Isak Gustaf Clason
Clason designed the Nordic Museum and the Bünsow House on Strandvägen and taught a whole generation of architects. He showed the way from the borrowed styles of the 19th century towards a more national architecture in genuine materials.
Isak Gustaf Clason was born in Stockholm in 1856. He studied at the Royal Institute of Technology and at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, where teaching was shaped by German and French historicism. He made study tours in Europe and was particularly impressed by the French and Italian Renaissance. Early on he received commissions in the rapidly growing Stockholm of the 1880s, when Östermalm was being built up and Strandvägen became the city’s most prestigious street. His breakthrough came with the Bünsow House, a large residential building for a wealthy timber merchant, which attracted attention for its power and its façades inspired by the French Renaissance. He became a professor at the Royal Institute of Technology in 1890 and was one of the most sought-after architects of his day.
Clason’s principal work is the Nordic Museum on Djurgården, 1889–1907, an enormous building in a style that draws on the Danish and Swedish Renaissance, with a great hall for the Nordic collections. He also designed the Östermalm Market Hall together with Kasper Salin, the Hallwyl Palace for Countess Wilhelmina von Hallwyl and several residential buildings in Östermalm. In the 1890s Clason moved away from borrowed styles towards a more national architecture, with genuine materials such as brick and stone, visible structure and inspiration from Swedish castles and manor houses of the Vasa era and the Swedish Empire period. He also restored Örebro Castle around 1900.
Clason died in 1930. His importance lies both in his buildings and in his teaching: as a professor at the Royal Institute of Technology he trained a generation of architects who developed National Romanticism, and he advocated an architecture in which materials should be honest and Swedish tradition should take precedence over international fashions. The Nordic Museum became a symbol of Swedish cultural heritage, and the Hallwyl Palace is today a museum with its interior intact. Clason is usually described as a bridge-builder between 19th-century historicism and 20th-century National Romanticism, and his ideas lived on in buildings such as Östberg’s City Hall and Westman’s Court House in Stockholm.