Swedish modernism : architecture, consumption and the welfare state

Swedish Modernism provides an in-depth, multilayered account of the process of modernization; whilst also highlighting the difficulties found.

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 'modernization' that shows to what extent it must always be understood on the basis of local context.

The second section delves into the importance of consumers and spectacles analyzed in relation to the wide range of 'state programmes' from housing to national marketing programmes.

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 analyzes of exhibition architectures and debated 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.

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 also 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. AUTHORS Reinhold Martin is an Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, Columbia University, and Director of the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for Study of American Architecture, Columbia University.

He is also partner in the firm Martin/Baxi Architects, New York. Penny Sparke is a Pro Vice-Chancellor and Professor of Design History at Kingston University, London.

UK Joan Ockman is Director of the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture at Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation.

She lives in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania. Helena Mattsson is an architect and researcher. She is teaching at the School of Architecture/Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm.

She is a member of the architectural collaboration Testbedstudio Stockholm, as well as of the editorial board of Site magazine. Sven-Olov Wallenstein teaches philosophy at the University College of Soedertoern, and architectural theory at the Royal Institute of Technology, both in Stockholm, and is the editor-in-chief of Site. ILLUSTRATIONS 173 colour & b/w illustrations