Review: Modern Swedish Design: Three Founding Texts, by Uno Åhrén, Gunnar Asplund, Wolter Gahn, Ellen Key, Sven Markelius, Gregor Paulsson, Eskil Sundahl, Lucy Creagh, Helena Kåberg, Barbara Miller Lane, and Kenneth Frampton

Abstract

The three texts that comprise Modern Swedish Design make the case for modernism in the home, for domestic products, and for architecture. While Gregor Paulsson's Better Things for Everyday Life and the jointly authored acceptera (always written with lower-case letters) have been available in facsimile reprints (1995, 1980 respectively), they have never before been translated into English. From time to time passages from acceptera have been cited by Anglophone scholars or filtered through Swedish authors—usually in reference to the work of the best known of the book's architect-writers, Gunnar Asplund. Modern Swedish Design helps fill that gap by presenting these three important writings, originally published in the first three decades of the twentieth century.The short introductory essays by Barbara Miller Lane (on Ellen Key), Helena Kåberg (on Gregor Paulsson) and Lucy Creagh (on the acceptera team) adequately sketch out the context in which the publications first appeared and the audiences to which they were addressed. The translations by Anne-Charlotte Harvey (Key) and David Jones (Paulsson and acceptera) read well, and only in a few places have words or terms been translated too directly from the Swedish. While the broad theme of emerging modernity and its consequences couples the three texts, there is a certain apples-and-oranges aspect to the book, given that Ellen Key addresses the home, room, and décor more broadly, Paulsson centers on objects and industrial production, and acceptera discusses the social linkage between architecture and contemporary life. On the other hand, as a group the three texts sketch out a vision for a modern Swedish design environment that extends from the small object to the city.Ellen Key (1849–1926) was a highly influential social reformer and widely read author whose interests spanned suffrage and the recasting of government (she actively argued for what became Sweden's social democratic welfare state), as well as design. It is a surprise, although no wonder, that one of her principal translators (into German) was Mamah Bouton Borthwick, and that Key was greatly appreciated by Borthwick's paramour, Frank Lloyd Wright. Key's railing against clutter and accumulation finds an echo in Wright's own lectures and essays and more distantly in Le Corbusier's Vers une architecture. Her appreciation for the simplicity and