What is Nordic Classicism? Swedish Grace in architecture

Nordic Classicism is an architectural style from roughly 1910 to 1930 that simplified classical forms and gave them a light, elegant and sometimes playful character. Columns, pilasters and pediments were combined with smooth, often pastel-coloured façades. The style is also called Swedish Grace, and Gunnar Asplund's City Library in Stockholm is its best-known work.

Facts

Classicism with a light touch

After the heavy brick and granite of National Romanticism a new generation of architects sought something lighter. They turned to classicism, but not to its pompous variety. Their models were rather Italian farmhouses, the wall paintings of Pompeii, the houses of the Danish Golden Age and Swedish manor houses of the 18th century.

The result was a Nordic Classicism with simplified forms, thin mouldings, slender columns and smooth façades in pale yellow, pink, grey or white. The details are often small surprises: an unexpected niche, a playful sculpture, a window that breaks the symmetry.

Swedish Grace

The expression Swedish Grace was used by English critics of the Swedish art and design shown at the 1925 World's Fair in Paris. It has since come to describe the whole of Swedish Twenties Classicism, in furniture, glass and silver as well as in architecture.

The period was the first time Swedish architecture and design received wide international attention. The light elegance was part of the explanation, but so was the collaboration between architects, artists and industry.

Asplund and Lewerentz

Gunnar Asplund is the style's foremost architect. Stockholm City Library, completed in 1928, is a cube with a tall cylinder in the middle, where the books stand on shelves around the whole round hall. The form is strictly geometric, but the details, from the door handles to reliefs with motifs from the Iliad, are carefully designed. He also designed the Lister County Courthouse in Sölvesborg and Villa Snellman in Djursholm.

Together with Sigurd Lewerentz, Asplund won the competition for the Woodland Cemetery in Stockholm in 1915. There landscape and buildings work together, from Asplund's small Woodland Chapel with its steep shingle roof to the long path towards the cross. The Woodland Cemetery became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1994.

Tengbom and the others

Ivar Tengbom designed Stockholm Concert Hall at Hötorget, inaugurated in 1926, with a blue façade and ten slender Corinthian columns, and the Match Palace for Ivar Kreuger's group, with a courtyard full of art. In Gothenburg the Gothenburg Museum of Art was built on Götaplatsen, inaugurated in 1923, where Carl Milles's fountain with Poseidon has stood in front of the steps since 1931.

The style was Nordic, not only Swedish. In Denmark the Faaborg Museum and the huge Police Headquarters in Copenhagen were built, and the young Alvar Aalto designed the Workers' Club in Jyväskylä in the same spirit before he became a Functionalist.

From Classicism to Functionalism

The transition to Functionalism was swift. Asplund himself was chief architect of the Stockholm Exhibition of 1930, which presented the new, modern architecture. But much of Classicism's feeling for proportion, light and care for detail was carried into Nordic modernism.

That is why Nordic Classicism is interesting even for those who mainly like modern architecture. The buildings stand on the border between two periods: classical in form, modern in their simplification. Read more in the guides to National Romanticism and Functionalism.

How to recognise it

Exercise

Which building by Gunnar Asplund has a tall, round reading room in the middle of a cube?