Recognising the 19th-Century Stone City: Façades, Courtyards and Styles

The stone city is the closed blocks of four- and five-storey buildings in render, brick and stone that were built in the centres of Swedish towns from the 1870s to about 1910. You recognise it by straight streets and esplanades, buildings standing wall to wall around a courtyard, a heavy ground floor with rusticated masonry, rich decoration in cement or sandstone, bay windows, balconies with wrought-iron railings, tower caps on the corner buildings and large oak doors. The façades are mostly in Historicism, above all Neo-Renaissance and Neo-Baroque, and the later buildings in Jugend. The background is the Building Ordinance of 1874, which required buildings of stone in the cores of towns.

Facts

Why the Towns Were Built in Stone

In the second half of the 19th century Sweden's towns grew rapidly, as industry expanded and people moved in from the countryside. The outer districts around Stockholm's Gamla stan long consisted of low timber houses and yards, and fires and cholera were constant threats. Paris had shown under Haussmann how a city could be transformed with broad boulevards, and in 1866 a committee under Albert Lindhagen presented a plan for Stockholm with straight streets, esplanades and large squares. It gave the main lines to Östermalm, Vasastan and Kungsholmen.

The Building Ordinance of 1874 applied to all the towns of the realm. It required town plans, broader streets and that buildings in town centres be built of incombustible material. It was the starting gun for a building boom in the 1870s and 80s, in which master builders and property speculators built block by block. In Sundsvall, after the great fire of 1888, an entire town centre was built in stone, also known as Stenstaden. The period is described under the era The Railway and the Stone City.

The Façade: Foot, Body and Head

A stone-city building is built like a classical façade, with the same vocabulary as a Renaissance palace. Read it from the bottom up, as in the façade drawing in the basics: the plinth, a ground floor with rustication, that is, horizontal joints in the render meant to look like heavy blocks of stone, a large portal, string courses between the floors, window surrounds that grow richer the finer the floor, balconies, cornice and at the top a mansard roof with dormers. The central section often projects as a risalit and is crowned by a pediment.

Much of the decoration is not carved stone. The ornaments were cast in cement or pressed in sheet metal and could be ordered from catalogues, and render was painted and scored to resemble sandstone. Typical features are bay windows, projecting windows on one or several floors, and corner buildings with towers and lanterns that mark the street corner. The word for the whole environment is in the glossary under stenstad, and the parts are explained in more detail in the guide to the parts of a façade.

Behind the Façade: Grand Apartment and Courtyard Buildings

The blocks of the stone city are closed. The buildings stand wall to wall along the street, and behind them lies a courtyard with courtyard buildings. Facing the street were large apartments for the well-to-do, with a drawing room and dining room en suite, tiled stoves and a maid's room beside the kitchen stairs. The courtyard buildings had small flats, often one room and a kitchen, for workers and servants, and the overcrowding there was often severe. The same building could thus contain the whole range of society.

In Gothenburg a variant of its own developed, the landshövdingehus: a ground floor in stone and two floors of timber on top. The building regulations required stone buildings, but the county governor could grant exemptions, and the building still met the fire requirements. You recognise it by the rendered or stone-clad ground floor and the panelled upper floors. Landshövdingehus were built in Haga, Majorna and Landala and right up to the 1940s.

Dating the Building by Its Style

The stone city was built over a little more than forty years, and the style reveals when. Buildings of the 1870s and 80s are often in Neo-Renaissance, with symmetrical façades, round-arched or straight-headed windows with pediments, pilasters and rusticated masonry. Around 1890 the decoration becomes heavier and more sculptural, with Neo-Baroque's curved gables and heavy brackets. The public buildings follow the same pattern: Nationalmuseum from 1866 in Neo-Renaissance, the Riksdag building from 1905 in Neo-Baroque. Strandvägen in Stockholm, built up from the 1880s, became the city's finest address, where Isak Gustaf Clason designed the Bünsow House on the model of French châteaux.

After the turn of the century the expression changes. Jugend brings softly curving lines, plant ornament and asymmetrical façades, and National Romanticism replaces render with dark brick and natural stone. At the same time the straight grid was criticised. Planners such as Per Olof Hallman, inspired by the Austrian Camillo Sitte, advocated curving streets and varied urban spaces, as in Lärkstaden around Engelbrekt Church. A building on a winding street from the 1910s is thus usually younger than one on a straight esplanade.

Look Out For: Stripped and Restored Façades

In the mid-20th century the decoration was seen as outdated, and many stone-city buildings were stripped: the ornaments were knocked off and the façade was given a smooth surface. If you see a building from the 1880s with 1880s proportions, tall windows and heavy cornices but entirely smooth walls, it has probably been stripped. Parts of the stone city were also demolished in the 1950s and 60s. Today the blocks are among the most sought-after residential environments in the country, and the decoration is sometimes recreated from old drawings and photographs.

Take a stroll through a stone-city district and try it out: find a ground floor with rusticated masonry, a bay window, a corner tower and an oak door. Look at the roof and decide whether it is a mansard roof; roof shapes are covered in the guide to roof shapes. More about town plans in the guide to town planning through history, about the styles in the guide to Historicism and about Haussmann's model in the guide to architecture in Paris. If you are unsure about a building, more rules of thumb are in Which Style Is My House?

How to recognise the stone city

Exercise

Which law led Swedish towns to get closed blocks of stone buildings?