Swedish model reassessed.

Post 1945, Sweden was envied by many other war-torn European countries. Its culture of architectural continuity, combined with enlightened community building programmes, became known as the 'Swedish model'. Continuing their examination of twentieth-century European architecture, the Deutsches Architekturmuseum (supported by the Architekturmuseet Stockholm) traced the history of this phenomenon, illustrated by photographs, models, and lectures from Bjorn Linn, Eva Eriksson, Eva Rudberg, Gert Wingardh and Carl Nyren. From Ragnar Ostberg's Italianate Stockholm City Hall (1902-23), and Gunnar Asplund's modern development of Neo-Classicism, to Ralph Erskine's Brittgarden and Nya Bruket urban housing projects and Rafael Moneo's Architecture and Modern Art Museum, Swedish architecture seems to have successfully united tradition and modern internationalism. Two main philosophical strands symbiosis with nature and industrialized rationality - have shaped a recognizable Swedish character.

With its small population, speaking a language rarely understood by others and distanced from the mass of Europe, Sweden has had to be internationally orientated. A rapid agrarian industrialization, the laying of a railway network and founding of new private and public-owned undertakings and institutions for commerce, housing and education in the mid-nineteenth century, excited architectural and engineering ingenuity. On the one hand, traditional farm structures were pragmatically adapted and adopted for the first railway stations. Today, this building type lives on in many architect-designed houses such as those by Jan Gezelius (the Villa Drake 1970), and Thorsten Askergren (Villa Olby 1988.) On the other hand, prefabricated building systems (the result of international research and philosophics), were accepted as economic solutions for mass building. In 1964, A4 Co-ordinator produced a pilot project for offices in Stockholm. Behind a metal clad street frontage, rooms for 2600 office workers were grouped around intimate landscaped courtyards. Since 1968 Carl Nyren has moved from the pure rationalism of precast concrete and an exposed structural skeleton for the Arrhenius Laboratories at Frescati University to more subtle and colourful buildings, like the Jonkoping Museum in 1991, with colour-washed fair faced concrete walls, pine ceilings and floors, in an extension of a '50s building.

A sense of community structure has consistently pervaded Swedish architecture, whether in the transparency of Peter Celsing's 1966 Stockholm Kulturhaus public facade, the refurbishment of Stumholmen Island between 1989-97 from a military harbour to civilian housing and museum development, or in the planned 'Friendly City' on the ex-industrial north bank of Goteborg. Until recently, when the European Union and global economy changed priorities, social democratic policies championed equal opportunity projects to bind the nation. A cohesive population with a historically puritanical and self:examining religion has also influenced the way in which a well educated people have solved their building needs. Significant numbers of religious buildings - Sven Ivar Lind's Nassjo crematorium chapel and a crematorium by the technologist group ELLT from 1957 and 1954 - particularly exemplify this reduced vocabulary of refined details.

In 1880 there were already 100 architects in a population of 4.5 million and since then it has been unquestionably accepted that environmental aesthetics play an important role in a successful culture. It was easy for Sweden, with its harsh but impressive landscape, to identify with the ideas of Ruskin and Morris, in which the relationship between man and materials was emphasized. Swedish National Romantic architecture is not hard to understand when the visitor sees Gerry Johansson's photography (at the beginning of the exhibition) of pine woods, solitary timber huts standing in snow-mantled fields, mountain streams and swathes of countryside almost devoid of human habitation. To realize how attractive this ideal can be, you have only to visit IKEA's pilot off-the-shelf timber housing project. Like their mass furniture at reasonable prices the international Swedish company is planning to offer these adaptable houses to other Europeans as a twenty-first century prefabricated building system solution.