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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.

Correspondence with Bart Lootsma: Reflections on MVRDV, Rem Koolhaas, and Dutch Urbanism

by Nader Vossoughian

In his very provocative essay “What is (really) to be Done? The Theoretical Concepts of MVRDV,” recently published in Reading MVRDV(Rotterdam: NAI Publishers, 2003), Bart Lootsma makes the case for a rethinking of the notion of utopia in this twenty-first century age. Citing the work of Winy Maas, Jacob van Rijs and Nathalie de Vries, better known as MVRDV, he argues against urban planning critics like Rem Koolhaas and Manfredo Tafuri, who associate utopianism with totalitarianism. While Lootsma is quick to observe MVRDVs indebtedness to the Office of Metropolitan Architecture and its principal, Rem Koolhaas, he insists that their organizational and datascape-based methodologies have helped inject new optimism into architecture and urbanism, reinvigorating the designer's role as an agent of social change.

In my correspondence with Lootsma, I inquire about his characterization of MVRDV vis-à-vis Dutch modernism. While I concede that MVRDV and its modernist forbearer Cornelis van Eesteren rely heavily on quantitative research methodologies, I also question in my letter if Lootsma does not overstate the similarities between MVRDV and the practices of the 1920s Dutch avant-garde. In my view, Van Eesteren was an unreconstructed humanist. He wanted to make the world a better place. By contrast, MVRDV seeks as much as anything to poke fun at rationalist modernism. Like Koolhaas, it appears to exhibit a degree of self-irony that is absent in the work of Van Eesteren and his colleagues.

Below is the response I received. Interestingly, Lootsma couches his remarks by way of the contemporary social and political climate in the Netherlands. He argues that MVRDV has managed (unlike Koolhaas) to articulate a coherent urbanistic philosophy that – similar to the work of Van Eesteren – maintains an active dialogue with legal and social norms, a dialogue that can only be seen against the backdrop of economic globalization, the privatization of the domestic housing market, and the internal idiosyncrasies of Dutch architecture and graphic communication.

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To: Nader Vossoughian

From: Bart Lootsma

re: MVRDV, Koolhaas, and Dutch Architecture

Dutch architecture seems indeed to be in a formal and theoretical vacuum. One could say many things about that. Whatever the impression abroad may be, based on the reading of the books of Rem Koolhaas and Ben van Berkel, theory has a very low appreciation in the Netherlands. Over the last couple of years, the most important critics and theoreticians disappeared from the scene. I moved to Vienna, for example, after the new dean of the Berlage Institute clearly expressed that he had no interest in research and theory and the director told me that they wanted 'to do it in a simpler way'. The formal vacuum is caused both by the rapid succession of styles over the last twenty years, which has turned style into something very similar to fashion, and the privatization of the housing market, which has led to a blossoming of neo-styles and pushed architects largely out of business where housing is concerned.

But there is also a deeper reason for this formal and theoretical vacuum. This reason has everything to do with the fact that in the Netherlands the debate is much more about urbanism than about architecture. Since the acceptance of the Housing Act in 1901, cities are obliged to make extension plans, and in the course of the century a very interesting system of national, regional, and urban planning was built up. Planning is a very important political issue in the Netherlands – even if the system is currently undermined by privatizations and globalization. Privatization means that there exists no political control over flows of money any longer. Globalization means that the Netherlands cannot function any longer as a kind of Petri dish, but that there are all kinds of complex relationships with other parts of the world. Immigration is an example of this complex interdependency, as is the new competition between regions (as opposed to countries) within the European Union. Industry is moving increasingly to low-wage countries, and agriculture has become much more profitable in other parts of Europe and the rest of the world. Still, the Dutch voters expect the politicians to organize their country to an extent they never would in other countries.

In this situation, the main issue for architects always was and is to find new control mechanisms on an urban and regional scale to accomodate the growth of the built environment. If you ask me about the difference between MVRDV and Koolhaas' concept of planning, I would say that they start more or less from the same premises, but in that they couldn't be more different in the end. Koolhaas is extremely Dutch in the way he presents issues of urbanism around the world. On the other hand, he has a relationship with the Netherlands that borders on self-hatred. He finds it ridiculous to speak about the Netherlands as if anything would or should be different there than anywhere else and if it is; he hates it. For Rem, there is just the global constellation, and he searches for urban mechanisms that are at work everywhere. Also, his position is highly contradictory. On the one hand, he has a love for planning and the central control that is needed for it. He always admired the French, particularly under Mitterand. On the other hand, he hates the design aspect of the plans of Van Eesteren and Van Lohuizen to such a degree that he does not even acknowledge Van Lohuizen, the man of the survey, or the politics that enabled Van Eesteren and Van Lohuizen to work. In the Netherlands, Koolhaas has always been in favor of the privatization of the housing market and has felt that national planning was not going far enough. In Rem's urbanism, there is no method. His approach of urbanism as a subject of study is still marked by his background as a journalist and a screenplay writer. In terms of projects, there are just concepts and partial ad-hoc strategies - even if they are large-scale - and they can be very different from each other. If you speak of self-skepticism and disenchantment, Koolhaas is your man.

MVRDV, by contrast, seems to be much more interested in methods; methods of research - the datascapes - and methods of organization. The datascapes are very similar to the spatialization of the survey by Van Lohuizen and Van Eesteren. There is one crucial difference, however: Van Lohuizen just used 'raw' data, quantifications of programs . Many of those quantifications were later transferred into a bureaucracy of laws, regulations and norms. MVRDV use both raw statistical data - from the Netherlands Bureau for Statistics -and spatializations of those rules that became institutionalized. These produce the complex envelopes within which a project has to develop.

This is a basic difference, mirroring as it does changes in society at large; for one, the rise the rise of abstract systems replacing traditional authority, as Anthony Giddens has defined it. Although Rem Koolhaas recently seems to have become aware that this tendency (i.e., abstraction and bureaucratization) is characteristic for European politics as a whole, he would never take it as serious as MVRDV. Your characterization of Van Eesteren as an unreconstructed humanist may be true. MVRDV would appear as post-humanists then. But that is a characterization that has already been claimed in other ways that do not do justice to what they are after. Their intentions - dealing with collective risks and desires - come much closer to Van Eesteren than Koolhaas.

But MVRDV also deal with another important change in society, which has to do with advocacy, and which has been analyzed by Ulrich Beck as a new way of making politics from bottom up. Many people are puzzled and irritated by what they see as game-playing and parody in the work of MVRDV. Within Dutch urban planning, cartoon-like simplifications are nothing special, as all offices use similar imagery. Willem Jan Neutelings even makes clear references to the Belgian Dutch tradition of the 'clear line' in comics, initiated by people like Herge. These cartoons enable architects to summarize ideas in a simple way, they are a particular kind of diagram. They enable the architect to present his or her ideas clearly to politicians (not just elder men and mayors, but also city councils and advocacy procedures).

There is never just one such cartoon; rather, their author always offers a choice of alternatives, something to be discussed in public. Sometimes, they show the real consequences of what politicians want; knowing that when they will become visible, they will distance themselves from them. But they are also instrumental as generative tools. As such, they are largely open to amendments and changes in the situation over the period the project is developed.

I will never forget how both Winy Maas and I were involved in a charette about finding a new program for the Van Nelle factory in Rotterdam. In the discussions, Winy would constantly summarize what was said in quick cartoon-like drawings. But also he would present quick cartoon-like sketches for solutions. I have never seen an architect that could so easily use the input of other parties in a project. This process, which is very different from making a proposal for a competition, in which the final result has to appear as a vision, is characteristic for MVRDV's approach.

Skepticism, maybe, as there is the clear awareness that a plan will never be realized exactly as the architect draws it. Disenchantment, no. There is the constant optimistic search for new methods.

Somehow, the categorizations that have been used in architecture, like 'humanist', do not apply here. The only thing that counts is democratic decision-making that transforms ideological and philosophical questions. Politics do define the program, but not with Mao's little red book in its hands. That does not mean the programs formulated are not ambitious: they may deal with migration or the environment or whatever on a large scale. Maybe 'post-ideological' might be a term here -but this does not mean there isn't something like an ideology present. On the contrary, I would say there is. But it is a kind of 'open source' ideology.

Bart Lootsma is Visiting Professor at the Universität für Angewandte Kunst in Vienna. His publications include Super Dutch: New Architecture in the Netherlands (2000) and Body & Globe: Dwelling in an Age of Media and Mobility (2003).