Sven Markelius
Markelius designed the Helsingborg Concert Hall and co-wrote “acceptera”. As Stockholm’s director of town planning from 1944 to 1954 he led the planning of Vällingby and the new suburbs along the underground railway.
Sven Markelius was born in 1889 in Stockholm. He studied at the Royal Institute of Technology from 1909 to 1913 and at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts from 1913 to 1915, and in his early years worked in the spirit of Nordic Classicism, which shaped Swedish architecture in the 1910s and 1920s. He won the competition for a concert hall in Helsingborg as early as the 1920s, but on a journey to Germany in 1927, when he visited the Bauhaus in Dessau and the housing exhibition in Stuttgart, he became a committed modernist. He redesigned the concert hall entirely in the functionalist style. He belonged to the circle behind the 1930 Stockholm Exhibition and was one of the authors of the 1931 manifesto “acceptera”.
The Helsingborg Concert Hall, inaugurated in 1932, is regarded as one of the first major public works of Swedish functionalism. In Stockholm he designed the collective house on John Ericssonsgatan, 1935, together with Alva Myrdal, with a shared kitchen and nursery for working women. He designed the Swedish Pavilion at the 1939 New York World’s Fair and the Folkets hus at Norra Bantorget. As Stockholm’s director of town planning from 1944 to 1954 he led the city’s master plan and the planning of Vällingby and the new suburbs along the underground, following the ABC principle of work, housing and centre. He also designed one of the chambers at the United Nations Headquarters in New York.
Markelius died in 1972. He was one of the most important figures of Swedish modernism, both as an architect and as a planner. Vällingby became internationally famous as a model of the planned suburb and was visited by architects and planners from all over the world in the 1950s. The Swedish idea of neighbourhood units with an underground station, a centre and housing set among greenery had an impact far beyond Sweden. His work on the redevelopment of Norrmalm and Hötorgscity, on the other hand, has been criticised because large parts of the old Klara district were demolished. Markelius was awarded the RIBA Gold Medal in 1962 and represents the period when architects and politicians in Sweden sought to build a new and fairer society.