During the 20th century, the population of Stockholm had exploded and the city center was no longer able to facilitate the rapid growth. With the controversial City Plan of 1946, a radical modernization project was launched to transform the old Norrmalm district of the inner city into the new modern heart of Stockholm - creating new underground metro networks, wider traffic infrastructure and new high-rise developments, at the cost of extensive and unpopular demolitions that had plagued the city through the 1950s. The new district that had emerged consisted largely of modern commercial buildings and business activities, including the Hötorget office and commercial center that had been directly inspired by emerging modernist projects such as the Lever House in New York City. The new commercial district would form around the heart of the reconstruction - a new large square, referred to as Sergels Torg, which addressed the city's continuously increasing traffic loads and the concept of separating pedestrian and car traffic, with a new sunken pedestrian plaza (the Plattan) connecting the city's popular pedestrian shopping street of Drottninggatan with the new infrastructure and commercial developments.
Sergels torg under construction, 1966
Peter Celsing's project proposal, 1965
Aerial of Site (Current)
Consequently, to counteract the commercialism of the inner city redevelopment, the Municipality of Stockholm in association with Pontus Hultén, the influential founder of Moderna Museet, launched an architectural competition in 1965 to create a cultural center within Sergels Torg. The competition's brief asked to create a cultural institution with heavy urban and national implications, including such programs as theatres, galleries, cultural activities, and premises for the central bank of Sweden. The winning entry entitled 'Kulturhuset' was proposed by Peter Celsing, the chief architect of the Stockholm Tramways and a leader in the city's modernist movement. At a time when city redevelopment was becoming increasingly unpopular in public opinion, the project sought to rationalize and humanize large-scale construction by creating an 'open shelf', transparent multi-purpose building in which visible interior functions take the place of traditional ornament, allowing the institutional building to have an atmosphere of the street coupled with the possibilities of a cultural workshop.
Sergels Torg's sunken pedestrian plaza articulated with a triangular pattern, referred to as "The Slab"
Pedestrian avenue through the Hötorget Office and Commercial Center toward Sergels torg
SL Tram at Sergels torgIn 1974, the Center would be constructed to the south of Sergels Torg according to the proposed competition scheme, realizing an accessible seven-story shelf unit mounted on a solid concrete wall, deemed as a "cultural living room". The Swedish Parliament (the Riksdag) had decided several years before on changes to the parliament building, as a result of the abolition of the upper house. With the withdrawl of Moderna Museet's future expansion, half of the Kulturhuset would then be intended as a temporary Parliament Building while the original on Helgeandsholmen island was being remodeled into a one-House legislature. What was intended to be the major stage of the City Theatre was rapidly transformed into a main governing chamber and with the state government as a future tenant, the building’s finances were on a safe footing during the development of the project.
Following the completion of the Cultural Center, two additions would soon follow. As the commercial limb of the Bank/City Theater/Cultural Center complex, the Bank of Sweden turns its back on the unifying concrete wall of the Cultural Center and presents an impervious, grid-like granite façade towards Brunkeberg Square and the city's old town. Directly west to the bank, the city theatre is assimilated into the existing urban fabric, while the other two elements stand out as objectified, representative buildings. The complex closes the main north-south axis of the city, and is sited on the historical boundary between the old town and the nineteenth-century commercial district. Celsing preserved this distinction by attaching the bank and the cultural centre to opposite sides of a thick ‘service’ wall, which symbolically represents the ancient city wall.
Underground commercial mall east of the pedestrian plaza underneath a fountain roundabout
Pedestrian passage through the Kulturhuset toward Brunkeberg Square
Aerial View of Sergels torg
The concept of Kulturhuset represented a new architectural ideology rising in Sweden, closely identified with the social reform movement of the early twentieth-century. However, by the date of completion, the period large housing projects in Stockholm and Sweden, including the large-scale brutal redevelopment of the civic center, were brought to an end. Protests against slum-clearance policies implemented without the consent of the public reached a culmination with the so-called "Battle of the Elms" in 1971. Kulturhuset would become the controversial figurehead to the public unrest, but the architectural composition would be sufficiently robust to survive both a tough childhood and confused adolescence by strength in functional performance. And now after thirty-eight years, the building has been taken back by the public - a department store for culture - with the openness and generosity of Sergels Torg, exposure of cultural activities outward to the square, and connective tissue to a layered shopping mecca, making its presence significantly felt in the modern center of the city.
“I am building for a new human being who has to come”
Diagram: Analysis of site access and movement, new development, and points of social engagement