Ian Volner revisits Gunnar Asplund’s eccentric Stockholm library, which showcases the competing impulses of an architect who embraced Premodernism, Modernism and even Postmodernism – decades before the term came into popular use.
The exterior reads as a homage to the fantastical monuments of 18th-century hyper-rationalists Louis Boullée and Claude Nicolas Ledoux: a four-square palazzo clad in umber plaster and stone and topped by a truncated rotunda
In ‘Other Traditions’, his collection of Havard Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, the American poet John Ashbery asks (in that quiet, teasing voice so familiar from his work) whether the ‘minor’ writers, the under-recognised geniuses who are the subjects of the book, appeal to him simply by virtue of their being under-recognised. “Is there something inherently stimulating,” he writes, “in the poetry called ‘minor,’ something it can do for us when major poetry can merely wring its hands?” It’s the outsiders, whose work cuts like a riptide through the major currents of culture, that often carry us the furthest, depositing us on the strangest shores.
Gunnar Asplund had, in this regard, both the very bad and the very good fortune to be born in Stockholm, Sweden in 1885. Generationally, this put him in optimal position for the coming Modernist wave (Le Corbusier was born only three years later) while leaving him geographically at the periphery of Europe, just close enough to know what was happening but never at the centre of the action. And while other, progressive-minded compatriots like Sven Markelius and Uno Åhrén would keep close tabs on developments abroad (joining up with Corb’s CIAM group, for starters) Asplund didn’t really have to. In 1914, just four years after dropping out of the Swedish Royal College, the budding architect received the commission for the Skogskyrkogården cemetery, a multi-phase project that would keep him busy and well-fed for nearly the rest of his career.
That career would produce some of the most extraordinary and most eccentric buildings of the 20th century—few more eccentric or more extraordinary than the Stockholm Public Library, located just a few miles away from Asplund’s famous necropolis and designed just eight years after the original master plan. One would say that the 1920s was an essential period in the architect’s growth, except that Asplund would go on to exhibit a peculiar refusal to grow in any particular direction: the idiosyncratic classicism that marks his earliest projects, the library among them, would be supplanted by a more stringent (and at least partially Modernist-inspired) functionalism, only for that too to give way, by the end of Aplund’s life, in favor of a return to historicism. The Stockholm Library represents not only where Asplund started out, but where he would end up.
It’s an astounding place. In its basic outline, the design appears to be a learned homage to the fantastical monuments of 18th century hyper-rationalists Louis Boullée and Claude Nicolas Ledoux: a four-square palazzo clad in umber plaster and stone and topped by a truncated rotunda, with little or no exterior ornament save the barest hint of a Grecian frieze around the lower register of the barrel and another near the blocky base.
Backing up against a steep hillside park, the library is sited on a busy public street, its primary façade shielded behind a planted margin with a broad staircase rising to a double-height entryway. So far, so Scandy—the formality, the curious mix of grace and rigor, all seem in key with Asplund’s slightly older Nordic contemporaries, Hack Klappman and Ragnar Östberg in particular.
The giddy sublimity of the main reading room contrasts with the icy austerity of the exterior. Later generations – particularly the PoMo crowd – have never managed to produce a building that induces the same sense of discovery and excitement.
The curveball arrives right on the far side of the threshold, where Asplund holds the visitor inside a rather cramped vestibule in front of another double-height door with more stairs beyond. This final passage leads up to the main reading room—and the sensation on ascending is like seeing the roof ripped off the world: 80 feet up, not a pitched dome, but a cylinder ringed round in tall windows. Below that, a banked ceiling of stucco, mottled to pick up the concealed lighting; and all around, a full panorama of books, three levels of them, with the upper two fronted by narrow galleries. Natural light seeps in from the entry, spilling across the marble floors, while more light peeks out of the openings that lead to the circulation and reading rooms arrayed around the central volume.
Plenty more surprises await in the auxiliary spaces: remarkable paintings (Nils Dardel’s frescos are a highlight), sculpture, and delicate details of Asplund’s own creation, like the two-tone cement staircases with dotted patterns at the first and last step. But the real quality of the building doesn’t reside in any one of its remarkable features, nor yet in the way they fit together—rather, it’s in the way they don’t. The icy austerity of the exterior; the giddy sublimity of the rotunda; the warmth and refinement of the fixtures and finishes: the building is definitely, ineluctably ‘off’, vying with itself in a way that never gets in the way of its program, but that seems, once noticed, just a bit unsettling.
‘Outsider’ architecture does not usually come in the form of a major civic building in a national capital, and Asplund himself was perhaps a bit too worldly and self-aware to classify as a fringe figure. Then again, how else to describe an architect so against the grain that, in the space of one lifetime (not even a long one: the architect died shortly after his 55th birthday) he was able to make the complete journey from Premodernist, through Modernism, and onto something like Postmodernism some four decades before the latter term even came into popular use?
If Skogskyrkogården is the rambling diary of that zig-zag trajectory, the library compresses Asplund’s architectural itinerary into a single stop, showcasing the competing impulses—for the new and the old; for simplicity and for dynamism; for the monumental and the everyday—that drove him.
Later generations, the PoMo crowd in particular, would come to recognise Asplund’s peculiar genius, yet they could never quite reconstitute his alternative vision for modern architecture, nor yet produce a building that induces the same buzzy feeling of discovery and excitement as his masterwork in Stockholm. Asplund is a tradition of one.
