Review: Södra Ängby: Modernism, Architecture, Landscape, by Thorbjörn Andersson, Sören Johansson, Paul Källenius, and Anders Lindunger

Abstract

Thorbjorn Andersson, Soren Johansson, Paul Kallenius, and Anders Lindunger, eds. Sodra Angby: Modernism, Architecture, Landscape Stockholm: Carlsson Bokforlag, 2015, 184 pp., 141 color and 74 b/w illus. €45 (cloth), ISBN 9789173317375 During the opening decades of the twentieth century, the movement to improve urban conditions and institute housing reform in Sweden gained increased attention and support prompted by a sense of growing urgency. With the country's health statistics among the worst in Europe—statistics fed by the pressures of continuing urbanization—living conditions in cities like Stockholm had become dire. In response, polemics by social reformer Ellen Key and art historian and design proselytizer Gregor Paulsson laid the foundations for an embrace of modernization and the adoption of a version of modern architecture known as functionalism, or, more colloquially in Sweden, funkis .1 The Stockholm Exhibition of 1930, for which Paulsson was commissioner-general and Gunnar Asplund served as coordinating architect, assembled the largest display of modernist buildings until that time, presenting modern design through actual construction and industrial products rather than through polemics alone. The buildings and displays of the exhibition introduced Sweden not only to a new architecture but also to a new way of living that departed dramatically from past modes of dwelling and furnishing. The life span of the exhibition was short, barely six months, but long-lasting effects followed in its wake. Among the exhibition's many legacies were the planning and architecture of a garden suburb beyond central Stockholm called Sodra Angby. As explained in Sodra Angby: Modernism, Architecture, Landscape , the making of the suburb was tied closely to the 1932 ascendancy of the Swedish Social Democratic Party. At that …