The Architecture of the Record Years: Vällingby, Hötorget and Concrete

The Record Years is the name given to the period from about 1950 to 1975, when Sweden built more per inhabitant than almost any other country. It was the age of suburbs on the metro line such as Vällingby, of the city-centre transformation with the Hötorget skyscrapers and Kulturhuset, and of the Million Programme. The architecture runs from the soft brick buildings with gabled roofs of the 1950s to the large scale, concrete elements and glass façades of the 1960s and 70s. At the same time Sigurd Lewerentz built two of the century's most remarkable churches in dark brick.

Facts

A Country That Built for the Future

Sweden had escaped the Second World War, but the housing shortage was severe. People moved from the countryside to the towns, the birth cohorts were large and many families lived in cramped and outdated conditions. The state gave favourable loans, the municipalities formed public housing companies, and building became a shared project of the welfare state. The ideal was the neighbourhood unit: an area where school, shops, library and community hall lay within walking distance.

The buildings of the 1950s are mostly three- and four-storey blocks in brick or render with gabled roofs, balconies and carefully designed doorways, set in parkland with old trees and rocky outcrops preserved. Årsta centre, opened in 1953, was an early neighbourhood centre with a theatre, library and community house. The soft, material-conscious Modernism was given the name New Empiricism abroad, and the firm Backström & Reinius was one of its best-known names. The same period in design is described under the People's Home in the design section.

Vällingby: the Suburb as a Pearl on a String

The General Plan for Stockholm, drawn up under the city planning director Sven Markelius, arranged the suburbs like pearls on a string along the metro line. Each group got a centre at the station, with tall buildings closest and lower buildings and villas further out. Vällingby centre, designed by Backström & Reinius and opened in November 1954, was built as a car-free square on top of the metro, with circles in the paving, neon signs, a cinema and a library.

Vällingby was called the ABC city, for work, housing and centre (Arbete, Bostad, Centrum), and planners from all over the world came on study visits. The idea is explained in the guide to the ABC city. The next big suburb, Farsta, opened in 1960, was already more adapted to the car, with large car parks.

The City Transformation: Hötorget and Sergels torg

From the 1950s large parts of the Klara quarters in lower Norrmalm were demolished to make way for the metro, wider streets and a modern commercial centre. The five Hötorget skyscrapers along Sveavägen, based on an idea by David Helldén, were erected in 1952–1966 by different architects but with the same height and basic form: eighteen storeys with façades of glass and slender columns, on a low base with shops and roof terraces. The first was completed in 1956, and they became the symbol of modern post-war Stockholm.

Sergels torg with its sunken plaza and Peter Celsing's Kulturhuset became the new centre. Kulturhuset opened in 1974 as a living room for culture, with a long glass façade towards the square, and between 1971 and 1983 the Riksdag sat in the part that is today the City Theatre. Criticism of the demolitions grew during the 1960s, and when the elms in Kungsträdgården were to be felled in May 1971, demonstrators occupied the park. The Battle of the Elms became a turning point for attitudes to preservation.

The Million Programme and Concrete Elements

In 1965 the Riksdag decided that a million homes should be built in ten years, and the target was reached. About a third were detached and terraced houses, but it is the large areas such as Tensta, Rinkeby, Hammarkullen and Rosengård that have shaped the picture. Building was industrialised: walls and floor slabs were made as concrete elements in a factory and lifted into place by cranes running on rails, which produced long, straight blocks. Traffic was separated, with roads at the edge and footpaths on bridges and in tunnels.

Here the Record Years differ from the Brutalism of Le Corbusier's Unité d'habitation. The concrete of the Million Programme is industrial and smooth, not sculptural, and the façades were often clad in brick, fibre cement or sheet metal. More about the ideas and the criticism in the guide to the Million Programme, and about the difference from raw concrete in Funkis or Brutalism?

The Churches: Lewerentz and Celsing

The most admired buildings of the Record Years are not housing but churches. The suburbs needed new parish centres, and in 1956 Sigurd Lewerentz, then about seventy, won the competition for St Mark's Church in Björkhagen. It was built in 1958–1960 in dark brick, where no brick could be cut and the broad joints take up the differences. St Peter's in Klippan, 1962–1966, is darker still, with a single steel column in the middle of the room. For more about him and his companion from youth, there is the guide Asplund and Lewerentz.

Peter Celsing built brick churches in Gothenburg, Uppsala and Vällingby at the same time, and the Englishman Ralph Erskine designed housing adapted to the cold at Svappavaara. The architecture of the Record Years is thus much more than concrete suburbs. The buildings in Stockholm are in the guide to architecture in Stockholm, and the style as a whole under post-war Modernism.

How to Recognise the Record Years

Exercise

Which building does NOT belong to the Record Years, 1950–1975?