The Age of Liberty
After the fall of the great power, building was smaller in scale but refined. The building of Stockholm Palace became a school for artists and craftsmen, and Rococo brought light, bright interiors.
After the death of Tessin the Younger, Carl Hårleman led the building of Stockholm Palace and introduced French Rococo into its interiors. A drawing academy grew up around the building work, the root of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts.
The new institutions of the Enlightenment received buildings of their own: the Observatory in Stockholm, designed by Hårleman for the Academy of Sciences, was completed in 1753, and the Seraphim Hospital on Kungsholmen opened in 1752 as Sweden’s first modern hospital.
At Drottningholm the palace theatre was built in 1766 to designs by Carl Fredrik Adelcrantz, and the Chinese Pavilion took its present form in the 1760s. The theatre still has its 18th-century stage machinery and is still in use.