When Gothenburg was founded, experts were brought in from abroad. The original layout was designed by Dutchmen, and Englishmen and Germans helped to run it. When the city grew in the mid-1800s, wide French-style avenues were built, and in the early 20th century, a new city plan was drawn up, based on German ideas. Nowadays, planners and architects from around the world are always invited when plans for expanding the city are being made.
However, these influences have always been evaluated against the background of our own long-established building traditions. As a poor country on the outskirts of Europe, our building traditions have always been based on functionality. Pompous showcases are rare, more common is a simple framework built to provide a background to human activities. Grand designs have never taken hold; instead the focus has been on simple, relaxed solutions to everyday problems. In Gothenburg, this can be observed both in the typical blocks of flats known as 'landshövdingehus', and in the housing experiments carried out in the mid-1900s.
Urbanisation arrived late in Sweden, and our long farming traditions mean that we have strong ties to the natural landscape. In Gothenburg, this is evident in the way the buildings have been designed to fit in with the natural variations of the landscape, and everywhere you look there are green hills and open parkland. Natural materials, like wood, stone and bricks, are commonly used in buildings, but also for interior design and furniture. Naturally, this partly due to the fact that Sweden is a country rich in raw materials from both forest and land, but there has also been a wish among architects and designers to use tactile building materials. Examples of this can be viewed inside a number of Gothenburg’s public buildings from the 1930s. Here, the architects were influenced by the strict modernism emerging in Central Europe, but instead of using raw steel and concrete, they designed peaceful interiors with furniture made of light wood. This version of modernistic design has since become an inspiration to designers from all corners of the world.
Text: Per Nadén