Gunnar Asplund and Stockholm City Library
Gunnar Asplund (1885–1940)
Erik Gunnar Asplund was born on 22 September 1885 in Stockholm (Figure 18). His parents were tax official Frans Otto and his wife Louise. Like JS Sirén and Alvar Aalto, he aspired to be a painter but was directed towards the safer profession of architecture by his father. In 1904, he passed his matriculation at the Norra Latin Secondary School in Stockholm, and a year later, he was accepted as a student at the Royal Technical University of Stockholm, where in 1909 he received his degree in architecture. He was a keen if unexceptional student with Osvald Almqvist (1884–1950), being the star of Asplund’s year. He continued his architectural studies at the Royal Academy School in Stockholm until 1910, when along with Sigurd Lewerentz (1885–1975), Almqvist and three other students,1 he rejected the traditional teaching of the academy and left to create the new Klara Skola, engaging Carl Westmann (1866–1936), Ivar Tengbom (Ch 3), Carl Bergsten (1879–1935) and Ragnar Ostberg (1866–1945) to teach this group of angry young men, after work in the evenings.2 While their spirit of rebellion may have continued, their architecture school lasted only a year, at the end of which Asplund started work at the Stockholm Municipal Building Authority.
FIGURE 18 Gunnar Asplund, Credit – ArkDes.
It was while he was working there in 1912 that he entered and won the competition for a school in Karlshamn (1912–1918), on the back of which he started his own practice at the age of twenty-seven. This was an example of the Scandinavian architectural competition system working positively, allowing a young, talented, capable architect such as Gunnar Asplund to undertake a major public building, early in his career. While the influence of his National Romantic tutors Ostberg and Westman is clear in his design (particularly the double-sloping roof of Westman’s Law Courts of 1909–1915), Asplund’s interest in developing a new Classical language is equally obvious too. The school plan is a truncated L of three-storey classrooms, which is linked to a lower gymnasium, by a deep Romanesque archway. While the overall design lacks the refinement of his mature work, there are numerous important aspects of Karlshamn School, which he was to go on to develop, including the restrained elevations of lime-washed brick with flush window frames, implying an unbroken plane. The windows are placed to respond to the needs of the spaces within, often not aligning between floors and in one case, picking up the diagonal movement of a staircase within, and applied Classical details, including balustrades below windows, stone cornices and crossing diagonal wooden balustrades, abound.3
His success in winning the Karlshamn School competition was quickly followed by first prize in the competition to extend the Gothenburg Law Courts (a project on which he was to work for much of the rest of his career until its completion in 1937). His winning competition entry appears to have had little to commend it, being a very restrained three-storey brick building with shallow brick pilasters spanning from the stone base course to the eaves, along with a simple, Classical, balustraded entrance. The year 1913 also brought his first private commissions, and the Villa Sturegarden in Nykoping for the local bank manager Oscar Wichman became his first completed building. Square in plan with a central chimney, rendered walls and a stepped, pitched roof expressing the attic space within, this represented a more developed combination of pure form against which simple shuttered windows were placed as required to serve the spaces within. Further villas, Selander in Ornskoldsvik of 1913 and for Dr Ruth in Kuusankoski in Finland of 1914, followed.
Having dropped out of university, Asplund had missed out on the various travel scholarships which were provided as prizes for the best students, but with his growing practice, he was now able to finally fund his pilgrimage to Italy himself, and so he set off via Paris, in December 1913, with fellow architect Folke Bensow. Despite having just successfully started his practice, Asplund spent almost six months in Italy – utterly fascinated equally by the buildings, cities and countryside and by the relaxed, civilized Mediterranean lifestyle. His journey is recorded in numerous sketchbooks, photographs and postcards which he purchased, which cover everything from the ancient Roman temples at Paestum, via meticulous notes and sketches of Roman tiled floors, to contemporary sketches, including a rather elegant young Italian lady eating spaghetti. His tour took in Rome, Palermo, Naples, Syracuse, Taormina, Pompeii, Bologna, Assisi, Perugia, Orvieto, Siena, San Gimignano, Venice, Florence, Vicenza and Verona, and at the end of his journey, he travelled back North with sources of inspiration for the rest of his life and career.
Shortly after his return in 1914, Asplund entered the competition for the new Woodland Cemetery in Stockholm with his former fellow student Sigurd Lewerentz. The competition was initially for the overall landscape strategy for the cemetery along with some indication of where the key buildings would be sited. Asplund and Lewerentz’s approach was to maintain the existing character of the wooded site and subordinate the paths, graves and buildings to this natural Nordic forest landscape. Lewerentz’s evocative competition-winning sketches of rustic graveyards, leaning crosses and gravestones amongst pine trees were to set the tone for what was to become a masterpiece of twentieth-century landscape design as well as a setting for two of the most important buildings of the Nordic Classical movement – Lewerentz’s Chapel of the Resurrection and Asplund’s Woodland Chapel – both of which are dealt with in detail elsewhere (Ch 7&12).
In 1915, he won the competition for the Karl Johan School in Gothenburg in what was becoming his mature Nordic Classical style, now utterly devoid of the remaining traces of National Romanticism of the earlier Karlshamn School. As was to be the case with so many of Asplund’s projects, such as the Gothenburg Courthouse extension (1913–1937) and the Woodland Cemetery (1914–1940), this too was to have a long gestation period, finally being completed in 1924. His dramatic design takes the form of a four-storey Classical Temple of Education. Its central corridor is expressed on both gables as a continuous three-storey-high window below a Classical pediment, through which a vaulted fourth floor breaks as a semicircular arch. The elevations below the cornice are austere, planar and practical, providing natural light to the classrooms via generous windows, once more flush with the wall plane (a detail which was fast becoming one of the hallmarks of the now mature Nordic Classical style). The plan has all the refinement that was becoming the norm in Asplund’s mature work – simple and apparently effortlessly resolved, with each change in direction of the route, being elegantly celebrated.
While major public buildings and their accompanying competitions remained the main focus for the practice, Asplund also undertook a broad range of commissions which reflected the continuing industrialization of Sweden, including private houses (such as the Villa Callin in Alberga of 1915), tram sheds, warehouses and the state grain silos at Eskilstuna, Roma, Linkoping, Hallsberg, Eslov, Tomellila, Vara, Ostra Klagstorp and Astorp. Despite a growing workload and reputation, Asplund had no wish to build a large practice, as his approach was to maintain his personal involvement in every detail of every project, which he undertook. He drove himself hard and expected his assistants to maintain the same work rate. Throughout the life of the practice, work started at 8 am in the morning and continued until 4 pm in the afternoon, when there would be a break until 8 pm in the evening, from when the whole team would work on until midnight each day. As his reputation grew, the role of assistant in Asplund’s office became more and more sought-after with the young Alvar Aalto (who was to go on to become one of the greatest architects of the twentieth century), applying unsuccessfully for a position in 1920 (they went on to become great friends much later).
Within this dedicated regime, Asplund also found time to marry Gerda Sellman, the sister of a fellow architect, in 1918 at the age of thirty-three, and to start teaching at the Royal Technical University, where his many influences became clear: ‘In his lectures he displayed the simple but pragmatic humane works of Tessenow. Similarly, when talking about layouts for single family dwellings, he presented the exemplary room arrangements from the work of such British architects as Voysey and Bailie Scott.’4 Through his teaching, his new role as editor of the Swedish periodical Architecture (Arkitektur) from 1917–1920, and most importantly, following the completion of several of what were to be regarded as his key projects, Asplund established himself as the leading figure in Scandinavian architecture.
His next major project, the Snellman House in the Stockholm suburb of Djursholm, designed in 1917 and completed in 1921, for the local bank manager, to quote Dan Cruikshank, ‘was one of the pioneering works of the Nordic neo-classical revival. In the Snellman house, Asplund not only reinterpreted Swedish neo-classical design traditions, but also displayed a great sensitivity to the possibilities offered by the site, creating a house that is elegant, functional and full of quiet, inventive wit’.5 It is the very essence of Nordic sophisticated simplicity, full of knowing jokes and references, including the pair of double entrance doors which share the same steps, restrained elevations with their subtle shifts of unaligned window positions and internal spaces which themselves swell and contract. This is an architect in total control of his craft and represents the first of Asplund’s now famous, mature works.
Lister Courthouse also designed in 1917 (completed in 1921), like the Snellman House, ranks as one of his most highly regarded designs. Again, like the Karl Johan School, we have the Classical gable pierced by a pure semicircular form – this time providing the main entrance to the courthouse. By turning the rectangular plan of the building so that it lies parallel to the street, he created the potential for the whole gable to become a giant pediment, which both accentuated the civic importance of this small building and acted as a conclusion to an axis, which runs through the town to the courthouse from the railway station.
For such a small building, the plan builds an extraordinary sense of gravitas, anticipation and release, with the entrance arch apparently cutting through several feet of masonry (created by the inclusion of matching toilets on either side of the entrance), and then the great curve of the circular courtroom bulges forward into the entrance hall, apparently forcing the side walls of the space out at an angle. Curved staircases rise on either side of the drum, serving the upper floors (anticipating his later design for the Stockholm Library – see full description below), making the drum itself appear much thicker and more substantial as one passes through its apparent depth to enter the courtroom beyond. To maintain this impression of mass and gravitas, the few external windows of the courtroom are extended externally to provide similarly deep reveals. This all serves to further increase the status of this small building and to support and reinforce its important civic function. Again, the route from railway station to building, from entrance hall to courtroom, is a carefully orchestrated experience, which concludes in the circular courtroom, which is the raison d’être of the building. Externally, the rendered facades are stripped to utter simplicity with Classical details being used only for occasional emphasis. The rear elevation breaks into a half-timbered gable above the great swelling drum of the courtroom in contrast to the monumentality of the main elevation. Internally, every detail is similarly carefully considered and orchestrated to support the overall approach of justice being delivered with both dignity and humanity.6
The contrast between the apparent simplicity of these buildings and the contemporary work of Tengbom or Sirén is striking. Asplund’s use of the vocabulary of Classicism is highly selective, with the pure forms of Classical architecture used extensively, while decoration is applied with the utmost restraint – often like icing on a cake. The orders are almost entirely avoided, and where balustrades, pediments or columns are included, they are either in the simplest Doric style or reduced to pure forms of Asplund’s own design. There is a growing confidence about Asplund’s architecture of the 1920s, which is in contrast to so many of his contemporaries, whose work of the period seems to increasingly resort to a formal, icy perfection.
In 1918, the Board of the Woodland Cemetery decided to proceed with the design and construction of a small chapel to allow the cemetery to be consecrated and opened for use, and Asplund received the commission for what was to become perhaps the greatest example of Nordic Classicism – his Woodland Chapel. This is dealt with in detail elsewhere (Ch 12). Commissions for much-needed workers housing were also undertaken in 1918 for sites in Tidaholm and Hallsberg, and in that same year, Asplund was co-opted onto the Public Library Committee of the City Council to carry out research on library design to support their proposed construction of a new public lending library in the city. This eventually led to him being commissioned as architect for the Stockholm Public Library in 1920 (finally completed until 1928). This, perhaps his most significant public building, is dealt with in detail below.
Further commissions followed – the Skandia Cinema of 1922–1923 for Svensk Filmindustri was to be one of the first in Sweden. The brief was for a theatre of ‘festive, unrealistic splendour’, and Asplund once more drew on his Italian experiences for inspiration – in this case Taormina, where he had witnessed, ‘the last day of the carnival there and in the evening there were coloured lanterns and funny coloured people and a big band on the square beneath the starry sky’.7 In the Skandia, he recreated the moonlit external spaces of the Italian town but this time under a dark blue ceiling which protected the filmgoers from the harsh Stockholm climate. The sense of these being exterior spaces was further enhanced by hanging, lantern lights, and before it was carpeted, a stone floor to the auditorium, while red and gold tent-like enclosures to the balconies, along with blind doors and windows, added to the sense of fantasy and unreality. This treatment of internal space as exterior, along with his evocative Classical detailing, was to have a direct influence on many of Asplund’s contemporaries, in particular Alvar Aalto in his Jyväskylä Working Men’s Club of 1924 and Martti Välikangas in his Athena Cinema in Helsinki of 1927.
In 1922, Asplund also participated in the Chancellery competition (with Ture Ryberg (1888–1961)), which was as much an exercise in urban design as architecture. The brief was for a series of government offices on Gamla Stan – the original island on which Stockholm was founded and the seat of both government and the royal palace. The new buildings were to occupy two triangular wedges of land to the west of the royal palace. Asplund’s solution was presented in the style of Nolli’s map for Rome (1748), which clearly communicated its sensitivity to the existing alleyways and courtyards of the island. Their southern site links to the existing pedestrian routes and spaces, while their northern block is divided by three courtyards of increasing size, each of which ends with a semicircular staircase, rising up to a first floor entrance. It is an extraordinarily subtle, sensitive and elegant piece of spatial design, which sadly came second to that of Wolter Gahn (1890–1985) and Gustaf Clason (1856–1930), who offered a double version of Hack Kampmann’s Copenhagen Police Headquarters with circular courts cut into two triangular blocks.
The year 1924, however, saw another competition win, this time for the new Oxelosund Cemetery (completed in 1929). The open site lacked the strong existing character of the Woodland Cemetery, and despite the odd surviving element of the spirit of the rural village churchyard, such as in the fieldstone walls, Asplund’s formal layout of strict rows of pollarded trees flanked by burial areas lacked the intensity and emotional impact of his and Lewerentz’s work in Stockholm.
In 1928, he began working with Gregor Paulsson who had been appointed as Director to oversee the development of a Swedish exhibition in Stockholm, which was to take place in 1930. Paulsson was already the director of the Swedish Arts and Crafts Association (perhaps most famous for having coined the phrase vackrare vardagsvara – ‘more beautiful every day goods’).8 Architect and patron travelled together to see both the Brno Exhibition of 1928 and the remaining buildings of the Weissenhof housing exhibition in Stuttgart, which had been completed in 1927. This was Asplund’s first direct encounter with many of the early functionalist buildings of Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe, and from the dramatic change in his architecture from this point forward, we must assume that this experience influenced him profoundly. While his buildings had become more and more restrained throughout the 1920s, they were still all clearly Classical buildings – in organization, form and detail – so this was no natural drift into Modernism but a revelation, which would dramatically change both Asplund and soon the course of Scandinavian architecture.
On his return to Stockholm, he had begun work on the exhibition buildings. As these emerged, it became clear that a radically different architecture was under construction – exposed steel-framed buildings; whole walls of glazing; flat white rendered planes; coloured external blinds and giant graphics, illuminated by searchlights. For the visitors, in the midst of an economic depression, the exhibition provided a glimpse of a new, brighter, healthier, egalitarian future; for Asplund’s architectural contemporaries, it was both a route map to the future and the coup de grace for Nordic Classicism. As Alvar Aalto, who visited the exhibition, said at the time, it was as if ‘Asplund’s architecture explodes all the boundaries’.9 Although Asplund was not the first Swedish architect to embrace functionalism (his old fellow student Osvald Almqvist had designed both housing and a power station in functionalist style in the 1920s), the impact of Asplund, the leader of Swedish Classicism, converting to Functionalism, was much more profound.
What was particularly successful about the Stockholm Exhibition was not just the light, bright, white modern buildings or the steel towers, banners and graphics (borrowed from the Bauhaus and Russian Constructivism) but the consistency and discipline which Asplund brought to both the overall layout and every building within it. Far from being a collection of alternatives, as had been the case in most previous expositions of this kind, Asplund presented one, indisputable and all-embracing view of the future – it was a vision of a new Modern world.
As would be the case with many other architects, the impact of his conversion on all other work in his studio was immediate. The Gothenberg Courthouse extension, won in competition in 1913 as a National Romantic brick building, had already been transformed into a Doric-colonnaded Classical building, arranged around a Roman atrium, and now suffered another metamorphosis, emerging as the Modern exposed concrete-framed, timber-lined building – complete with glass lifts, water fountains and telephone booths – when it was finally completed in 1937. This change was total and irrevocable and extremely difficult for the public to understand. Unlike the acclaim and enthusiasm with which almost all the major Nordic Classical buildings had been greeted, the public’s reaction to the new Functionalism was often extremely negative, with the Gothenburg Courthouse extension being described on its completion in the local paper as ‘perhaps the greatest tragedy in the history of modern Goteborg’.10
Coincidentally, this period also brought a significant change in his personal life, with the end of his first marriage, which had become increasingly strained by his intense workload and his wife Gerda’s increasingly fundamentalist Christianity. Asplund had fallen for Ingrid Wahlman, the wife of architect Lars Israel Wahlman, and following their controversial divorces, Gunnar and Ingrid married in 1934.
Despite the success of the Stockholm Exhibition, Asplund’s practice suffered too from the Depression in the early 1930s and, apart from the Courthouse project, which sustained it during this period, it was not until the second half of the decade that growth returned once more to the Swedish economy and with it, further architectural commissions. The year 1935 saw the opening of his Bredenberg Department Store (1933–1935) in Central Stockholm complete with ribbon windows, stone cladding and neon signs, and in 1937, the State Bacteriological Laboratory in Solna and his own summer house on the island of Lison. Completed some ten years after the Villa Snellman, his summer house is another simple yet sophisticated cottage, which hugs the land, stepping down through four levels, along with the natural ground level. In 1936, his entry for the new Kviberg Crematorium competition was selected. Completed in 1940, this was one of his least impressive buildings, and in 1937, he designed the new crematorium at Skovde (also completed in 1940). This represented a more successful return to ancient Nordic prototypes – in this case, stone village churches and ancient burial mounds, but it still lacks the intensity of the Woodland Cemetery or Chapel. Indeed, it was to the Woodland Cemetery that Asplund returned, for what was to be his final project.
By 1935, the final design of the landscape had been completed by Lewerentz and Asplund, the Meditation Grove planted on the small hill above the entrance and the Way of the Cross established, leading up to the giant cross and the site of what was to be the final building in the cemetery – the main crematorium. Initially, Lewerentz and Asplund had worked on the building design together, but Asplund was now invited by the cemetery board to progress the building design himself, with Lewerentz being dismissed. His brief was now for three chapels, rather than the single large chapel originally envisaged.
Asplund’s response has become recognized as one of the most successful groups of modern sacred spaces ever designed. Humane, modest and yet powerful, they have managed to retain their relevance even today, in what has become a much more secular age. The three chapels are strung along the Way of the Cross (with its echoes of the Via Sacra and other ancient routes), with the two smaller chapels, Faith and Hope, opening directly off the pathway. The largest chapel, of the Holy Cross, is set back and in front of it, stands a great open loggia, now known as Monument Hall. This is a tall, dignified covered space, which shares the Way of the Cross’s memories of ancient Rome or Greece. Under it, funeral parties can gather or disperse, sharing views out across the only major open space of the cemetery to the Meditation Grove on the hill (with its own echoes of Calvary and early Christianity). On one level, this is a Classical heptastyle temple at the conclusion to the long route from the entrance to the cemetery, but it is also modern architecture in which the undecorated columns are clad with thin sheets of stone, which are clearly expressed simply as a skin to the obvious concrete structural frame. Within the portico, a section of frame has been removed in front of the doors to the chapel, below which a sculpture of the Resurrection by John Lundqvist reaches skywards, bathed in light.
As with all Asplund’s work, the concluding space – the raison d’être for the building – does not disappoint, and while the chapels lack some of the extraordinary grace and simplicity of the Woodland Chapel, they remain humane and peaceful spaces for contemplation and difficult parting. Throughout, as one would expect, every detail is carefully considered, from the strikingly modern light fittings of the loggia to the metalwork of the gates. It is a masterpiece of Modern architecture, produced by an architect who had previously mastered the Classical language. Regardless of style, Asplund’s architecture remains, in the words of Bjorn Linn, ‘always in touch with the great and simple things that lie at the bottom of all human experience’.11
The Crematorium was completed in 1940, and Asplund died on 20 October that year, becoming the first person to have his funeral held in the Chapel of the Holy Cross. At the end of the ceremony, his friends and family filed past his coffin, the glazed screen to the loggia was lowered into the ground and they strolled out to contemplate the ‘biblical’ landscape, which he and Lewerentz had created. A simple memorial stone outside the chapel bears the inscription: ‘His work lives on.’
Stockholm City Library
In 1910, a committee was established for development of a new Stockholm Public Lending Library. Gunnar Asplund was co-opted onto the committee in 1918 to help develop a brief for the new building, following the receipt of a generous donation from the Wallenberg banking family and the gift of a site on Observatory Hill by the City Council of Stockholm. This was to be Sweden’s first public library in which visitors could access books without the need to ask library staff for assistance, and Asplund travelled to the UK, Germany and the United States to research the building type – studying both public and university libraries, including the great circular reading room of the British Library in London.12 Such a major public project would normally have been the subject of an architectural competition, but the committee felt that, such was Asplund’s expertise and understanding of the problem and the potential solutions, he should be appointed directly to undertake the design.
He presented his first proposal in 1922. The basic elements of the final building remain unchanged from this initial design – a circle within a square in plan – public over private space and a civic building wholly integrated into the fabric of the city. At this stage, the circular reading room was surmounted by a coffered dome (a la Pantheon) with three Corinthian porticos facing the city, front, left and right. ‘In fact, Gunnar Asplund’s first scheme for the Stockholm City Library was composed of a threefold stylistic metaphor: the dome stands for civic splendour, the pediment and portico for honourific entry, and the bourgeois apartment block for public, everyday life.’13 This was to be a monument in the city in contrast to the everyday apartments and offices which surround it – a major public building and landmark within Stockholm.
FIGURE 20 Stockholm City Library Section, Credit – John Stewart.
By the time construction started in 1924, the dome had become a drum, which now dominated and dwarfed the supporting square spaces much in the manner of Ledoux’s Barriere de la Villette of 1789 and also of Christian Frederik Hansen’s design for the Slotskirken in Copenhagen (1810–1826). The elevations too were simplified with rusticated base, frieze and plain rendered piano nobile, executed in burnt sienna-coloured stucco – with the three entrances transformed from ionic porticos to the tall glazed Egyptian doorways (borrowed from Thorvaldsen’s Museum in Copenhagen of 1848 by Thorvald Bindesboll (1846–1908) that we see today). This simplification of his design was driven both by financial constraints (as with the Woodland Chapel) and by Asplund’s determination to continue to refine his design until he achieved what he regarded as the most lucid, well-resolved and appropriate solution.
The building was completed in 1927 along with the shops below it on Sveavagen and the public square with pool, at the base of the hill (Figure 21). The public square works on a number of levels – as a new public outdoor space within the city; as a setting for this major civic building within the context of the city’s streets and squares; and as a gap in the urban fabric, thus allowing the library (including the drum of the lending room) to be seen in advance of the start of the journey to this central dominant space. The contrast between the civic presence that the square and pool create for the Stockholm City Library and the long-unresolved surroundings to JS Sirén’s Finnish Parliament building (Ch 5) emphasizes the importance and the success of this element of Asplund’s design.
FIGURE 21 Stockholm City Library from Park, Credit – John Stewart.
The main entrance is from the street with the single-storey base of shops on which the library sits, being split by a broad, paved, stepped ramp leading up from Sveavagen (Figure 22). This provides a long, easy ascent from the street to the library entrance on the level above, below the great drum, of which one has an uninterrupted view as one ascends, with the cobbles and stone steps of the ramp echoing ancient routes and evoking memories of both ancient Rome and Tuscan hill towns.
FIGURE 22 Stockholm City Library Entrance, Credit – John Stewart.
The library building itself is a rather severe combination of pure forms, stripped of almost all ornament that is softened by its bright, burnt sienna, orange render. Directly ahead, the central doorway, which tapers to further accentuate its height, has the only dressed stone on the exterior of the building, further signalling and enhancing its importance as the entrance to a great repository of learning. Above the rusticated ground floor, a simple rendered frieze contains hieroglyphs, which can be understood by all, in place of the traditional, elitist, Latin quotations. These represent the contents of the library within – history, geography, technology, industry, travel – with the section to the children’s library, containing buckets and spades, prams, toy trains and dachshunds, and high above that, the great rotunda of the lending room – our destination – still dominates the route.
And so we move from the daylight of the city to the contrasting darkness of the entrance hall, and from the warm ochre render outside to the black polished stucco, which almost disappears up into this vast dark space. A frieze depicting scenes from the Illiad decorates the walls, and the great stone Egyptian door frame is repeated once more ahead, with the light of the library drum beyond and further above. Below our feet, we are confronted ‘by a slightly macabre skeletal image on the floor, with the admonition “Gnoti Cafton – Know Thyself”. The Greek spelling is that of the original, sketched by Asplund during his journey in 1914 in the Museo Delle Terme in Rome of a mosaic from the Appian Way’.14 On either side of the central steps, two further curving flights ascend to left and right, exposing the drum of the lending room, thus both increasing one’s anticipation and reminding the visitor that they are now approaching the goal of their journey – the great drum they first saw from across the city (Figure 23).
FIGURE 23 Stockholm City Library Staircase, Credit – John Stewart.
Moving up the stairs, they narrow as we climb upwards and onwards, through the great mass of the building’s base and into the light above, where we finally reach the principal library space – the white, day-lit interior of the drum – so bright that it feels as if the space is almost open to the sky and we arrive, finally, at the very centre of this great space – the full stop to our journey. We have moved from darkness into light, from the hubbub of the city streets to a calm refuge, from the subterranean to a higher plane and from ignorance into enlightenment, during which Asplund has continually heightened our expectations and engaged our emotions, before the great final release, when we find ourselves at the very core of the building. This is the power of axial Classicism, but here harnessed to place the citizen at the centre of events, rather than a king or god.
Three stepped tiers of books line the walls that encircle us, below the white-painted drum, pierced all around by regular vertical windows through which light floods. In the transition from dome to drum, we have moved from the feeling of an interior space under the overwhelming weight of a pantheon-like coffered roof to an open-air piazza, bathed in the sunlight of what could almost be an Italian sky (the only remnant of the pantheon remaining, in the pattern of the floor). In moving from exterior to interior, the massive masonry drum has been dissolved by light. This great internal space, like the stairway to it, appears to have been carved from the building’s mass with the bookstacks like great stepped rings, hollowed out from above, giving this space its monumental quality. The source for the famous stepped bookshelves was almost certainly Etienne-Louis Boullee’s Bibliotheque du Roi, of 1785, but here in circular form, providing even greater drama15 (Figure 24).
FIGURE 24 Stockholm City Library Lending Room, Credit – John Stewart.
And so we have travelled from the sunlit public square outside to the sunlit piazza of the Lending Room, where for the first time, the citizens of Stockholm could browse and borrow books, either to take through to the side reading rooms or to take home to enjoy at their leisure. Despite the demands of our progress to this destination, its extraordinary height, apparent mass and the formality of its design, this circular, book-lined space is also surprisingly intimate, relaxing and enveloping. One can only imagine the impact which it must have had on its first users – surrounded by this public gift of knowledge, which was suddenly fully accessible to them. Despite its attempted categorisation, as a ‘move from architectural nostalgia and overt historicism to the rational, practical architecture of the modern world’,16 Asplund’s library is in every respect a Classical building and one that successfully responded to what in 1920’s Stockholm was a completely new building type.
The tall drum of the Lending Room is flanked by Reading Rooms in the north and south wings, with offices over the main entrance to the east and the bookstore in the base of the drum below. The entrances to the Reading Rooms are on a cross axis, below the first tier of books in the Lending Room. These are calm, simple spaces with a full-height view back to the outside world offered directly opposite the entrances from the Lending Room. Internally and externally, the detailing is exquisite, imaginative and consistent – whether handrails, light fittings, drinking fountains, signage, shelving or window surrounds; the minor elements reinforce the major and never detract.
This is one of the great library buildings of the world – a sophisticated sequence of public spaces based on expectation and arrival. It draws on the tradition of Calvinistic Nordic restraint – the rendered, coloured, manor house, painted brick walls and cobbled farm yards, and combines them with ancient themes – the Appian Way, the Pantheon and Ancient Egypt, while travelling through the history of Classicism via Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s (1598–1680) Scala Regia in the Vatican (1663–1666), Boullee’s visionary monuments and Bindesboll and CF Hansen’s local contributions. It provides one of the great spatial experiences of Western architecture as we move from outside to inside and finally almost to outside once more – from light to dark to light again and from a constrained steep ramp and dark stairway to the release of the great circular light-filled drum. This is a building of constant contrasts – monumental and yet humane, dominating and yet serving its city, hierarchical and yet with the citizen at its centre, simple and yet beautifully and thoughtfully detailed. It is one of the finest achievements of the Nordic Classical movement and one of the finest examples of Scandinavian architecture.