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Appropriate Architecture in an Uncertain Age by Wilfried Wang

‘The Swede is the poet of matter.’ Aphorism ascribed to Ilya Ehrenburg 1

Certainties

Museum at Millesgården

What guides architects in their design process? Which internal motivations and external influences can one observe from the outside? How does the work develop over time? A review of the work of an architect only hints at that individual’s pace of life and how it engages with accompanying events. The slow processes of cognition, absorption, reflection and creation are obscured by the rapid rhythm of buildings and proposals, realised and unrealised, that are selected and laid out in a book such as this. Leaving aside the designs, projects and competition entries, especially those that have their final resting place in the archive, the observer of an architect’s corpus of work might conclude that there are leaps of creation from one building to the next. But the inner pace of conception and design, ostensibly free of constraints, must confront concrete needs and rules. In the slow translation from design idea to built reality, the architect’s work encounters inescapable demands, whether from the logic of formal and spatial composition or from cultural expectations, building codes or the client’s stipulations. These are all considerations within the work, creating relations between the architect and the design. An essay such as this one, however, has the task of reflecting on overarching themes. If the pace of life, the process of design reflection, is ultimately subsumed within each project, is it possible to discern an underlying order of reflection that hints at a premeditated path of creation through the lineage of the work? Or is it all just a series of happenstances, of coincidences, of more or less fortunate circumstances and opportunities? How conscious are architects of the path that their career might take? Most architects do not have an architect parent to overlook, comment on or criticise their development. Those who do often find themselves in open or subconscious conflict with the parent – a conflict that might last an entire lifetime or eventually be resolved with psychiatric help. Johan Celsing’s father was one of the foremost architects in Sweden during the heyday of social democracy. But Peter Celsing (1920–1974) died unexpectedly when Johan was 19 years old. At the time of Johan Celsing’s birth in 1955, Tage Erlander was already

1 ‘Ilya Ehrenburg once said that “the Swede is the poet of matter.” Is it true that they love materials and things more than they love people?’, A Alvarez in an interview with Ingmar Bergman in The New York Times Magazine, 7 December 1975, 308.

AppropriAtE ArchitEcturE iN AN uNcErtAiN AgE

Appropriate Architecture in an Uncertain Age by Wilfried Wang

‘The Swede is the poet of matter.’ Aphorism ascribed to Ilya Ehrenburg 1

Certainties

Museum at Millesgården

AppropriAtE ArchitEcturE iN AN uNcErtAiN AgE

nine years into his 23-year tenure as Sweden’s prime minister, continuing a line of social democratic-led governments that began in 1932, with Per Albin Hansson, and would go on, uninterrupted, until 1969, when Erlander handed over the premiership to his protégé Olof Palme. During these four decades of social democratic rule, Sweden made the transition from an agricultural to an industrial economy, constructing new towns and public infrastructure and establishing pioneering workers’ rights and social standards. This was the context in which Peter Celsing built a reputation for bringing forward traditional typologies, notably for churches, into a contemporary, abstracted architecture: Nordic and reticent, but simultaneously empathetic and substantive in its materiality. Peter Celsing was a pivotal figure in the Swedish architectural and artistic scene, collaborating, amongst others, with the sculptor Sivert Lindblom (1931–) and the painter Sölve Olsson (1928–2008), and for some years he worked with Sigurd Lewerentz (1885–1975) on the renovation project for Uppsala Cathedral (1951– 55). Peter Celsing’s most complex urban and architectural project – the set of three buildings of the Riksbanken, Kulturhuset and Stadsteatern in central Stockholm (competition 1965) – was completed while he was still in his fifties, but his extraordinary career was cut short by a brain tumour. What had promised to be a prosperous and prodigious period ended at the height of his creativity. Growing up, Johan Celsing would spend hours in his father’s office, which made a lasting impression, representing the ideal of synthesising creative pursuits with ‘work’. Here, he met all the architects and artist colleagues. He observed skilled draughtsmanship and water-colouring, and followed design processes, fascinated by the experimental model-making using wood, plaster and card. It was in this architectural laboratory that he honed his ability to observe, and later recall, minute details, cultivating an empathetic memory first for the visual and then for words, as he developed his interest in language and poetry. The Celsing family home at this time was Villa Klockberga in Drottningholm, a two-storey house with a rectangular plan and a small winter garden that Peter Celsing had converted in 1969. This house, too, made a lasting impression on Johan. Behind its apparent compositional casualness, all the design decisions – the marginal location of the stair, the minor shift in the wall alignments, the asymmetric placement of doors – were absolute in their dimensional and metric considerations, helping to frame a certain architectural and atmospheric meaning of Swedish-international domesticity: one that integrated furniture experiments from current projects in the Celsing office with Near Eastern salon typologies, for example with the carpet-covered sofas, or the rugs draped from the ceiling.

Villa Klockberga

room by Adolf Loos

WiLFriEd WANg

Adolf Loos’s concept of the Raumplan is a compositional relation of differently sized spaces, indeed of varying heights, some of them overlooking and thereby enriching the spatial experience of each other, all within a compact configuration.

Besides the spatial and compositional discipline, the house could be thought to display a planimetric version of Adolf Loos’s Raumplan 2. Peter Celsing was adamant about the external expression: a double-pitched roof with a play of asymmetries and an inscribed portico signifying the main entrance, the Villa Klockberga as a miniature Palladian villa. And in its colour scheme – a common black metal cladding system on the approach facades, with window frames painted in ochre – the house refers to the nearby royal palace of Drottningholm. Before Villa Klockberga, however, in a quieter time in the early 1960s, father and son built a playhouse on the grounds of the family summer house. Made from an assortment of building materials found around the house or left over from other construction projects, it has a pitched roof, arched entrance and a small fireplace.The extended height gives the lekstuga something of the air of a sentry box. In a way, the playhouse possesses all the basic elements of a primitive hut for small people. If, for children, playing is a subconscious preparation for the adult world, then the collaborative enterprise of building the playhouse was not only a bonding exercise for father and son but also preparation for an independent existence: a freestanding house beside another freestanding house. In hindsight, the playhouse could be considered as an architectural bequest that defines core elements of Johan Celsing’s own work as an architect. Peter Celsing understood architecture in its dense lineage from antiquity to the contemporary.3 He explored archetypes in his projects and built works, predating the postmodernist discourse that is more widely associated with Robert Venturi (1925–2018) and Aldo Rossi (1932–1997). ‘Postmodern’ analysis of modernist architecture was familiar to the architects who took part in the debate initiated at the time of the 1930 Stockholm Exhibition. One example is Architektur als Symbol (1931), Josef Frank’s fundamental critique of abstract, white German modernism – a critique he translated into built form with his experimental summer houses of the 1930s on the peninsula of Falsterbo.4 In the same light, Peter Celsing’s success in the 1965 competition for the urban design of the three new buildings in central Stockholm can be understood as a reaction to Norr malm’s radical 1950s transformation into a soulless corporate office and shopping district. On the Brunkebergstorg side, Peter Celsing’s reference was the palazzo typology, with the Riksbanken clad in rough black granite;

haus Wilbrandtgasse 3, Vienna by Joseph Frank 1914

Wilfried Wang, The Architecture of Peter Celsing, (Stockholm: Arkitekturförlaget, 1996).

4 Josef Frank, Architektur als Symbol: Elemente deutschen neuen Bauens (Vienna: Löcker Verlag, 1931). On the summer houses, see: Johannes Spalt and Hermann Czech, Josef Frank 1885–1967 (Vienna: Hochschule für Angewandte Kunst, 1981) and Mikael Bergquist and Olof Michelsen, Josef Frank: Arkitektur (Stockholm: Arkitekturmuseet, 1994).

AppropriAtE ArchitEcturE iN AN uNcErtAiN AgE

Villa Klockberga

room by Adolf Loos

WiLFriEd WANg

haus Wilbrandtgasse 3, Vienna by Joseph Frank 1914

Wilfried Wang, The Architecture of Peter Celsing, (Stockholm: Arkitekturförlaget, 1996).

AppropriAtE ArchitEcturE iN AN uNcErtAiN AgE

Årsta church

the large top windows and tracks across the walls like a sun-dial throughout the day. Unlike the crematorium, where the same type of brick is used to create many different surfaces, here variations are introduced through the use of different colours (the small side chapels are clad in green, red and natural brick) and finishes (natural, lime-washed or glazed). During the three days I spent photographing Årsta I witnessed a funeral, a baptism and a wedding. The church came alive with the presence of people, their movement, colours and voices, a perfect backdrop to the essential moments in the life – and end of life – of a community. Arriving on the morning of the wedding, I looked up at the church’s western windows. Imprinted on one of them was the outline of an owl that had struck it the night before.

Årsta church

nobel forum

KV PrInSen

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