Case Study / Kulturhuset (The House of Culture)

During the 20th century, the population of Stockholm had exploded and the city center was no longer able to facilitate the rapid growth. With the controversial City Plan of 1946, a radical modernization project was launched to transform the old Norrmalm district of the inner city into the new modern heart of Stockholm - creating new underground metro networks, wider traffic infrastructure and new high-rise developments, at the cost of extensive and unpopular demolitions that had plagued the city through the 1950s. The new district that had emerged consisted largely of modern commercial buildings and business activities, including the Hötorget office and commercial center that had been directly inspired by emerging modernist projects such as the Lever House in New York City. The new commercial district would form around the heart of the reconstruction - a new large square, referred to as Sergels Torg, which addressed the city's continuously increasing traffic loads and the concept of separating pedestrian and car traffic, with a new sunken pedestrian plaza (the Plattan) connecting the city's popular pedestrian shopping street of Drottninggatan with the new infrastructure and commercial developments.

Consequently, to counteract the commercialism of the inner city redevelopment, the Municipality of Stockholm in association with Pontus Hultén, the influential founder of Moderna Museet, launched an architectural competition in 1965 to create a cultural center within Sergels Torg. The competition's brief asked to create a cultural institution with heavy urban and national implications, including such programs as theatres, galleries, cultural activities, and premises for the central bank of Sweden. The winning entry entitled 'Kulturhuset' was proposed by Peter Celsing, the chief architect of the Stockholm Tramways and a leader in the city's modernist movement. At a time when city redevelopment was becoming increasingly unpopular in public opinion, the project sought to rationalize and humanize large-scale construction by creating an 'open shelf', transparent multi-purpose building in which visible interior functions take the place of traditional ornament, allowing the institutional building to have an atmosphere of the street coupled with the possibilities of a cultural workshop.

Sergels Torg's sunken pedestrian plaza articulated with a triangular pattern, referred to as "The Slab"

Pedestrian avenue through the Hötorget Office and Commercial Center toward Sergels torg

SL Tram at Sergels torgIn 1974, the Center would be constructed to the south of Sergels Torg according to the proposed competition scheme, realizing an accessible seven-story shelf unit mounted on a solid concrete wall, deemed as a "cultural living room". The Swedish Parliament (the Riksdag) had decided several years before on changes to the parliament building, as a result of the abolition of the upper house. With the withdrawl of Moderna Museet's future expansion, half of the Kulturhuset would then be intended as a temporary Parliament Building while the original on Helgeandsholmen island was being remodeled into a one-House legislature. What was intended to be the major stage of the City Theatre was rapidly transformed into a main governing chamber and with the state government as a future tenant, the building’s finances were on a safe footing during the development of the project.

Following the completion of the Cultural Center, two additions would soon follow. As the commercial limb of the Bank/City Theater/Cultural Center complex, the Bank of Sweden turns its back on the unifying concrete wall of the Cultural Center and presents an impervious, grid-like granite façade towards Brunkeberg Square and the city's old town. Directly west to the bank, the city theatre is assimilated into the existing urban fabric, while the other two elements stand out as objectified, representative buildings. The complex closes the main north-south axis of the city, and is sited on the historical boundary between the old town and the nineteenth-century commercial district. Celsing preserved this distinction by attaching the bank and the cultural centre to opposite sides of a thick ‘service’ wall, which symbolically represents the ancient city wall.

Underground commercial mall east of the pedestrian plaza underneath a fountain roundabout

Pedestrian passage through the Kulturhuset toward Brunkeberg Square

The concept of Kulturhuset represented a new architectural ideology rising in Sweden, closely identified with the social reform movement of the early twentieth-century. However, by the date of completion, the period large housing projects in Stockholm and Sweden, including the large-scale brutal redevelopment of the civic center, were brought to an end. Protests against slum-clearance policies implemented without the consent of the public reached a culmination with the so-called "Battle of the Elms" in 1971. Kulturhuset would become the controversial figurehead to the public unrest, but the architectural composition would be sufficiently robust to survive both a tough childhood and confused adolescence by strength in functional performance. And now after thirty-eight years, the building has been taken back by the public - a department store for culture - with the openness and generosity of Sergels Torg, exposure of cultural activities outward to the square, and connective tissue to a layered shopping mecca, making its presence significantly felt in the modern center of the city.

“I am building for a new human being who has to come”

— Peter Celsing, architect

Diagram: Analysis of site access and movement, new development, and points of social engagement

The Royal Dramatic Theatre (Dramaten)

Since 1909, The Royal Dramatic Theatre has been the national home for the dramatic arts - sited in a popular public space in central Stockholm called Nybroplan ('New Bridge Square'), which faces the Nybroviken waterfront and connects a number of major urban throughfares in the city. The Art Nouveau / Neo-Baroque building was designed by Swedish architect Fredrik Lilljekvist that, at the time of construction, was criticized for being too ornate for the Scandinavian city and excessively over budget.

View of the Dramaten from the busy Lebanon Meza (Street)

On the Stairs of the Royal Dramatic Theatre

Down the pedestrian-friendly Nybrogatan (Along the Dramaten)

Berzelii Park (Across from the Dramaten)

The Royal Swedish Opera (KUNGLIGA OPERAN)

The Royal Opera House from the Norrstrom river

The first opera house in Stockholm would open in 1782, located in the center of Sweden's capital city in the Norrmalm district of the city between Gustav Adolfs torg (city square) and the Kungsan (King's Garden) - adjacent to the Royal Palace and along the Norrstrom river. The original opera house, now known as the Gustavian Opera, was the work of architect Carl Fredrik Adelcrantz and commissioned by King Gustav III (who would later be assassinated in the same building ten years later). The opera house would serve the city for a little more than a century before being demolished and replaced at the end of the 19th century (1899) by the present Royal Opera House (Kungliga Operan), also known as the Oscarian Opera. The Operan would be Swedish architect Axel Johan Anderberg's first big commission (1889-1898) that utilized parts of the old opera foundations and left the main entrance on the square. The fairly traditional, quasi-neo-baroque architecture would utilize Swedish granite and Limestone at the exterior of the street level with rose-tinted stucco above - keeping a strong axial relationship in line with the main entrance.

Royal Opera House from Kungsan (King's Garden)

Context / Stockholm, Sweden

As a metropolitan area that stands on 14 interlocking islands; a mosaic-like topography of land, lake and waterway stitched together by 50 uniquely-designed bridges, it's hard to imagine any other city that makes better use of its natural assets than Stockholm. The vibrant urban environment has long been the capital and most populous city of Sweden, the largest of the Scandinavian nations. Lying on the country's east coast, the capital city is home to almost a quarter of the nation's population, constituting it as the most populated urban area in Scandinavia. However, for all its size, Stockholm seems to merge urban construction and wide-open rural elements in a way that benefits the people at a human scale. In the entire metropolitan area, over 30% of the city is made up of waterways and another 30% is made up of park spaces, leaving a small area for growth, developing a dense and efficient infrastructural system for urban construction. More importantly, history plays an important role in the civic expression - grand pedestrian boulevards, immense civic structures, extensive park spaces and continuously treaded waterfronts - all enforce the sense of romantic expressionism to Sweden's rise as a major European power in the 17th century, both culturally and politically.

Gamla Stan's waterfront

The Royal Palace (right) and Cathedral of Stockholm (left)

Gamla Stan (referred to as the 'Old Town') is Stockholm's oldest district, site of the Royal Palace and Parliament House, and origin to the city's urban growth. It lies at the heart of the historic city, standing on a strategically situated island in the middle of the narrow bottleneck channel between the salty Baltic Sea and the inland freshwater lake of Malaren, the third largest lake in Sweden. As a fortified merchant town during the thirteenth century, both north-south trade routes by land and the east-west routes by sea could be controlled, developing strong economic and cultural linkages with other cities. Today, Gamla Stan is not regarded as a perfectly preserved medieval townscape, but the island nature of the settlement, its small area and its crowded layout have spared Gamla Stan from too much modernization. What remains today is an enclave of colorful old stone buildings dating from the 15th to the 18th centuries. You can wander at will through the Old Town without getting lost, as you are never far from the waterside or a bridge to re-orient yourself.

Erik Gunnar Asplund's Stockholm Library

Ragnar Östberg's Stockholm City Hall

Stockholm Waterfront Congress Centre by White Arkitekter

In the early 20th century, a nationalistic push spurred new architectural expressions in the city inspired by medieval and renaissance ancestry that would lead to an emphasis in modernist construction, characterizing the new language and development of the city until today. An example, north of Gamla Stan is Norrmalm, the business and commercial district. This is the heart of the modern city – glass, steel, and concrete, along with a clear Swedish design ideology - all present throughout the area with a cityscape of towering glass buildings, emphatic shopping malls, busy streets and traffic-free concourses that satisfy the demands of both vehicles and pedestrians. Simultaneously, the city's industrial and economic aspirations had grown at the beginning of the century, drastically transforming the city into an important service center and increasing the urban population through immense immigration, making less than 40% of the city residents Stockholm-born. The population boom led city officials' attention toward a growing housing shortage, with new aesthetic ideals developing in architecture that promoted a new modern functionalist form adopted from mass-production construction. With the introduction of the Stockholm metro in 1950, new state-subsidized suburban housing developments would continue to sprout up around the city like a string of pearls along the transit lines. Many of these areas would later be criticized for functionalist planning ideals - dull, unattractive, unsafe - built mainly out of concrete construction. At the same time, the city's inner city was undergoing radical urban renewal plans that sought to adapt increasing vehicular traffic and demands of the modern age, while controversially demolishing large areas of existing properties to make room for new development projects, leading to a segregated population and urban gentrification.

City infrastructure

Looking down Stockholm's Hamngatan street toward Royal Dramatic Theater

The major pedestrian street of Drottninggatan

The planning schemes of modernism were starting to be questioned by public officials by the end of the 20th century. With Danish and other examples as models, a reorientation towards small-scale housing took place, where 'dense and low' became the dominating principle in city planning. In a new plan for Stockholm, the idea of density in urban planning was emphasized with the future expansion of the city, with focus on developing on previously established land, preserving valuable green areas, developing around the edges of the city, and redeveloping older industrial areas into denser urban districts. The development inwards has led many politicians to generally abandon their former difference with regard to high-rise development in the inner city of Stockholm, threatening the city's public perception of well-established architectural unity and low profile nature.