"Dangerous liaisons. Preserving post-war modernism in city centers".
Conference,15-17 February 2001, Helsinki, Finland

Towards the sausage that follows the function

[See photos]

Sanja Peter

Finland’s modern heritage is internationally well known and imposing.

As a comparison the half million city of Gothenburg, Sweden can not present similarly qualitative quantity of architecture from the modernistic period of building. But work to resurrect the modern architecture is intensive.

In Gothenburg there are not only attempts to revive celebrated stars of modernity - some local post-war examples like “Norra Guldheden” are well known in Nordic counties - but studies are made to evaluate even the less known architecture from the 60ties and the 70ties. This period is in Sweden mostly known as a “million housing programme”. Some speculative-like building stock is built during the period and it has been both hated and criticised. There are in deed problems, social, technical as well as aesthetic. But there are also qualities. In this enormous mass of architecture there are more or less experimental examples worth mentioning. In Gothenburg architects and builders held pace in the front lines of experimenting with prefabricated elements; from Erik Friberger via Nils Einar Eriksson, Helge Zimmdal or Arne Nygård towards our contemporary Gerth Wingård, just to name some. Architects reflected international influences and applied them on the local arena.

Gothenburg, in the post-war period of the previous century, has a sad history of demolishing. But parallel to a large sanitary destruction of older, mainly wooden buildings there is a history of attempts to preserve this ordinary housing. Like the “landshövdinge”-areas a working class housing in Haga or Majorna.

Today the million programme housing enters a similar arena since it is threatened by hard exploitation. The question thus arises: how and what to preserve for the future?

Thus, as always, the leading principle is: the preservation of today can be a sustainable action for tomorrow. But, how can we predict the future needs?


“Storstadsgruppen” from Gothenburg attending the conference Dangerous Liaisons, 15-18 february 2001