Backström & Reinius
Sven Backström and Leif Reinius designed Vällingby Centre, the Star Houses at Gröndal and Rosta in Örebro, and several of the best-loved housing estates of the Swedish welfare state. They sought variety and intimacy rather than long, straight slab blocks.
The architectural practice Backström & Reinius was founded in Stockholm in 1936 by Sven Backström, born in 1903, and Leif Reinius, born in 1907. Both had trained at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and came of age with Swedish functionalism, which made its breakthrough at the 1930 Stockholm Exhibition. The partnership lasted several decades, and they worked under a joint signature rather than as two separate architects. The firm soon received commissions from municipal and cooperative housing companies at a time of severe housing shortage, when the Social Democrats’ building of the folkhem, the welfare state, was gathering pace. Their approach started from residents’ everyday lives, with carefully studied plans, daylight and a relationship to the landscape around the buildings.
The firm’s breakthrough was the Danviksklippan estate in Nacka and the Star Houses at Gröndal in Stockholm, 1944–1946, where three-pointed blocks are linked in continuous chains that form courtyards and give every flat light from several directions. The same idea was used at Rosta in Örebro, one of the best-known housing estates of post-war Sweden. Vällingby Centre, inaugurated in 1954, became their most famous work: a square with shops, cinemas and an underground station, designed with patterned paving, varied façades and sculptural details. They always sought variety and human scale and rejected long, straight slab blocks, in the direction known internationally as the New Empiricism.
Sven Backström died in 1992 and Leif Reinius in 1995. Their work became internationally known as examples of the Swedish model that the British journal Architectural Review called the New Empiricism in the 1940s. The Star Houses and Rosta influenced housing both in Sweden and abroad, and Vällingby Centre was visited by planners from all over the world. The firm’s architecture represents a phase of the welfare state in which the aim was to combine functionalism’s rational planning with a softer, more popular architecture. Vällingby Centre is today regarded as an environment of cultural and historical value, and the firm’s original design was given careful consideration when the centre was renewed in the 2000s.