Peter Celsing
Celsing designed Kulturhuset and the Riksbank building in Stockholm and Filmhuset at Gärdet. He moved between heavy, almost archaic stone and concrete and open, light glass façades.
Peter Celsing was born in 1920 in Stockholm and trained at the Royal Institute of Technology in the 1940s. He made study trips in Europe that shaped his interest in archaic and early medieval architecture, and he was influenced by both Asplund and Lewerentz. Early on he worked on restorations and extensions of churches, through which he gained a deep knowledge of materials, light and sacred space. In the 1950s he designed several new churches in the new suburbs of Stockholm and Gothenburg. He became professor of architecture at the Royal Institute of Technology in 1960 and was a leading voice in the Swedish architectural debate.
Celsing’s churches, such as Härlanda Church in Gothenburg, Almtuna Church in Uppsala and St Thomas’s Church in Vällingby, are built of brick, with heavy, closed volumes and dim interiors. He designed Filmhuset at Gärdet, a powerful concrete building for the Swedish Film Institute. Kulturhuset on Sergels torg in Stockholm, 1966–1974, has a long glass façade that displays the building’s activities to the square, and it originally formed part of a larger complex that also housed the Riksdag. The Riksbank building on Brunkebergstorg, by contrast, is a closed building with a dark granite façade. His formal language alternates between heaviness and lightness, the monumental and the open, archaic stone and modern technology.
Celsing died in 1974, before the Riksbank building was completed. Kulturhuset is one of Stockholm’s most debated buildings and a symbol of the cultural policy of the 1960s and 70s, when culture was to be open to all. It has been renovated several times and is today a protected heritage building. His churches of the 1950s are counted among the finest works of Swedish post-war modernism, closely related to Lewerentz’s later churches. Celsing was highly influential as a teacher and polemicist and shaped a generation of Swedish architects. His son Johan Celsing has continued a similar line as an architect, with brick and a clear expression of materials, for example in the New Crematorium at the Woodland Cemetery.