Nordiska museet
Artur Hazelius wanted a palace for Swedish folk culture. Clason designed a building in the Nordic Renaissance Revival style, inspired by the castles of the Vasa era with their gables and tower caps, and by Danish models. The Great Hall inside is like a church, with Carl Milles’s statue of Gustav Vasa.
In 1872–1873 Artur Hazelius began collecting objects from the Swedish peasantry, whose culture he saw disappearing as industrialisation advanced. The collection grew rapidly and needed a building of its own, and the state made land available on Djurgården. Isak Gustaf Clason received the commission and developed a building in the Nordic Renaissance Revival style, with the castles of the Vasa era and the Danish Renaissance, especially Frederiksborg, as models. Construction lasted from 1888 to 1907, and Hazelius died in 1901, before the museum was inaugurated. The idea was that the building itself should express the history of the nation and show that Sweden had an architectural tradition of its own to build on. Construction dragged on because the money came in instalments, from collections, gifts and state grants.
The building is dominated by the Great Hall, a long and very tall space with galleries on several levels along the sides, reminiscent of the nave of a church. In 1925 Carl Milles’s large seated statue of Gustav Vasa, executed in painted and gilded oak, was moved here. The exhibition galleries are arranged around the hall, so that visitors can always orient themselves towards the centre of the building. The exterior has tall stepped gables, tower caps and richly designed portals, and the long façade facing the water by Djurgårdsbron gives the building the character of a palace. Clason’s original plan was considerably larger, with wings around a courtyard, but the money stretched only to part of it. The building therefore looks today like a single enormous range, whose short ends hint at what was never built.
Nordiska museet became Sweden’s great museum of cultural history, and together with Skansen, which Hazelius opened in 1891, it shaped how Swedes saw their own history. The building is one of the early key works of National Romanticism and shows how the Renaissance Revival could be made national. Through this building Clason became one of the most influential architects of his time and later taught many in the generation that designed Stockholm City Hall and other National Romantic buildings. The interior has been modernised several times to suit new ways of exhibiting, but the Great Hall has retained its character. Its location on Djurgården, close to the Vasa Museum and Skansen, makes the museum part of Stockholm’s great cluster of cultural institutions, and its façade is a familiar sight from the water.