THE STOCKHOLM EXHIBITION 1930: Modernism's Breakthrough in Swedish Architecture.

By Eva Rudberg. Stockholm: Stockholmia Forlag 1998. SEK352

Sigfried Giedion, Secretary and grand spokesman for the International Congress of Modern Architects, is quoted here as having said of the 1930 Stockholm Exhibition: 'There's been no exhibition to rival this one for overall effect' and this book is a most welcome reminder of why he said it.

The impact of the Exhibition was very great. The 1925 Paris Exposition with its unique contributions of Le Corbusier's Pavilion de L'Esprit Nouveau and Melnikov's Russian Pavilion followed in 1927 by the much wider demonstration of residential buildings in Stuttgart certainly broke the ground earlier but the Stockholm Exhibition had the unique significance of being a huge popular success by demonstrating not only a wider range of public building types but a broad image of urban totality and 'townscape' of seductive attraction: the waterside Corso with cafes, restaurants, exhibition galleries, houses and recreational episodes had all the virtues of the urban street or esplanade without traffic but with the stimulant of what Auden contemporaneously called a 'new style of architecture, a change of heart'.

To us now there is no little irony in reading of Giedion's accolade since this very kind of street architecture was the exact opposite of the new order of dispersed structures poised on pilotis in open parkland as promulgated by CIAM.

Stockholm's withdrawn self-containment has elicited a polite dismissal to the margins of the post-war debate. After the 1925 Paris Exposition the Architectural Review promoted the concept of 'Swedish Grace' to typify a mode best exemplified in the detailing of Stockholm Town Hall: after World War II it promoted the concept of 'The New Empiricism' which embodied a bloodless but pretty pragmatism that was one of the main provocations of 'The New Brutalism' -- a half-truth that in the absence of any exchange in debate slumbered there. It is therefore all the more refreshing to be reminded of the lyrical enthusiasm of Morton Shand writing in the August 1930 special number of the Architectural Review devoted to the Stockholm Exhibition. Alongside the magnificent photographs of Frank Yerbury, Shand (who had coined the phrase 'Swedish Grace') commended the fact that 'Sweden has deliberately elected to turn her back on the fields of her former triumph' to explore 'the uncharted currents of the Modernist Maelstrom'; and he went on to say 'the acceptance of the machine aesthetic is the true inward significance of this summer's Exhibition'.

This book is richly documented in its coverage of all aspects of the Exhibition--its promotion and politics; a guided tour of its many structures and its landscaping; its craft and manufactured exhibits; participating architects, designers and photographers and its press reception nationally and internationally. There is a very generous range of illustrations of design studies, presentation perspectives and photographs, many of which have not been published before. All in all it is a very thorough and handsomely produced documentation of an exhibition that is equalled in quality and importance during this century only by the Stuttgart Weissenhofseidlung of 1927.