September 29, 2003
Reviewing Barbara Miller-Lane's National Romanticism and Modern Architecture in Germany and the Scandinavian Countries (2000) : A Critical Perspective
by Lucy Creagh
There is a conspicuous visual resonance between the photograph of Sven Markelius’s Villa Kevinge (1945), which became an icon for the architecture of “New Empiricism” (right, top), and the frontis piece of Carl Larsson’s famous series of images on family life in rural Sweden, Ett Hem [A Home] (right, bottom), published in 1899. In both, a child stands before a pitched-roofed, timber house sited in an extended landscape. As a symbol for the virtues of simplicity and honesty, the child is positioned within these images not only to mirror the unadorned nature of the building behind, but also to convey an idea of home as the frame for a new type of family life in a new type of society. Both these images speak of a modern encounter with traditional building forms, and both works emerged at crucial points in the formation of Sweden’s modern national identity. Larsson’s retreat to the countryside to create a home in which new ideas about open family life could be fused with the aesthetics of traditional rural handicrafts came at time when Sweden’s status as a regional power had been diminished; at the same time, industrialization and the rise social democracy were setting down the foundations for a reinvigorated national self-image. Markelius’s villa, a judicious mix of traditional forms with modern planning and construction techniques, represents the time at which the ideas and social movements set in train during the 1890s were fully realized. After decades of unprecedented economic growth and the even distribution of its spoils through welfare policy, the late 1940s and 1950s represent the zenith of folkhemmet – a term used to convey the idea of the Swedish nation as a family of people enjoying the benefits equality and welfare solidarity. The evocation of the folk makes clear that this was an idea of modern nationhood based on a pre-industrial past. Folkhemmet was, as the economic historian Mauricio Rojas has put it, symbolic of “a new society [searching] its history, its collective memories and ancient dreams for a suitable way of coping with modernity.”
On the one hand, it is surprising that Barbara Miller Lane does not draw attention to this specific comparison, particularly as a major objective of her book, as its title implies, is to establish continuity between National Romanticism and modern architecture. On the other hand, to enter into a discussion of New Empiricism would involve unpacking the long-standing tendency of the British architectural press to valorize Swedish architecture as the preferred alternative to the extremes of Franco-German modernism. Lane is adamant that to achieve her revisionist objective of establishing National Romanticism as a “bridge” to modernism from 19th century eclecticism, the cross-currents of influence between Scandinavia and Germany must be focused on exclusively. Lane’s book provides the most comprehensive account of National Romanticism to date, thoroughly researched from sources in five different languages. While National Romanticism is generally considered by Lane to be the search for a national style, nationhood in each of the countries investigated meant something quite different in the decades spanning the centurial shift: nationhood only recently won in the case of Norway and still pending for Finland; a diffused sense of nationhood in Germany and territorial diminishment for Sweden and Denmark. According to Lane, what draws these countries together and gives some commonality to their respective searches for a national design idiom is the “Dream of the North” – a longing for mythological stories, peasant traditions and a tendency to find the origin and essence of the nation in medieval culture. Lane goes to considerable length to recuperate this longing from its association with the Nazis, stressing that up until 1933 it represented no particular political affiliation, being deployed in both Scandinavia and Germany by proponents across the political spectrum. 
Among the many contributions to scholarship made by this book is Lane’s assertion of the defining influence of Scandinavian artists, architects and intellectuals on German developments in architecture and town planning between 1890s and 1920s. The success and influence of Larsson’s Ett Hem series of prints in Germany is proffered as one such example, and she cites figures as divergent as the artist Fidus and the benevolent industrialist Friedrich Alfred Krupp as having come under Larsson’s influence.
Yet, as Lane points out, by far the most influential Scandinavian figure in Germany was the feminist and socialist Ellen Key. Key is best known to architects and architectural historians in connection with Frank Lloyd Wright, who through his second wife Mamah Borthwick came to be influenced by Key’s progressive ideas on women, marriage and egalitarian family life. Borthwick translated a number of Key’s works into English, although ironically, none of those that related directly to the aesthetics of the home. Key’s most important essays in this respect, and those which Lane describes as having the greatest influence in Germany, were collected under the title Skönhet för alla [Beauty for all], published in 1899. Key held that beauty and purposefulness went hand-in-hand and that industrial processes should be harnessed to enable everyone to enjoy household objects born of these concomitant principles. The home thus reformed became an engine for social transformation, with falsity, inequality and unfortunate social customs disappearing. Key’s works went into several translated editions in Germany, and the resonance of her thinking with, among other things, the program of the Deutsche Werkbund is obvious.
Lane emphasizes the crucial nature of Key’s influence on Germany by situating her as a hinge between the Scandinavian and German sections of the second and most important chapter, “The Home as a Work of Art.” While it is public buildings which are most readily identified with National Romanticism – Martin Nyrop’s Copenhagen Town Hall (1892-1905) and Ragnar Östberg’s Stockholm Town Hall (1909-23); Isak Clason’s Nordic Museum in Stockholm (1889-1907) and Gesellius, Lindgren and Saarinen’s National Museum in Helsinki (1904-10) – Lane argues that it was the ideas about form, materials, communality and “the total work of art” that were first explored in domestic architecture that became a decisive influence on National Romanticism as a broadly identifiable style. Once again, this is a notion traceable to Key, who believed that a reformed domestic architecture would precipitate a new, revived monumental architecture. Following this idea, Lane submits a third chapter entitled “The Search for a New Monumental Architecture,” in which the continuity between National Romanticism in the domestic realm and public building is discussed. These two chapters form the core of Lane’s exposition of the stylistic and social implications of National Romanticism, chapters in which a concentration on the influence of Scandinavia challenges the pervasive Germano-centric nature of most histories of the birth of modern architecture.
In the concluding chapter, “The Legacy of National Romanticism”, Lane wisely bypasses the loaded appellation of post-World War II architecture as New Empiricism. Instead, she opts for the more descriptive and inclusive term “Scandinavian Synthesis” to describe the “revived” if not “surviving” tendencies of National Romanticism. She identifies the hallmarks of the Scandinavian Synthesis as a return to natural materials, rustic detailing, open yet intimate public spaces that speak of a sense of community, solidity and asymmetrical massing, purpose-designed furniture and fittings and the drive towards the “total work of art”. All of this is typified by Alvar Aalto’s Säynätsalo Town Hall of 1950-2, which Lane describes as a kind of medieval hill town in microcosm. She argues that the initial impulses of National Romanticism were so deeply ingrained in modernist thinking as it emerged from the crucibles of Darmstadt and Hellerau and as it developed through Expressionism and the early Bauhaus, that not even the extremes of Neue Sachlichkeit, nor the appropriation of the “Dream of the North” by the Nazis, could completely extinguish its message and appeal.
In her book, Lane seeks to trace continuities across borders during periods of unprecedented political, social and cultural rupture. On the basis of the impressive depth and breadth of its research, this book constitutes an indispensable resource to scholars working in the field of German and Scandinavian modernism. At the same time, the clarity of Lane’s thought and language, the book’s straight-forward organization and ample illustrations render it an excellent introduction to the early modern architecture of any one of the five countries dealt with.
Lucy Creagh is a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University in New York, and writes on the architecture of the Swedish cooperative movement.
Posted by agglutinations at September 29, 2003 05:35 AM