Architecture: Nordic Classicism

The aim of this study is to explore Nordic Classicism. This will be done through understanding its derivations and using the case study of Erik Gunnar Asplund’s Stockholm Public Library to understand how he applied the principles. During the twentieth century several strands of classicism developed across the world, including Nordic Classicism which was a short-lived period (1910 to 1930) of architectural history in Scandinavia. The movement was inspired by a combination of pre-existing building typologies and modern build techniques and social ideas. These juxtaposing sources allowed for buildings to be familiar looking whilst being made with new technologies.

Stockholm Public Library by Erik Gunnar Asplund is a building from the NC movement. The building was a public commission, and he visited the United States, Germany and England to look at libraries as precedents for his designs. His designs went through a series of modifications to get it to what is considered an architectural achievement of the 20th century.

Asplund modelled the design of the library on aspects from neoclassicism and the nineteenth-century tradition of library design, and therefore this essay will argue that Stockholm library is an abstracted version of classical architecture.

The library was set upon a round planned and expressed as a centrally positioned cylinder rising through a rectangular ‘box’. Initially Asplund drew inspiration for this from Palladio’s Villa Rotunda, which he may have seen on his visit to Italy in 1914. It was expected that early on in their career’s architects should make pilgrimages to countries like Italy, to observe classical and vernacular styles and possibly use this as inspiration. Villa Rotunda has a glazed dome and not the drum that Asplund uses. It is generally believed that the dome had to be modified into a drum due to budget. However, when studying other precedents such as Claude-Nicholas Ledoux’s Barriere de la Villette(1784-9) near Paris, we can see a likeness to the library as both share a drum-like form rising from a rectangular ‘box’. Asplund visited Paris in 1913, but there is no is no direct evidence to suggest Asplund was inspired by this specific precedent.

The established type of the ‘rotunda’ is widely used in classical and neo-classical architecture. Though Asplund was looking at this architecture, he has not copied the historic ornamentation used in its predecessors. Both exteriorly and interiorly the drum is stripped of decoration, only containing a single, horizontal band of small rectangular windows, which allow direct daylight from the sides and give partial views of the sky when one is standing inside. Simplifying a classical type might allude to the teaching of the french architecture academic, Jean-Nicolas-Durand (1760-1834),who was important(influential) to the Nordic classicists as he encouraged architects to rationalise classicism, and through this creation of a simple composition, beauty could be achieved. Durand dismissed the idea that one of the purposes of architecture was to be aesthetically pleasing; he believed that an architect should design with function and the method of construction in mind. Beauty would be the by-product of this design process. I believe this is evident as we are not going to mistake the library for a temple or palace, as it is not highly decorated. Also, successful reading rooms such as Library, The oxford camera all take a circular form, so perhaps there is somewhat an indication of the function being more important than form. (maybe revise this argument- form follows function is a modern idea, classical architecture has unnecessary décor for beauty affect).

The soaring cylindrical form poking from a low rectangular box gives the exterior a sense of monumentality- a concept that was key to Baroque architecture. The scale was important to Asplund, who saw civic architecture as being landmarks. The site (which is on the corner of an L shaped parc land)is on a main road intersection with a park behind it, so the building had to have well-articulated facades on all sides to achieve this sense of presence. Perhaps Asplund imagined the building to be seen as in his sketches of Italy, where buildings dominated vernacular landscapes. The concept of monumentality also relates to why the architects studied classicism and favoured over romanticism. The Nordic classicists were receiving civic commissions(that needed to be used by many people), and romantic buildings lacked scalability. The classical precedents were monumental in scale, and to design larger and more complex structures (as the Nordic Classicists were doing) (their commissions were public buildings and large) it made sense to look at how classical buildings were composed. This further reflects one of Durand idea. He argued that a building ‘could be made Classical if it proved convenient’ . In this case classical building are useful antecedents because they were colossal structures.

The rectangular ‘box’ is decorated as a monumental Egyptian portal, that rises above a rusticated plinth zone and dominates the three-story facade. It houses two continuous frieze courses that are made up of a band of fluting and a band of hieroglyphs below it. The portal and friezes are the only historical features that Asplund employed. They have been applied like an object of antiquity stuck onto an otherwise plain façade, which is only articulated by two courses of fenestration at the top. The hieroglyphs have bear no relation to Egyptian precedents, instead they are mundane objects such as prams, buckets and spades, trains and toy dogs. This is a perplexing feature as I would expect the library to have relief made of symbols of knowledge from Greek mythology( such as Minerva-the representation of wisdom). These random (and possibly meaningless) objects could be inferring the new socialist ideals- that the library is for all, and not for elite members of society. However, this speculation could be incorrect as the overall form of the library does imply knowledge as, since the building of Museums reading room, the ‘rotunda’ form has been regarded as a symbol of knowledge of the world. Asplund may once again be exemplifying Durand’s teaching, in that the most abstract form of a building can infer its function.