The preceding chapters have dealt in detail with the work of leaders of the Nordic Classical Movement, but there were many other architects who made a significant contribution to its development, promotion and eventual popular appeal, who should also be recognized. These are dealt with in the following sections.
Sweden
While Carl Petersen’s Faaborg Museum in Fuunen in Denmark is generally recognized as the first Nordic Classical building to be have been designed and constructed, the real driving force of the movement quickly switched to Sweden and Stockholm, in particular, where both Gunnar Asplund and Ivar Tengbom led its development through the 1920s. Among their contemporaries, the following architects also played their part.
Ragnar Östberg (1866–1945)
Following the completion of his Stockholm City Hall in 1923, Ragnar Östberg became the most celebrated Scandinavian architect both within the region and beyond, winning the Royal Institute of British Architect’s gold medal in 1926. While the City Hall building is recognized as perhaps the high point of National Romantic architecture, many of the later interiors, principally the first-floor galleries and antechambers overlooking Riddarfjärden, are evidence of Östberg’s growing interest in Nordic Classicism. This is further developed in the pure geometric forms of his Helsingborg Crematorium of 1924–1928 and reached its maturity in his Stockholm Maritime Museum of 1935, which (though completed after most Nordic Classicists had moved on to Functionalism), with its the simple rendered planes and primary geometries, is a fine example of the style.1
Carl Westman (1866–1936)
Unusually for the period, Carl Westman worked in the United States in 1893–1894, bringing back first-hand knowledge of the work of both Louis Sullivan (1856–1924) and HH Richardson (1838–1886). An exact contemporary of Östberg, Ernst Carl Westman was runner-up to Östberg in the competition for the Stockholm Town Hall and was awarded the design of the new Courthouse on Kungsholmen in Stockholm, which was the original subject of the competition. This was completed in advance of the Town Hall’s completion in 1915 in the style of a vast medieval brick manor house. As with Östberg, he was a late adopter of the Nordic Classical style during the 1920s and built a number of hospitals in the 1930s in the style. The most notable of these is Beckomberga Hospital in Bromma, west of Stockholm (1929–1935), where the vast hospital complex is laid out symmetrically on a north/south axis with avenues of linden trees, square and semicircular courtyards enclosed by four, four-storey ward blocks. The centrepiece of the composition is an auditorium, which, unlike most of the buildings, retains its fine Classical interior.
Carl Bergsten (1879–1935)
Carl Gustaf Bergsten was another Swedish architect who initially worked in the National Romantic style before moving on to Classicism during the 1920s. Although not a prolific builder, he played an important role in promoting Nordic Classicism both within the region and beyond. His Liljevalch Art Gallery in Stockholm of 1913–1916 was one of the most important early Nordic Classical buildings, combining a Classical enfilade of top-lit galleries with an early, expressed reinforced concrete frame. In 1924 he won the competition to design the Swedish Pavilion at the Paris Exposition of 1925, which included interiors by Gunnar Asplund and a model of Östberg’s Stockholm City Hall, which led to the description of Nordic Classicism as ‘Swedish Grace’. His most significant and finest completed building is the City Theatre in Gothenburg, which was not completed until 1934 by which time it was regarded as rather old-fashioned by the critics. Nevertheless, it is a fine Nordic Classical building in brick with a glazed first-floor foyer, designed as an ionic colonnade.
Hakon Ahlberg (1891–1984)
Like Carl Bergsten, Hakon Ahlberg did much to promote Nordic Classicism, principally as editor-in-chief of the Swedish architectural journals Arkitekten in 1922 and Byggmästaren from 1922 to 1924, during which time he was also Founder and President of the Swedish Association of Architects. His most significant projects are the refined Classical Pavilions for the Gothenburg Exhibition of 1923, the restoration of Gripsholm Castle near Mariefred in Central Sweden, the Classical, PUB (Paul U Bergstrom) Department Store in Stockholm of 1924 and his Freemason’s Children’s Home in Stockholm of 1927–1931.
Finland
The Finn Kauno Sankari Kallio (1877–1966) (Oiva’s elder brother (Ch 8)) could lay claim to an earlier Nordic Classical building than Carl Petersen’s Faaborg Museum, with his Tampere Theatre of 1913, but it is generally regarded as an example of the continuing thread of Classicism (albeit with its Jugendstil details) in similar vein to Hack Kampmann’s Aarhus Theatre of 1900. It was friends and fellow students, Erik Bryggman and Hilding Ekelund, who led the Nordic Classical Movement in Finland with Gunnar Asplund as their guide.
Erik Bryggman has the distinction of being the first Finnish architect to embark on a study tour of Italy, which he did in 1920, with financial assistance from the State Architectural Commission. With Hilding Ekelund, he contributed to the highly influential ‘Italia La Bella’ issue of Arkkitehti in 1923, the year he established his own office in his home town of Turku, where he collaborated with and mentored the young Alvar Aalto. His finest Nordic Classical buildings are both in Turku – his Atrium Apartment Building of 1925–1927 and Hotel Seurahuone of 1927–1928 together constitute, in Richard Weston’s view, ‘one of the finest urban compositions in 1920s Finland’.2 His and Aalto’s Turku Exhibition of 1929 marked their conversion to the new Functionalism to which he also made several notable contributions, including his most famous design for the Resurrection Chapel in Turku of 1941.3
Hilding Ekelund (1893–1984) and Eva Ekelund (née Kuhlefelt (1892–1984))
Hilding Ekelund was a hugely influential figure in Finnish architectural circles throughout the 1920s and 1930s, and were it not for his unusual ability to consistently come second in architectural competitions, he would be much better known. He and his architect wife Eva (née Kuhlefelt 1892–1984) spent eight months touring Italy in 1921–1922, and after working for both Hakon Ahlberg and Ivar Tengbom in Stockholm, Hilding and Eva started their own joint practice in Helsinki in 1927. Their most famous Nordic Classical works are the Taidehalli Art Gallery (Kunstmuseum) in Helsinki of 1928 with its neo-baroque convex entrance (Figure 75) and their Toolo Church in Helsinki of 1930, which Malcolm Quantrill described as exhibiting ‘a turgid formality or decorative fussiness that do not indicate an architect of real talent’.4
FIGURE 75 Kunstmuseum Helsinki, Credit – John Stewart.
He had previously won the competition for the siting of the new Parliament House in Helsinki in 1923 but came second to JS Sirén in the competition for the building design of 1924, as well as coming second to Alvar Aalto in the competitions for the South Western Agricultural Cooperative Building in Turku of 1926 and the Viipuri Library in Vyborg of 1927, all of which proved crucial in their contribution to these other architects’ successful careers. He taught at the Helsinki Institute of Technology from 1927 to 1941 and edited Arkkitehti from 1931 to 1934.5
Like Aalto and Bryggman, he converted to Functionalism in the 1930s and went on to finally win the competition for the design of the Finnish Embassy in Moscow in 1935, completing the building in 1938. He collaborated with Martti Välikangas on the very fine Olympic Housing in Helsinki of 1938–1940, acted as City Architect in Helsinki from 1941 to 1949 and designed a number of buildings for the 1952 Olympics in Helsinki.
Gunnar Taucher (1886–1941)
Jarl Gunnar Taucher became city architect in Helsinki in 1923 and used this position, both to design a considerable number of buildings himself and to direct his department to build in the Nordic Classical style. Consequently, his portfolio consisted largely of low-cost housing developments and educational facilities. His most famous work is the municipal housing at Mäkelänkatu 37–43 in Helsinki (1925–1926), which is one of the most elegant and beautifully proportioned apartment blocks built anywhere in Scandinavia in the 1920s. His Finnish Language Adult Education Centre of 1927, Käpylä Primary School of 1929 and the Aleksis Kivi Primary School of 1934 all exhibit an increasing restraint which eventually led him too to abandon Nordic Classicism, as can be seen in his Functionalist Lapinlahti School of 1939.6
Pauli Blomstedt (1900–1935) and Marta Blomstedt (née Von Willebrand (1899–1982))
Pauli Blomstedt was a contemporary of Alvar Aalto, having studied at the same grammar school in Jyväskylä and at the Institute of Technology, during which time they both lodged with Aalto’s aunt in Helsinki. For several years in the 1920s, it looked like Pauli and his architect wife Marta (née Von Willebrand (1899–1982)) might be the future of architecture in Finland rather than Alvar and Aino Aalto. After spells working for Armas Lindgren, Bertel Jung and Gunnar Taucher, they established their joint practice in 1926, having won the competition for the design of the Liittopankki (Union Bank) House in Helsinki, which they completed in 1929. In the Union Bank, the Blomstedts inflated the typical Nordic Classical arched ground-floor semi-basement windows (as in Taucher’s fine apartment block on Mäkelänkatu of 1926) into a half-round Classical arcade, which was richly decorated with a Greek-key pattern, all of which wrapped around a Pompeian villa plan. This was followed up with competition wins for Civil Defence buildings in Jyväskylä and Hämeenlinna (unbuilt) and the Finnish Savings Bank in Helsinki, which was completed in 1930 – all in Nordic Classical style.
Like the Aaltos the switch to Functionalism was made in the late 1920s, and the Blomstedts first Functionalist design, the Finnish Savings Bank in Kotka, was completed in 1935, the same year that they completed the outstanding Pohjanovi Hotel and Restaurant in Rovaniemi, which was sadly destroyed in the Lapland War in 1945.7 Tragically, Pauli died at the age of thirty-five but Marta continued to practise, firstly in partnership with Matti Lampen and, after his death in 1961, with Olli Penttilä. Both practices were very successful and completed hotels, housing, industrial buildings, banks, a cinema and the City Hall for Kuusijärvi in 1956 as well as a number of town planning commissions.8
Denmark
Despite its early start, with the completion of Carl Petersen’s Faaborg Museum in 1915, Nordic Classicism never really gained the momentum in Denmark that was achieved in Sweden and Finland. Apart from a number of interesting competition entries, Petersen’s later completed projects had little of the initial spark of the Faaborg, and his contemporaries and fellow members of the Classical ‘Free Architects Association’ – founded in 1909 – (including Hans Koch (1873–1922), Ivar Bentsen (1876–1943), Povl Baumann (1878–1963) and Edvard Thomsen (1884–1980)) won relatively few major commissions during their careers, prior to their conversion to Functionalism.
The architect who arguably made the greatest contribution to Nordic Classicism in Denmark was Hack Kampmann (1856–1920). By 1910, he had already established himself as the most prolific and successful architect of his generation and been appointed Professor of Architecture at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts (1908–1918). Even he had designed only a handful of Nordic Classical buildings before his death in 1920, including the fine Viborg Cathedral School (1915–1926), Randers State School (1918–1926) and the masterly Copenhagen Police Headquarters (1916–1924), which were all completed by his sons.9
The reasons for Nordic Classicism’s relative failure to take root in Denmark are numerous, including the extraordinarily eclectic nature of Danish Architecture at the start of the nineteenth century, in which various movements ran in parallel to a greater extent than elsewhere in Scandinavia; the lack of a dominating national architectural figure during the 1920s, such as Gunnar Asplund in Stockholm; and the continuing national loyalty to building in brick, which continued on through the Modern Movement. Nevertheless, there were a number of architects who contributed to the style’s development who should be noted.
Ivar Bentsen (1876–1943)
Ivar Bentsen was a student of Peder Vilhelm Jensen-Klint (1853–1930), the architect of the famous proto-expressionist brick Grundtvig Church in Copenhagen (1913–1940), and never qualified as an architect. A member of the Free Architects Association, in 1918, he and Carl Petersen entered and were runners-up (to Edvard Thomsen) in the ‘Banegaardsterraen’ housing competition in Central Copenhagen. In 1921, he and Thorkild Henningsen were commissioned to design 171 workers homes at Bellahøj in Copenhagen. These restrained brick terraced houses were much influenced by Heinrich Tessenow’s (1876–1950) contemporary work in Germany and, in their turn, very influential in Denmark. In 1922, Bentsen was commissioned, along with Carl Petersen, Povl Baumann, Ole Falkentorp and Peter Nielsen, to design the Ved Classens Have workers housing by the Copenhagen General Housing Society, which was completed in 1924. Perhaps his finest building is the Niels Steensen Hospital in Gentofte in Copenhagen of 1932, which has a simplicity and elegance often missing in his earlier works. His final contribution to Danish architecture was to design two of the Functionalist blocks at Blidah Park in Hellerup (1934). He succeeded Petersen as professor at the Royal Academy in 1923, where he taught until shortly before his death in 1943.
Povl Baumann (1878–1963)
Povl Erik Raimund Baumann was another pupil of Peder Vilhelm Jensen-Klint, finally setting up his own practice in 1910. His house for Aage Lunn in Hellerup in Copenhagen of 1916 marked him out as one of the rising stars of the new Classicism in Denmark. Here steps sweep up steeply to a central baroque door case in an otherwise plain rendered facade below a steeply tiled roof – beyond lies an atrium, around which the house is organized. The simplicity of the Faaborg’s entrance facade composition springs to mind, but there is vitality here, and this is no mere reworking of the Faaborg themes. In 1917, he started work on a large housing project in Vestergårdsvej in Copenhagen. This is a particularly fine series of rendered apartments below tiled roofs, which create a new communal, tree-lined square. The year 1923 brought his involvement on the Ved Classens Have workers housing, noted earlier, with his Villa Svastika in Rungsted of 1926 and diagonally patterned, polychromatic brick Linoleumshuset in Copenhagen of 1930–1931, concluding his contribution to Nordic Classicism. His practice continued through the 1930s with his, rather elegant, copper-clad Ved Vesterport building being completed in 1932 and his sleek Storgarden apartments in 1935.10
Kay Fisker (1893–1965)
Like many other Nordic Classical architects, such as Alvar Aalto, Kay Fisker is better known as a Modernist. He served a quite remarkable Nordic Classical apprenticeship, however, working in the offices of Anthon Rosen, Sigurd Lewerentz, Gunnar Asplund and Hack Kampmann, both during his studies and after, before winning the competition to design a series of railway stations on the Danish Island of Bornholm, in partnership, with Aage Rafn in 1915. These drew upon rural Danish vernacular traditions, interpreting them however in a new, and very fresh, way. Various residential commissions sustained his practice through the next ten years or so until, in 1924, when he won the competition to design the Danish Pavilion for the Paris Exposition of 1925. His design was an unusual, highly sculptural, symmetrical ribbed brick cubist structure, which had all the formality of the Swedish Pavilion, if little of its grace.
After his conversion to Functionalism, he became established as a leading member of his profession in Denmark, with his design for Aarhus University of 1932–1943 being regarded as one of the most important building complexes of their period, as much for the quality of their exterior spaces as for the buildings themselves. He was appointed as a professor at the Royal Academy in 1936, a post he held until 1963.11
Fisker’s partner in the Bornholm railway stations, Aage Rafn, was another member of the Danish Nordic Classical generation who promised much and delivered little. The majority of his output was in the form of entries for competitions and exhibitions with his fine design for a crematorium of 1921, gaining the Royal Danish Academy’s gold medal. In addition to his own small practice, which he established in 1916, he worked for Hack Kampmann from 1918 to the completion of the Copenhagen Police Headquarters in 1924, for which he claimed design credit. His contribution to the Danish Pavilion at the famous Paris Exposition of 1925 was his bronze chairs, designed for the parole hall of the police station. During the remainder of the 1920s and 1930s he carried out a number of domestic commissions, the finest of which being his own, rather late, Nordic Classical house at Krathusvej 7 in the Copenhagen suburb of Charlottenlund with its white rendered double-height entrance between two traditional red brick wings.
Norway
In the 1910s and 1920s, Norway was very much the poor relation of the Scandinavian countries with almost all Norwegian architects educated in Sweden until the opening of the first Norwegian architecture course at the Trondheim Institute of Technology in 1910. After significant growth arising from industrialization in the first decade of the twentieth century, the Norwegian economy went into a long decline, only really recovering with the end of the world Depression in the early 1930s. Consequently, architecturally, its role was as a follower of Swedish architectural developments, and the opportunities for Norwegian architects to build during the period of Nordic Classicism were more limited than in any other Scandinavian country. Their contribution to the movement was therefore slight, although there was at least one partnership whose work attracted interest beyond their borders.
Gudolf Blakstad (1893–1985), Herman Munthe-Kaas (1890–1977) and Jens Dunker (1892–1981)
These three architects were all among the first graduates of the architecture course at the Norwegian Institute of Technology in Trondheim. Blakstad and Dunker collaborated on the winning competition entry for the new Theatre in Oslo in 1919, the design of which marks the dawning of 1920’s Classicism in Norway. Blakstad and Munthe-Kaas then collaborated on the Haugesund Town Hall in 1922, producing the finest contribution to Nordic Classicism from Norway. Its dramatic pink body, above a grey granite base, superb proportions and detailing, put it on a par with much of the best Nordic Classicism being produced in Sweden and Finland at the time. Having been late into Classicism, they were then early adopters of Functionalism with their Artists House in Oslo of 1928–1930, architecturally anticipating the later Oslo City Hall (1931–1950) and bringing the brief Norwegian contribution to the Nordic Classical Movement to an end.
In addition to these architects, there were a number of further contributors to Nordic Classicism who deserve mention.
In Denmark, Kaj Gottlob (1887–1976), Thomas Havning (1891–1976), Paul Holsoe (1873–1966), Steen Eiler Rasmussen (1898–1990), Sven Risom (1880–1971) and Frits Schegel (1880–1971); in Finland, Uno Ullberg (1879–1944); in Norway, Lars Backer (1892–1930), Harald Hals (1876–1959) and Lorentz Ree; and in Sweden, Ragnar Hjorth (1887–1971), Cyrillus Johansson (1884–1959), Sven Markellius (1889–1979) and Eskil Sundahl (1890–1974) deserve a mention for their contributions to the movement.