TRADITION, COLOR, AND SURFACE

Francis E. Lyn

9Michelle Facos, p. 3.

10Claes Caldenby, “Beginnings,”

Lectures and Briefings from the Inter­

national Symposium on the Architecture of Erik Gunnar Asplund, Christina Engfors (ed.), Stockholm, The Swedish Museum of Architecture and the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, 1986, p. 9.

11Christina Engfors and E. G.

Asplund, Architect, Friend and Col­

league, Stockholm, Arkitektur Forlag, 1990, p. 68.

12Erik Gunnar Asplund as quoted in Gunnar Asplund Architect 1885–1940, Gustav Holmdahl, Sven Ivar Lind, and Kjell Odeen (eds.), Stockholm, Ab Tidskriften Byggmastaren, 1950, p. 16.

214 FRANCIS E. LYN

Rather he used these notions as a way to explore a new reading of space and place relative to the new requirements of a rapidly changing and developing society. This attitude seems to have developed out of a consciousness that was in fact pervasive in Swedish National Romantic theory. According to Michelle Facos, “National Romanticism in Sweden distinguished itself from the same movement elsewhere and from mere nationalism by promulgating a modernist worldview embracing change, not a static pastoral/agrarian vision, which characterized culturally conservative movements elsewhere.”9So, in Asplund’s work, the reading of modernity that developed was not dogmatic, but rather a pragmatic one which was entirely place­derived.

In the summer of 1910, before beginning his studies at the Klara Skola, Asplund went on a three­month long study trip to Germany, which resulted later in an article on the use of concrete as a faỗade material. According to Claes Caldenby, this seems to be “a first step in the gradual turning away from the orthodoxy of natural materials.”10Although he disparaged the artificial use of this new material (i.e., imitating granite or limestone) he did accept in the end the notion of cladding as legitimate. Another important point that this trip suggests is that Asplund must have been at least conversant in German, and would probably have been aware of the recent theories and methods concerning cladding that were being considered in Germany, Austria, and France. Asplund’s student Goran Sidenbladh remarks that Asplund expected that his students be well versed in current literature, both German and French. So relative to these new theories as well as Asplund’s requirement for a literate body of students, it seems reasonable to postulate that he should have been familiar with the writings of Gottfried Semper.11Clearly, around that time, the very theories that Semper had proposed were being questioned, and Asplund himself called for

“truth” in architecture. In his article about concrete, he stated, “Advocates of the sound modern principle of truth in architecture are inclined to reject the whole of this new form of material, because it can only be an imitation of natural stone.”12So here, and later in his career, he questioned the notion of surface as a legitimate rationale for the making of architecture. Yet, as in the Skandia Cinema (and to a lesser degree, several of his other projects), he would at times rationalize the use of the articulation of surface as architecture, and eventually accept it as an appropriate point of departure for the manifestation of a work of architecture.

At the turn of the century, the notions of surface articulation as a means of expression of architectural truth were becoming codified. Numerous architects had begun to investigate the separation of the skin of the building from its structure and Asplund’s interests concerning these matters seemed clearly aligned with his continental contemporaries. So by the time he made his trip to the South, many of the fundamental components of his development as an architect were probably already in place. His interest in cladding and surface articulation, and his understanding of the importance of place were already clearly defined. This trip did not make him the architect that he was to become, but seemed rather to affirm certain beliefs that he already had, and to inspire new ways of interpreting the world in which he would build.

In 1913–1914, Asplund traveled to France, Italy, and the Mediterranean. The importance of his trip to the South, and its relevance to the architecture that he produced over the next several decades, have been discussed in numerous articles by various scholars (Ortelli, Caldenby, and Wrede, to name just a few).

It was a trip in the tradition of the grand tour, but also one that was self­

initiated and self­financed. So it was more in the spirit of the trips that students

10.2 Gunnar Asplund.

Girgenti (now Agrigento) panoramic travel sketch, perspective view from northwest, 1914.

Source: © Arkitekturmuseet Stockholm, photo Nikolaj Alsterdal.

of the École des Beaux Arts had made to Greece in the early part of the nineteenth century, before academic acceptance of the islands was achieved.

As a result, his Italian journey can be better understood as “experiential” rather than as “academic.” Unlike the official trips of the academies, it had more to do with his personal interests. He had no reports to make, no envois, so to speak. Instead, his records consisted of volumes of journals filled with notes and sketches made as he traveled throughout Italy and the Mediterranean.

These journals offer a glimpse of various concerns and issues that were to develop in his work.13

Asplund traveled first to Paris, where he felt completely out of place, and quickly moved on to Italy and Tunisia (plate 38). There he visited Rome, Palermo, Girgenti, Syracuse, Taormina, Tunis, Naples, Pompeii, Paestum, then north back to Rome, through the regions of Perugia, Umbria, Tuscany, and finally to Venice. On this trip he was sure to have seen many of the same things that students of the École des Beaux Arts such as Abel Blouet and Henri Labrouste had recorded a century earlier. In Pompeii he is moved by the street of tombs at the foot of Vesuvius and enchanted by its decorations; at Syracuse, the theatres and their relationship to the landscape; and in Tunis and Taormina, the festive atmosphere and the people. In his journals, continual references to color and the festive way of life are made:

Palermo: “strong in colors and great in indolence. . . . Boys are splashing.

. . . in the blue waters, the harbor is filled with masts and gaily­colored boats.”

Girgenti: “Greek temples and the deep blue sea . . . the roads and rocks a burning yellow.”

13There is no English translation of his travel notes. See the illustrated Spanish version: Erick Gunnar Asplund, Escritos 1906–1940 – Cuaderno de viaje a Italia en 1913, El Escorial, El Croquis Editorial, 2002.

GUNNAR ASPLUND’S MEDITERRANEAN RESONANCES 215

14Erik Gunnar Asplund as quoted in Gunnar Asplund Architect 1885–1940, pp. 20–27.

15Le Corbusier as quoted in William J. R. Curtis, Modern Architecture Since 1900, London, Phaidon Press, 1982, p. 166.

16Benedetto Gravagnuolo, Adolf Loos, New York, Rizzoli, 1988, p. 148;

also see Benedetto Gravagnuolo’s essay in this book.

17Bjorn Linn, Introduction to Dan Cruikshank (ed.), Erik Gunnar Asplund, London, The Architects’ Journal, 1988, p. 13.

216 FRANCIS E. LYN

Pompeii: “Large surfaces of color are often to be seen, but always picked out with thin lines and ornamentation in other colors, taking nothing away from the main coloring, but rather playing into it. The large pale walls sparsely divided by thin lines, garlands, small graceful columns, and the like are a delight to me. Deep yellow skirting, especially if one imagines it against a dark floor and light panels, is good (plate 39).”14

Asplund’s insistence on color is one of the aspects that made his journals from the South different and unique. Most of his contemporaries chose, instead, to focus on the “whiteness” and abstract quality of the Mediterranean. In 1911 Le Corbusier wrote of the Italian portion of his travels:

Italy is a graveyard where the dogma of my religion now lies rotting. All the bric­a­brac that was my delight now fills me with horror. I gabble elementary geometry; I am possessed by the colour white, the cube, the sphere, the cylinder, and the pyramid.15

Likewise, commenting on Adolf Loos’s Scheu House of 1912, Benedetto Gravagnuolo wrote of the “pure, radical and extremely modern shape of this stepped white shell . . . [that] gives rise to the invention of a new typological model for extensive residential building outside . . . the Mediterranean.”16 Asplund’s interest in the Northern vernacular had certainly made him well aware of the importance of color in the national context. His delight in the surfaces and colors observed during his trip to the South would soon betray the strategies that he would later employ in a number of his projects. Bjorn Linn states that by “the second half of the 1910’s, Asplund’s architectural style was becoming clear. He had assimilated his Italian studies and combined them with his deep empathy for the Swedish countryside and tradition of small town building in wood.”17Yet, the possibility exists that the importance of surface and color in his work might also have been derived from a reading of Semperian theory and from the debates on the discovery of color in ancient temples that began about a century before his trip. It also seems reasonable to suggest that circumstances relative to social and cultural changes, as well as technological advances in construction (some of which developed out of Semperian theory) played a significant role in Asplund’s development.

By revisiting the issues of color and surface explored by nineteenth­century French scholars, and conflating them with Asplund’s own architectural discoveries both in Sweden and during his trip to the South, this essay seeks to establish one of the significant paradigms within which he would work for much of his career. By investigating a number of his most important projects (Villa Snellman, the Royal Chancellery Project, the Woodland Cemetery and Chapel, the Stockholm Public Library, the Gothenberg Law Courts Annex, his summer house at Stennọs, and the Skandia Cinema), I hope that his strategies of layered imagery, coupled with surface manipulation to render both cultural and architectural meaning, will be revealed.

The Debate about Polychromy

The first appearance of polychromy in the study of architecture came in the first decades of the nineteenth century at the peak of the Romantic Movement, and revolved around the fact that ancient Greek temples had been externally painted. Stuart and Revett, in their first volume of their Antiquities of Athens, published in 1762, had noted painted decorations on the frieze of the Temple

18See Antoine­Chrysostome Qua­

tremère de Quincy, Jupiter Olympien, ou l’art de la sculpture antique con­

sidérée sous un nouveau point de vue;

ouvrage qui comprend un essai sur le gỏt de la sculpture polychrome,Paris, 1815.

19Harry Francis Mallgrave, Intro­

duction to Gottfried Semper, The Four Elements of Architecture and Other Writings, New York, Cambridge University Press, 1989, pp. 4–5.

On the debate on polychromy, see in particular David Van Zanten, “Architectural Polychromy:

Life in Architecture,” in Robin Middleton (ed.), The Beaux Arts and Nineteenth Century French Architec­

ture, Cambridge, The MIT Press, 1982, pp. 197–215; Neil Levine, “The Romantic Idea of Architectural Legibility: Henri Labrouste and the neo­Greek,” in Arthur Drexler (ed.), The Architecture of the Ecole des Beaux­Arts, Cambridge, The MIT Press, 1977, pp. 325ff.

20Gottfried Semper, Vorlọufige Bemerkungen über bemalte Architek­

tur und Plastik bei den Alten (Hamburg­Altona, 1834). Later, he published his most important work, Der Stil in den technischen und tek­

tonischen Künsten oder Praktische Ästhetik, 1861–63, in English: Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts, or Practical Aesthetics, Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute, 2004.

21His theory was first published in his Mémoire sur l’architecture poly­

chrome chez les Grecs(1830). In 1831, he published his renderings of the Temple of Empedocles in Selinunte (Selinus), which became the center of his polychrome theory. Hittorff’s friend Franz Christian Gau had pre­

sented ancient Egyptian architecture as colored in his plates of Antiquités de la Nubie(1821–27).

22See Neil Levine, “The competition for the Grand Prix in 1824,” in Robin Middleton (ed.),The Beaux Arts and Nineteenth Century French Architec­

ture, Cambridge, The MIT Press, 1982, pp. 139–173.

23Ibid., p. 199.

24Ibid.

25Ibid.

GUNNAR ASPLUND’S MEDITERRANEAN RESONANCES 217

of Ilissus. It was not, however, until 1815 that a general interest in the use of color in antiquity came to the forefront. That year, Antoine­Chrysostome Quatremère de Quincy (who would later become the permanent secretary of the Academie des Beaux Arts) published his observations on the use of color on antique sculpture, in an essay titled Jupiter Olympien, ou l’art de la sculpture antique considérée sous un nouveau point de vue; ouvrage qui comprend un essai sur le gỏt de la sculpture polychrome.18It was a work that studied the use of ivory, semi­precious and precious stones, gold, bronze, and paint in ancient Greek sculpture. The text, which was readily accepted, had a number of illustrations. One of these was a hand­colored plate in which the sculpture, naturally, included color. What is perhaps more significant is the fact that the surrounding architecture remained uncolored, thus retaining the “purity” that Winckelmann and other eighteenth­century scholars had aspired to. This aspiration was in fact pervasive throughout the eighteenth­century. According to Harry Francis Mallgrave in his introduction to his translation of Gottfried Semper’s The Four Elements of Architecture, this aesthetic form had by the end of the century been extended to every fine art. But in the first few decades of the nineteenth century, the growing interest in classical studies in conjunction with the new discoveries of color being applied to antique works caused this

“white” view of architecture to be thoroughly challenged.19

In 1834, Gottfried Semper – who had traveled around the Mediterranean region between 1830 and 1833 – published his pamphlet titled Preliminary Remarks on Polychrome Architecture and Sculpture in Antiquity.20The pamphlet came on the heels of the great polychrome debate that was taking place in the academies and which was centered primarily on Jacques­Ignace Hittorff’s colored renderings of Temple B at Selinus, displayed in Paris in 1824 and published, with considerable negative reactions, in Architecture antique de la Sicile (1827–30) (plate 40). Hittorff was clearly concerned with archaeology, yet his interest was also contemporary. He regarded paint as a protective substance and saw it very adapted to the Parisian and northern light as a means of emphasizing form.21As a result, the debate became a major catalyst for the Grand Prix winners’ interest in ancient Greek polychromy. No longer did the pensionnairesof the Villa Medici wish to remain in Italy.22It was not until 1845, however, that travel to Greece was officially sanctioned by the École. Prior to this, students such as Abel Blouet could only undertake projects in Greece outside of their official duties or after their five­year stay in Rome. Such trips would prove to be among the most consequential for the polychrome argument.

In 1828, Henri Labrouste studied three temples during his fourth year as a pensionnairein Paestum, a Greek and later Roman colony site south of Naples.

In his envois, the renderings were reserved, with coloring limited to the corona.

While executing the Paestum envoi, Labrouste was concurrently working on a series of reconstructions of ancient cityscapes. Particularly interesting is the one that is inscribed “Agrigentum, 1828” on the back (plate 41). It is a watercolor fantasy in which polychromy is “laid over the architecture substructure as a shell.”23Each monument within the representation is painted distinct from the other. This polychromy emphasizes the relationship to the Attic models. Half columns are painted to stand out from the wall, as if they were free­standing.24 A line of triglyphs is painted on a red wall behind a gate. We understand this detail as painted because Labrouste shows the paint chipping off the stuccoed wall. Labrouste seems to be suggesting that the carved motifs that were to follow “had their origin in the effort to make permanent the more primitive and immediately meaningful painted and attached adornment.”25 Yet, polychromy had a wider significance for Labrouste. Color became an element

of “regional” reading of architecture where buildings would respond to regional conditions – in particular, the type of materials – and to particular functional, historical, and cultural conditions of the place.

Semper continued on these arguments in his Preliminary Remarks on polychromy of 1834. Where Hittorff had set the stage for the argument of color as a basic element of antique architecture, as an “order” that could be used in all of classical architecture, Semper used color as a point of departure to describe a theory that had its essence in the surface, where the surface could be understood as architecture. Like Labrouste, he had a “vernacular’ vision of polychromy, as a response to and an effect of natural surroundings. He felt that in his nạve brilliance polychromy was democratic. At the same time, he followed Bronsted’s argument regarding polychromy in ancient Greek wooden temples, which suggests that the painted pattern was a substitute for the missing plastic form, that “color [was] used to create an illusion as a substitute for sculptural effects.”26Semper, however, felt that color held formal and symbolic meaning together. This idea resulted from his belief that decoration in monumental architecture was the direct descendant of natural artifacts hung or draped on a structural framework.27He states:

Plain constructions were consecrated for an ennobling purpose, for worship for example. Decorations of a more definite religious meaning (not always designated) were appropriately attached to the outside walls and interiors of the sanctuaries: suspended flowers, festoons, branches, sacrificial imple ­ ments, weapons, the remains of sacrificial victims, and other mythical symbols.

With the further development of worship and concomitant with increasing artistic activity, they became fixed as typical symbols. No longer were they simply fastened to the walls in their natural state, according to local traditions and their destination; they were represented artistically and thereby incorporated into the monuments themselves as a characteristic part.28 From this point, Semper went on to further develop a theory that would culminate in his book The Four Elements of Architecture (1851), and Der Stil in den technischen und tektonischen Künste(1860–63). Of particular interest is his discussion of the essence of the wall. Here he describes the history of the wall from its beginning as a hedge fence, which would later develop into the weaving of mats, which could in turn be hung from a structural framework.

The framework becomes incidental. What is more important to Semper is the surface of the textile that makes the space; that makes the architecture. He furthers this argument by stating that even after having arrived at masonry walls, upon which textiles could be hung as surface decoration, this masonry wall is still only an incidental structural framework to support the surface articulation.

The Impact of the Mediterranean Journey and Other Influences

In a large number of Asplund’s most important works, the notions of spatial extension, of the inversion of space, of bringing the outside in, and of spatial and structural ambiguity assert themselves as primary themes. These themes, which were informed by both his interest in the Scandinavian vernacular as well as his Mediterranean tour, allowed for the manifestation of an architecture that went beyond a simple derivation of form from style, structure, or function.

Consequently, Asplund developed an ever more complex design paradigm, in which the manipulation of surface and color, layered over these primary thematic strategies, began to emerge as a significant motif.

26Harry Francis Mallgrave, “Intro­

duction,” p. 9.

27Ibid., p.15.

28Gottfried Semper, Preliminary Remarks on Polychrome Architecture and Sculpture in Antiquity, New York, Cambridge University Press, 1989, p. 63.

29One need only look to the ancient Okthorp farmhouses, buildings Asplund was sure to have known, to understand the relationship of the type to this new house that he was designing. These buildings, which included a farmhouse and a number of barns, typically enclosed a rec­

tangular farmyard. This farmyard was understood to be primarily a private space, separated from the public realm by the farmhouse. The Okthorp farmstead at the Skansen Open Air Museum in Stockholm was the first one of the kind in the world, started in 1891 by Artur Hazelius. Its foundation was contemporaneous with the National Romanticism movement that was at its height during Asplund’s formative years.

Peter Blundell Jones, “House at Stennas,” in Dan Cruikshank (ed.), Erik Gunnar Asplund, pp. 123–124.

218 FRANCIS E. LYN