Architecture-Building & Construction

A desire to enhance national traditions while embracing the tenets of modernism characterizes the architecture of early Scandinavian modernism. The leaders were Erik Gunnar Asplund of Sweden, Eliel Saarinen and Alvar Aalto of Finland, and Arne Jacobsen of Denmark. Asplund, in his design for the Stockholm City Library (1928), set a rotunda (round building with a dome) within a rectangular cube. The design was neoclassical in inspiration, but the building’s plain surfaces were characteristic of rationalist modernism. Asplund went on to create decidedly modernist buildings for the 1930 Stockholm Exhibition, with slender piers and extensive use of glass and steel. But his most influential building may have been the small, unadorned Woodland Chapel at the Stockholm Cemetery (1920). With its shingled roof and temple-like columned entry porch, the chapel seemed to transcend both local and classical architectural traditions.

Jacobsen worked within Danish tradition throughout his career,... but was deeply influenced by the craft and rigor of Asplund's designs. In the Jespersen Office Building (1955) in Copenhagen, Jacobsen also incorporated the curtain wall and steel frame typical of high-rise buildings in the United States.

Eliel Saarinen was a member of a group of artists, musicians, and writers who celebrated Finnish nationalism, and with them he participated in a broad movement to revive Nordic vernacular traditions. His Helsinki Central Railway Station (1904-1914) utilized local masonry techniques to emphasize bold architectural forms and expressive sculptural decoration. But he allowed functional considerations to guide him in designing its sleek, streamlined appearance and rational organization of space. Saarinen moved to the United States in 1923, where he designed buildings for the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.

Eliel’s son, Eero Saarinen, secured his fame with two designs. The first was the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, Missouri, for which he won a competition in 1948 (though it was not built until 1963). Its soaring line has since become a world-recognized symbol of St. Louis. The second design was for the TWA Terminal at the John F. Kennedy Airport (1962) in New York City, a building that expresses flight with its sweeping curves. Although visually pleasing, the terminal’s curving shape proved maddeningly resistant to expansion.

Alvar Aalto's early work reveals the influence of Asplund's designs, although Aalto was later influenced by Russian and Dutch constructivism, Finnish neoclassicism, and Frank Lloyd Wright's house designs. In collaboration with his first wife, Aino Marsio, Aalto designed houses, public buildings, and plywood furniture. After working with reinforced concrete, a standard material in modern European designs, he began to use more wood because of its association with native Finnish tradition and its greater warmth and expressiveness. For the Villa Mairea (1939) in Noormarkku, Finland, Aalto layered sensuous strips of teak and other woods, even using teak for the venetian blinds on the exterior of the windows. The natural materials he used—wood-paneled interiors, a rough granite base for the house, and an exterior wall of stone rubble—stand in sharp contrast to the clean white walls of International Style modernism, although they display a sympathy with the natural materials of Wright's architecture. Aalto was less interested in arguing for a specific style than in finding solutions that would dignify places of human habitation.