The Architecture of Peter Celsing.

By Wilfried Wang. Stockholm: Arkitektur Forlag. 1996. SEK398

Loos' segregation of Architecture from the business of everyday building posed a provocative dilemma for modern practice. As architects expanded their scope to include almost every constructional activity (housing, entertainment, the workplace), could High and Low Art be reconciled? An architect who profoundly examined this dialectic of the particular and the general was the Swede Peter Celsing (1920-74).

Unusually for an architect in 1960s Sweden, Celsing dealt primarily with the institutions of that corporate society -- its churches, banks, cultural machines. The Institution, the place of communal structural value, was also of course the great theme of Louis Kahn. In time, the city of Stockholm itself became for Celsing an object of investigation and continuous proposal. In this way, Celsing, having a sense of permanence and the urban marker, links Kahn and Aldo Rossi.

Celsing's work was almost always composed of strong isolated forms (the Olaus Petri Church and apartments, the megastructural Film Institute) or a formal grouping of frontally balanced masses (the folkish church compound at Harlanda, Stockholm's controversial Kulturhuset -- horizontally layered similar to Beaubourg -- and the palazzo-like Bank of Sweden). Even Celsing's most post-modern work, his own villa at Drottningholm with oeil-de-boeuf windows and eclectic interiors, is an intensely considered box.

The roles of modesty and rhetoric, the building as thing, Celsing's ability to connect grand themes to a vigorous concern for fabrication -- are the subject of this elegant book, and in particular Wilfried Wang's essay. With many photographs and drawings (including plans and impressive sketches) illustrating the factual information and contextual exegesis, this long-overdue monograph presents Celsing's architecture as having an immediate logic and an engagement of culture at large. He synthesised the Loosian dichotomy. Making and form were contingent.