Famous Buildings in Sweden: from Dalby Church to Sara Cultural Centre

Among the best-known buildings in Sweden are Uppsala Cathedral, Lund Cathedral, the Royal Palace in Stockholm, Drottningholm Palace, Stockholm City Hall, Stockholm Public Library, the Woodland Cemetery and Turning Torso in Malmö. Together they tell almost a thousand years of Swedish architecture, from the stone churches of the 11th century to today's timber high-rises. Here they follow in chronological order, and the map below shows where in the country they stand.

Facts

The Middle Ages: Cathedrals and Stone Churches

Sweden's oldest surviving buildings are churches. Dalby Church in Scania was built around 1060, when Dalby was briefly a bishop's seat, and is probably the oldest stone church still standing in the whole of Scandinavia. Scania was Danish then, and when Lund became the archiepiscopal see for the whole of the North in 1103, work began on Lund Cathedral, in sandstone on models from the Rhineland. The apse with its dwarf gallery and the great crypt survive, while the west towers took their present form only in the 19th century. In Västergötland stands Husaby Church with its broad west tower and three spires, according to tradition the place where Olof Skötkonung was baptised.

Gothic arrived with brick and French models. Uppsala Cathedral was begun in the late 13th century, was directed for a time by the French master builder Étienne de Bonneuil, and was consecrated in 1435. It is the largest church in the Nordic countries. In Visby, German merchants built St Mary's, consecrated in 1225 and now the cathedral, and across Gotland stand more than ninety medieval parish churches; more about them in the guide to the churches of Gotland and Visby. By Lake Vättern lies the Blue Church in Vadstena, built 1369–1430 for St Bridget's convent. The period as a whole is covered on the page about the Swedish Middle Ages.

Palaces and Castles: the Vasa Era and the Swedish Empire

Under Gustav Vasa came the fortress and then the Renaissance palace. Vadstena Castle began as a defensive fortress in 1545 and under his sons became a palace with a symmetrical façade and rich gables, influenced by the Netherlands and Germany. In the 17th century Sweden became a great power, and the nobility and the royal house built on a new scale. The House of Nobility in Gamla stan, 1641–1674, was given one of the country's best-known säteri roofs.

Nicodemus Tessin the Elder designed Drottningholm Palace from 1662 and Kalmar Cathedral in the Roman Baroque manner, with four corner towers. His son Nicodemus Tessin the Younger designed the new Royal Palace in Stockholm after the fire at Tre Kronor in 1697, a closed quadrangle modelled on Roman city palaces that was not finished until 1754. More about the period can be found on the page about the Swedish Empire period.

Rococo, Gustavian and the 19th Century

At Drottningholm, Carl Fredrik Adelcrantz built both the Chinese Pavilion, 1763–1769, and the Palace Theatre from 1766, where the original stage machinery still works. The age of Gustav III brought a light and austere Neoclassicism: the pavilion in Haga Park, 1787–1792, and the orangery Linneanum in Uppsala with its portico of Doric columns without bases. Under Charles XIV John, Fredrik Blom built Rosendal Palace on Djurgården.

The 19th century borrowed styles. The German architect Friedrich August Stüler designed Nationalmuseum, opened in 1866, in the Neo-Renaissance manner, and Helgo Zettervall gave Lund a bright university building with sphinxes on the roof. Towards the end of the century Isak Gustaf Clason began to build the Nordic Museum, a palace for folk culture in Nordic Neo-Renaissance, with gables and tower caps modelled on the palaces of the Vasa era.

National Romanticism and Swedish Grace

Around 1900–1925 a large share of the buildings now seen as typically Swedish were built. Ragnar Östberg's City Hall on Kungsholmen, opened in 1923 and with a tower 106 metres high, is the principal work of National Romanticism, and Lars Israel Wahlman's Engelbrekt Church, Torben Grut's Stadium from the 1912 Olympic Games and Carl Westman's Röhsska Museum in Gothenburg belong to the same wave of hand-laid brick and craftsmanship.

After the First World War, form grew lighter. Gunnar Asplund's Public Library, a cylinder on a cube from 1928, and his courthouse in Sölvesborg belong to the Nordic Classicism that abroad was called Swedish Grace. In Gothenburg, Götaplatsen is crowned by the Museum of Art in yellow brick. Over twenty-five years Asplund and Sigurd Lewerentz shaped the Woodland Cemetery, which became a World Heritage Site in 1994.

From Funkis to Timber Buildings

The Stockholm Exhibition of 1930 introduced Functionalism, and soon Sven Markelius built the concert hall in Helsingborg and Asplund his extension to Gothenburg Law Courts. After the war came suburbs and churches: Vällingby centre from 1954, Lewerentz's dark brick churches St Mark's Church and St Peter's in Klippan, and Peter Celsing's Kulturhuset at Sergels torg. The period has its own account in the guide to the Record Years.

Later buildings include Rafael Moneo's Moderna Museet from 1998 with its pyramid-shaped skylights, Santiago Calatrava's Turning Torso in Malmö, the tallest building in Scandinavia when it was completed in 2005, and Väven in Umeå from 2014. Sara Cultural Centre in Skellefteå, opened in 2021, has a twenty-storey hotel with a timber frame and shows that timber has returned to large buildings. The architects behind the buildings are presented in the guide to famous Swedish architects, Stockholm's buildings in the guide to architecture in Stockholm, and the whole course of events on the page about Swedish architectural history. On the map they appear together with the rest of the world.

Rules of Thumb for Swedish Buildings

Exercise

Which of these buildings is the oldest?