Swedish Modernism: Architecture, Consumption and the Welfare State

4/5 ( ratings)

Swedish Modernism provides an in-depth, multilayered account of the process, and difficulties found, in the process of modernization. The debate is enriched from a diverse range of contributors including architects, researchers and leading academics from across the globe.

Following an introduction from Helena Mattsson and Sven-Olov Wallenstein, the book is divided thematically into three sections. The first section of the book explores the construction of the welfare state. The contributions in this section analyze the peculiar modalities of this development from the point of view of sociology and political science, providing a more nuanced view of ‘Modernism’ that shows to what extent it must always be understood on the basis of local context.

The second section of Swedish Modernism delves into the importance of consumers and spectacles analyzed in relation to the wide range of ‘state programs’ from housing to national marketing programs. This section includes case studies highlighting the importance of consumption for the formation of subjectivity, both in the pre- and post-war period, and range from analyses of exhibition architectures and debates on standardization to the Co-Op movement and the gendering of taste. One of the contributors looks, for example, at the exhibition Modern Leisure, 1936, and explores how exhibitions were highly
instrumental in the formation of the Swedish welfare state. And another contributor looks at how strategies of consumption are formulated in the political and architectural debates of the 1930s.

The third and final section of the book deals with the problem of historiography on a broad level. The section includes contributions from Roger Jonsson and Sven-Olov Wallenstein, who draw on the work of Michel Foucault and delineate a genealogical model of analysis that focuses on how architecture can take part in the production of subjectivity.

Contributors include: Hendrik Berggren, Yvonne Hirman, Ylva Habel, LIsa Brunnstrom, Thordis Arrhenus, Penny Sparke, Reinhold Martin, Eva Rudberg, Joan Ockman.