Striving for a new monumentality: the non-classical influence on Gunnar Asplund’s architecture

Gunnar Asplund’s architecture is today synonymous with 1920s Classicism and Nordic Classicism. His designs for the Woodland Chapel (1918–1920) and the Stockholm City Library (1920–1928) stand as prototypical examples. However, this article contests this perception. Through an analysis of these two buildings in light of theories of form and space around the 1900s, the article argues that the chapel and the library are manifestations of the Formalism of German-speaking scholars in a Nordic setting. Alois Riegl, who challenged the classical aesthetic ideal as a universal criterion for judging the quality of art and architecture, framed much of the intellectual background that shaped the Vienna Secession. This study finds that Asplund shared the Secessionists’ belief in a revival of architecture through a purified language of form. The article places Asplund’s practice in the historical context of an early twentieth-century interest in archaeology and suggests that the Secessionists prompted Asplund to search for models in the monumental ancient cultures, e.g. in the Near East and Egypt. Finally, the article demonstrates how August Schmarsow’s theory of bodily movement through space and Riegl’s writings about shadow and shade as formal architectural qualities in Baroque architecture are reflected in Asplund’s architectural design.


Introduction
The early 1980s saw perhaps the most significant period of writing and interpretation of Asplund's architecture.In 1980, the Museum of Modern Art in New York presented an overview of his work, curated by Stuart Wrede.The accompanying book, The Architecture of Erik Gunnar Asplund, brought the architect to the fore, proposing his architecture as 'strict classicism'. 1 Wrede focuses on the symbolic dimensions of Asplund's work, whose interpretations, according to the curator, are speculative since there is minimal written corroboration from Asplund. 2 Bolstered in 1982 by the exhibition and publication of Nordisk Klassicism/ Nordic Classicism 1910-1930 (organised by Simo Paavilainen and Juhani Pallasmaa for the Museum of Finnish Architecture), the classical heritage came to prevail in the conception of Nordic architecture during this period. 3According to Bjørn Linn's article, 'En professionell arkitektur' ['A Professional Architecture'] in the Swedish journal Arkitektur in 1982, it was the architect Sven Silow who first 'seriously' introduced the term tjugotallsklassisismen ['the classicism of the twenties'] in his survey of Swedish architecture in 1951.Linn claims that Silow's analysis has shaped posterity's image of the 1920s as a stylistic intermezzo between national romanticism and functionalism. 4The following quote from the book Swedish Grace: The Forgotten Modern (2015), edited by Peter Elmlund and Johan Mårtelius, illustrates this: So far, Swedish Grace is the most successful classical revival in the history of modern architecture.Squeezed in between the two anti-classical periods of National Romanticism (of Arts and Crafts origin) in the early 1900s and Functionalism (Modernism in Swedish) in the 1930s. 5edish Grace is also called 1920s Classicism, 'as this movement had its heyday during that decade', 6 or Nordic Classicism, 'since it not only refers to the architectural vocabulary in Sweden, but also elsewhere in the Nordic countries'. 7The Woodland Chapel (Fig. 1) is today described as perhaps the greatest example of Nordic Classicism 8 while the Stockholm City Library (Fig. 2) is referred to as the finale of the Classicism of the 1920s. 9splund's inaugural lecture as professor of architecture at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm entitled 'Our Architectural Conception of Space' (1931), published in the journal Byggmästeren the same year, gives a glimpse of his theoretical orientation.Here Asplund speaks of the German historian and philosopher Oswald Spengler and his seminal two-volume work The Decline of the West published in 1918 and 1920.Spengler writes in the introduction that he admits no sort of privileged position to the Classical or the Western Culture as against the Cultures of India, Babylon, China, Egypt, the Arabs, Mexico […]  which in point of mass count for just as much in the general picture of history as the Classical, while frequently surpassing it in point of spiritual greatness and soaring power. 10engler finds that in each culture there is a symbolic expression of a 'culturesoul', a 'prime symbol' that can be found in their conception of space, states Asplund in his lecture. 11'This prime symbol', he goes on to say, 'which never manifests itself in visual form, is active in everyone's sense of form, and dictates the style for all his expressions of life'. 12This article links Asplund's quotation of Spengler with the Austrian art historian Alois Riegl and his concept of Kunstwollen as the creative force underpinning all artistic works of a particular period and civilisation. 13In his book Words and Buildings (2000), Adrian Forty analyses keywords such as 'form' and 'space' and locate them within a framework of historical enquiry and theoretical discussion.Here he points out that the word 'space', denoting three-dimensionality, was not present in the architectural discourse before the introduction of the German word for space, Raum, in the 1890s. 14Forty refers to the German art historian August Schmarsow and his 'proposition that "form" in architecture is to be identified primarily through the experience of space'. 15Schmarsow's term Raumwille 'draws on Riegl's Kunstwollenthe concept of artistic volitionbut locates it in the conception of space'. 16Schmarsow 'was the first to formulate a comprehensive theory of architecture as a spatial creation', 17 and in his essay 'The Essence of Architectural Creation' (1893) Schmarsow states, 'The history of architecture is the history of the sense of space'. 18ike Schmarsow, Riegl recognised that space was specific to each period of history.In The Origins of Baroque Art in Rome, published posthumously in 1908, he claims that Baroque architecture showed major innovations in comparison to classical Greece and Italian Renaissance architecture, notable in the treatment of space.In his inaugural lecture, Asplund explains to the audience that the 'Greeks did not conceive of space as space, but in terms of finite bodies', and in this context, he highlights the sense of space in Baroque archi- tecture. 19Asplund points out that the architect with a 'formal conception of space, has formed beautiful enclosed squares and streetsmagnificent interior spaces'. 20However, states Asplund, 'our conception of architectural space has changed, so that the supremacy of formal architectural values has been broken in favour of other values'. 21He proclaims that 'Le Corbusier is the pioneer, the theoretician who has clarified our ideas', 22 and refers to 'the dissolution of architectural formalism in response to the changing pattern of our lives and society'. 23Implicit in these statements and his design for the Paradise Restaurant, a building with exposed steel frames and large expanses of glass built for the 1930 Stockholm Exhibition, lies a criticism of his architecture from the previous decades.
Formalism was a theory that evolved during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.Forty writes in Words and Buildings that 'form' became a key concept no longer a property of things (as it had been throughout antiquity and the Renaissance) but in the process by which they were perceived.Formalism concentrated upon the mode of perception of form devoid of any ulterior meaning.Aesthetics was defined in terms of the psychological reception of the elementary relations of lines, tones, planes and colour.The potential for the application of formalist aesthetic to architecture, the art of visible pure form, was seen in the play of lines or of light and shade. 24According to Mitchell W. Schwarzer, Schmarsow differs 'from other theorists in his insistence that bodily movement through space rather than stationary perception of form was the essence of architecture'. 25he influential Swedish art historian Gregor Paulsson, who writes about a new monumentality in his book Den nya arkitekturen [The New Architecture] published in 1916, recalls that during his stay in Heidelberg in 1911, his encounter with Riegl's writings, Problems of Style: Foundations for a History of Ornament (1893) and Late Roman Art Industry (1901), had an almost explosive effect on him.He was liberated from the positivistic straitjacket and learned that facts become scientific only after they are placed in relation to a theory.26 It has been pointed out that the popularity of Riegl's work in the 1920s rested on these two books and The Origins of Baroque Art in Rome.27 This article focuses on the significant idea that Asplund's 1931 lecture implies conceptions of spatial composition aligned with Riegl and Schmarsow's notion of form and space in architecture, and that this implied conceptual alignment is evidenced in the compositional arrangement of Asplund's design for the Woodland Chapel and the Stockholm City Library.The descriptions of the two case studies emanate from historical research and the author's observational analysis of the spatial experience of both sites.Asplund's architecture resonates with other contemporaneous buildings in the Nordic countries, and this article suggests that pre-classical architecture and the counter-classical tendencies in Baroque architecture had a greater influence on architects in the Nordic countries during the 1910s and 1920s than is generally recognised.According to this article, Asplund's work defies its popular stylistic classification due to its emphasis on space.

Riegl versus Winckelmann
Riegl recognises the subjective artistic forces of a work of art with a clarity not achieved at the time by his colleagues. 28He questions the neoclassical aesthetic that Johann Joachim Winckelmann had introduced to Western Europe.According to Riegl, Winkelmann's 'promotion of Greek art, proved fatal to modern creativity, for it combined his own preferences for the Greek aesthetic with a new urge for scholarly accuracy'. 29As stated by Diana Reynolds Cordileone, Riegl 'framed much of the intellectual background that shaped the Vienna Secession' 30 an association founded in 1897 by artists and architects including Joseph Maria Olbrich and Josef Hoffmann in rebellion against the academic classicism and the conservatism of the art institutions in Vienna.The motto of the movement, 'Der Zeit ihre Kunst: Der Kunst ihre Freiheit' ['To every age its art, to every art its freedom'] is carved in gold relief above the main entrance to the Secession Building (1898), designed by Olbrich.
Asplund graduated from the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm in 1909 and continued his education at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, where architecture as discipline was guided by its commitment to classical Greece and the Italian Renaissance.The architect Carl Otto Hallström, who studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts between 1909 and 1912, recalls that students were supposed to draw in a Renaissance style.However, they were familiar with Sonderheft, a series of special issues by the German magazine Berliner Architekturwelt, which with excellent typography, and at a moderate price, reproduced the works of architects like Joseph Maria Olbrich, Otto Wagner and Frank Lloyd Wright. 31Anthony Alofsin finds that Wright 'shared with the artists and architects of the Secession movements a belief in "pure forms" as the source of cultural rebirth'. 32'The forms of this language were the circle, square, and triangle, to which Wright attributed meanings of infinity, integrity, and structural unity'. 33Forms of 'architecture that were linked to basic traditions of a culture, yet avoided the blatant imitation of historical motifs'. 34he Secessionists searched for models of modern architecture in the simplicity of the art and architecture of pre-classical and non-Western cultures.The rear elevation of the Secession Building is formed to resemble Egyptian temple pylons (the gateway of ancient Egyptian temples) while the frieze designed by Koloman Moser recalls the city walls and friezes of ancient Assyrian and Egyptian palaces.The Studio, the influential art magazine 'that disseminated the art and architecture of Great Britain and the Continent to the international Arts and Crafts movement', 35 gave a great deal of attention to the progressive architects of the Secession movements in the subsequent years.In 1911, The Studio stated rather bluntly that the English Arts and Crafts movement had stagnated, adding that the original ideals of the movement had been kept alive by and renewed in Austria and Germany. 36arious Secession movements, artists' collectives and new schools were calling for attitudes and images that broke with stultified academies and artistic dogma. 37In 1910, despondent with his teachers' disinterest in recognising Figure 2. Stockholm City Library, designed by Gunnar Asplund, 1920-1928, photographed by G. Löwendahl, n.d., CC PDM, courtesy of Arkitektur-och designcentrum, Digitaltmuseum.seemerging artistic movements, Asplund left the Academy.He and several contemporaries who included Sigurd Lewerentz, newly returned from Germany, set up their own free academy, the Klara School (1911), a form of studio instruction conducted by the foremost architects in Sweden. 38In Den nya arkitekturen, Paulsson highlights the architecture of German architects such as Peter Behrens and former teachers at the Klara School.He praises Liljevalch's Art Gallery (1913-1916) in Stockholm, designed by Carl Bergsten, for its 'pure form'. 39splund had the opportunity to see in person buildings from publications when he travelled to Germany in the summer of 1910 on a scholarship from the Royal Institute of Technology to study German façade materials.He visited Mathildenhöhe and used illustrations of the Wedding Tower and the Exhibition Hall, both designed by Olbrich and completed in 1908, in his rapport published in the journal Teknisk Tidskrift (1911).The photographs show rough-textured walls, monumental entrances with multiple framed panels, and the canted mass of the walls (signs of the Egyptian pylon). 40

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The Journal of Architecture  3), and during this period they collaborated on the site plan.Both Asplund and Lewerentz used geometric forms as the basis for their design, but Lewerentz combined them with explorations of a classicist vocabulary.In Asplund's architecture, 'The orders are almost entirely avoided, and where balustrades, pediments or columns are included, they are either in the simplest Doric style or reduced to pure forms of Asplund's own design'. 41In the Stockholm City Library, the decorative patterns reflect different layers of time and various culturesfrom a figurative stucco border featuring Egyptian hieroglyph-like motifs on the outside walls (Fig. 4), via walls decorated with thin stucco relief depicting scenes from Homer's Iliad sculpted by Ivar Johnsson on the shiny black vestibule walls, to a rhythmic pattern of squares and circles on the floor in the lending hall (Fig. 5).In the vestibule, the visitor is confronted with a skeletal image in the floor with the Greek text Gnoti Cafton [Know Thyself].However, to the extent that classical forms and motifs were used, they were liberated from academic classicism, or from what Riegl refers to as the 'dictatorship' of the art historian. 42Asplund, like Lewerentz, avoided any egalitarian or symbolic explanations of his work. 43s the latter puts it: 'All that he had to say was said through building'. 44purified language of form The Swedish art critic Erik Blomberg, who writes about the Stockholm City Library upon its completion in 1928, points out that Asplund had stated in an interview that the new architecture borrowed neoclassical elements, but that neoclassicism did not create the new architecture.Blomberg adds that Asplund had emphasised the striving for form and the purity of form.45 He finds that Asplund had a geometrician's obsession with circles and squares, symmetry and axial systems.46 The Secessionists used basic geometrical forms within the framework of historical prototypes; 'The Studio provided illustrations of decorated objects whose motifs were transferable to architectural forms and surfaces'.47 Pure forms provided the vocabulary architects needed to rejuvenate contemporary art and architecture.Riegl finds that geometric forms were the original visual language of our culture, and this article suggests that geometry as a grammar of architectural form can be traced back to his book Problems of Style.Here Riegl stresses the autonomy of forms, as a contrast to 'the Semperians [who] jumped to the conclusion that all art forms were always the direct product of materials and techniques'.48 The first chapter is devoted to the geometric style.Riegl writes that the style, characterised by the mathematical expression of symmetry and rhythm in abstract lines, is derived from an artistic urge in man apparent in the first attempts to draw, engrave or paint threedimensional forms on two-dimensional surfaces.49 The geometric style incor-porates endless variations and interpretations within a relatively simple and rational formal idiom.Riegl emphasises its universal validity: The few basic motifs of the Geometric Style occur in the same manner among practically all prehistoric and contemporary primitive cultures in Europe and Asia, in Africa as well as in America and Polynesia, although they may occur in different combinations and with varying preferences for a particular motif. 50e square within a square raised into three dimensions evokes associations with the 'steps' of the oldest pyramids of Egypt and the ziggurats in Mesopotamia, for example.Riegl writes that the geometric style is organic because the 'same laws of symmetry and rhythm that govern geometric shapes are apparent in the natural laws of humans, animals, plants, and crystals as well'. 51In 'The Essence of Architectural Creation', Schmarsow argues that axes form the basis of human movement, and that symmetry, rhythm, and proportion are basic principles for human organisation: [S]patial impressions that nature offers us […] are stimuli to our spatial imagination.But in imitating them in our own works we regularize all their lines and simplify all forms to bring them into accord with the laws that govern the organization of our mind.[…] The ideal in the mind is always pure form. 52 his diary, Asplund describes his experience of the sky in Tunis: Above us the sky, so clear and deep blue as I have never seen it, such a timbre about that colour, I had the constant impression of the sky as a vault, a tremendous blue-painted dome. 53cording to Riegl, the invention of the silhouette or contour line was a creative act, which unleashed the imagination from the strict observation of nature and allowed a greater freedom in the combinations of forms.'[L]ine became an art form in and of itself', writes Riegl, 'linear shapes were made to obey the fundamental artistic laws of symmetry and rhythm'. 54Problems of Style was quickly hailed as a model of a historical and comparative method. 55From 1917 to 1918, Asplund taught decorative arts at the Royal Institute of Technology. 56Riegl's reflections on the geometrical style correspond with Asplund's exploration of form in the Woodland Chapel and the Stockholm Library.In the small wooden chapel, which is a circle within a square, an ancient motif found in both primitive huts and temples, became the primary form of the floor plan (Fig. 6).The room the mourners enter is square, but Asplund has concentrated it in a circle defined by eight wooden columns bearing a dome with a glazed centred skylight (Fig. 7).The circular interior arrangement brings people together and stresses that they are gathering around the catafalque, making the coffin rather than the altar the focal point of the room.As in the chapel, the floor plan of the Stockholm City Library involves the interaction of a square with a circle (Fig. 8).But here the motif of a circle within a square constitutes the library's architectural design: a cylinder (the central lending hall) surrounded by a cube (reading rooms).
Seen frontally, the Woodland Chapel with its white columns and dark pyramid-roof (with a discrete gutter and no profiling that distract from the pure triangular form) stands out as what Riegl refers to as a Bildwerk [pictorial The architectural ideal of the ancient Egyptians is best expressed through the tomb-type of the pyramid.Any of the four sides permits the beholder's eye to observe an always unified plane of an isosceles triangle, the sharply rising sides of which by no means reveals the connecting space behind.[…] Therefore, the pyramid should be called a Bildwerk rather than a Bauwerk. 57e temporary buildings at the Gothenburg Art and Industry Exhibition in 1923 illustrated how basic geometric forms along an axial staircase with landings shaped as octagons and circles formed an architectural ensemble (Fig. 9).In Asplund's review of the buildings at the exhibition in Byggmästeren (1923), he writes about 'today's and tomorrow's willpower in our developing architecture'. 58The formal qualities of the 1920s are, according to Asplund, a clear rhythmic configuration, restful proportions, Egyptian lines, straight long staircases and the serenity of enclosed forms. 59Asplund once described the buildings at the exhibition complex in terms of 'forms which do not threaten, but invite'. 60His design for the staff and service building between the Woodland Chapel and the Chapel of Resurrection, completed this year, is made up of four pyramid-shaped pavilions (Fig. 10).
1923 saw the completion of the Stockholm City Hall designed by the architect Ragnar Östberg.Like the city hall, which was erected in the years between 1909 and 1923, the Stockholm City Library is a manifestation of Arts and Crafts thinking, a fusion of art and crafts, and an understanding of materials and their expression.Brick is used in both buildings as a primary material, which underscores the form and the impression of mass and weight, as well as the connection to the architecture of earlier agesas in Östberg's city hall to the Middle Ages.

Influences from the ancient Near East and from Egypt
The search for a new monumentality based on pure forms coincided with extensive archaeological excavations.The major sites or capitals of the ancient Near East, like Assur, Babylon and Ur in Mesopotamia, Ugarit in Syria, and Susa and Persepolis in Iran, remained largely unknown until the monumental campaigns of archaeologists around the 1900s and the decades that followed. 61Between 1899 and the First World War, the German archaeologist Robert Koldewey and his team made major discoveries in Babylon, for example.As well as the Ishtar Gate, they unearthed remains of the city's great Processional Way, temples including the Esagila (dedicated to Marduk), the palaces of King Nebuchadnezzar, and Etemenanki, a ziggurat that some scholars identify as the legendary Tower of Babel.Koldewey's book Die Tempel von Babylon und Borsippa (1911) was illustrated with plans, sketches, and half-tone reproductions by the architect and archaeologist Walter Andrae (Figs. 11 and 12).The book was translated into English in 1914, entitled The Excavations at Babylon, and reprinted several times. 62The same year, Bergsten, Let us not stop at classicism, therefore, as we have done previously, without intending to continue onward, and let us hope that the period of neo-Antiquity, which to all appearances is currently prevailing, will become a springboard to new architectural forms. 63om a Nordic perspective, it is worth noting that the famous Swedish explorer Sven Hedin embarked on a journey in 1916 in the same area as Koldewey, during which he was treated, among other things, to 'a three-day-long continuous lecture' by Koldewey. 64Hedin's book Bagdad, Babylon, Ninive was published in Swedish in 1917.In this context, it is of interest that Asplund, who writes about the Gothenburg Exhibition in 1923, highlights the visual effects and the sense of spatial sequence of the buildings, such as the Crematorium Building by Lewerentz, and refers to the Jacob's ladder: When we progress further through the doorway under the cupola we find a Jacob's ladder in the light against us leading up to the plateau of the crematorium.Here is a clear monumental idea: this staircase with its terraces of graves in the outside air: you really wish you were on your own with an open view, not blocked by the backs of other visitors.The original idea with the rising terraces and the increasing gradient of the staircase augmented one's expectations.Up at the top on the magnificent plateau one is rewarded with wide views over the roofs like a fairytale city. 65 order to satisfy the expectation, it became fundamental to all nineteenthcentury art theory that the works of architecture, inherently static, should reveal movement. 66Asplund's references to 'Jacob's ladder' moving up towards a 'magnificent plateau' resembled the Etemenanki ziggurat, the Tower of Babel, found during Koldewey's excavations.Its Sumerian name Etemenanki [E-temen-an-ki] means 'Temple of the foundation of heaven and earth'.Leading up to this tower, and perpendicular to its southern line, is a straight long stairway, as pictured in Hedin's book Bagdad, Babylon, Ninive (Fig. 12).
The changes on the façades of the Stockholm City Library coincided with the English archaeologist and Egyptologist Howard Carter's discovery of Tutankha-  67 The ornamentation on the walls using a mode of expression in harmony with Egyptian motifs was an appropriate way of articulating the library's clear-cut form.Asplund gave up his idea of a central lending hall under a dome in favour of a basilican design with vertical, clear glass windows high up in the outer wall.Hakon Ahlberg writes in the book Gunnar Asplund arkitekt 1885-1940 (1943): Here we have a square, which encloses a circlepure geometry […] It is the plan, the structure, that gives its adequate image: a cylinder rises from the enclosing cube.Even the domewhich existed in the previous projecthas been found to be too weak in form and therefore rejected.The arch is also too weak, all vault covers are straight.Egypt versus Rome. 68e basic planning concept of the Stockholm City Library changed little between initial project and final building. 69The axial staircase cutting through all layers of the building (Fig. 13) 'appears both in the main section of the first project and also in a series of telling little perspectives taken along the axes'. 70In his review of the Gothenburg Exhibition in 1923, Asplund writes that a 'straight long central staircase, up which one circulates with groups of rooms on both sides at increasingly higher levels, is a brilliant architectonic idea'. 71Distinctive artistic concepts were not only ideas but traditions, that were transmitted from one generation to the next and from one culture to another', writes David Castriota in the introduction to Riegl's Problems of Style, and continues: 'In the hands of a creative artist, traditional forms could also be mutated to produce innovations as they were handed down or diffused transculturally'.72 The art historian Rudolf Wittkower, who 'leaned heavily on Riegl', 73 stresses that the Empire style was influenced by pre-classical ideals, partly as a result of Napoleon's campaign in Egypt and Syria in 1798-1801: 'Historians underestimate [the Egyptian] influence on European thought, whereas in many respects the Egyptian impact is as important as the classical tradition in its formative influence'.74 For example, the Thorvaldsen's Museum (1839-1848) in Copenhagen, designed by Michael Gottlieb Bindesbøll has oblique lines and portals with antecedents in Egyptian architecture (Fig. 14).
In Sweden, the early nineteenth century was rediscovered as an attractive part of the country's cultural heritage. 75Paul Mebes' book Um 1800 [Around 1800] published in 1908 was 'one of the key books of the time'. 76ebes argues that the Biedermeier period was the last period when art, architecture, and crafts had been united.The revival of the long-forgotten Biedermeier style can be traced back to Riegl's essay on the 'Empire style', written for the Vienna Congress Exhibition of 1896.Here Riegl describes Biedermeier as 'a local expression of Empire style, but downsized from aristocratic use for the city apartment; thus suitable for the middle-class consumer'. 77Several of the formal characteristics that Riegl found in the Empire (and Biedermeier) stylethe simple outlines, light colour schemes, polished woods, and fine craftsmanshipwere taken up by members of the Vienna Secession.According to Cordileone, 'The quietism, simplicity, domesticity and inwardness of the Biedermeier remained a powerful image for an Austrian cultural identity well into the twentieth century'. 78At the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts in Paris in 1925, the elegance and fine craftsmanship of the Biedermeier style is reflected in Swedish interior design and furniture, as in Asplund's design for the Senna Lounge Chair and in his sketches of interiors (Fig. 15), for example. 79The polished surfaces of the walls and ceilings in the Stockholm City Library are seen in the mahogany and jacaranda panelling in the passages between the lending hall and the reading rooms, amongst other places.Riegl's concept of Kunstwollen supported William Morris' view that there was no division between the fine arts and the applied arts.In this context, Kunstwollen became the basis of Riegl's argument about the unity of art forms. 80Riegl, therefore, did not follow Schmarsow in his attempt to detach architecture from the other arts and define it solely in terms of space. 81

Bodily movement through space
In 'The Essence of Architectural Creation', Schmarsow stresses that architecture 'is the creatress of space, in accordance with the ideal forms of the human intuition of space'. 82e intuited form of space, which surrounds us wherever we may be and which we then always erect around ourselves […] consists of the residues of sensory experience to which the muscular sensations of our body, the sensitivity of our skin, and the structure of our body all contribute. 83hmarsow's statement about space as an extension of the body is echoed in Asplund's inaugural lecture: [What I mean by the] idea of space [is not] just space as in our dwellings, our public buildings.I mean the spatial totality, in the town square, in the street, in "city-form", and not only that but the space of everything around us. 84 Space can be represented in painting and relief, but space can only be created and experienced in architecture: 'Architecture represents in tangible form the results of the body's interactions with the world'. 85Schmarsow finds that space 'provided an answer to the question of what in works of architecture stimulated aesthetic perception', 86 and he asks rhetorically: Do the massive pile of purposely hewn stone, the well-jointed beams, and the securely arched vaults constitute the architectural work of art, or does the work of art come into being only in that instant when human aesthetic reflection begins to transpose itself into the whole and to understand and appreciate all the parts with a pure and free vision? 87hmarsow conceives of space as the kinetic extension of bodily impulses because as the human body moves 'through a building, a continual stream of visual images combine in the mind to yield an ever-changing concept of spatial relations'. 88He finds that 'the most important direction for the actual spatial construct is the direction of free movementthat is, forward'. 89He refers to '[t]he long processional avenue of the Egyptian pilgrimage temple', 90 which Asplund describes as a sequence of visual images along an axial route: Space was conceived in terms of direction, route; best illustrated, according to Spengler, by the temple complexes with their unending, focused majestic causeways, passing among rows of sphinxes, through colonnades, courtyards and corridors to their destination. 91e axial layout of the Stockholm City Library, which resembles a setting for processions, demonstrates how Asplund accommodates a path of movement through contrasting and unifying effects and by linking spaces to one anotherfrom movement to immobility.A wide long staircase with deep treads makes the visitor glide rather than walk towards the Egyptian portal.At the main entrance, the visitor must grasp figural door handles (Eve upon entry and Adam upon exit) to step into the narrow entry hall.Here the visitor passes scenes, on both walls, from the first great literary work of Western literature before a long, narrow flight of stairs that requires, progressively, more rapid movements, leading the visitor in the direction of the central hall (Fig. 16) and into the tranquillity of the immense space of the cylinder, lined with walls of books.Asplund's design for the library includes the stationary as well as the moving, where the sphere of rest is represented by a geometrically pure form.Moving through the building, the visitor identifies form through the experience of space.As Schmarsow puts it: Although we may look at an enclosed building from the outside, we can gain an understanding of the laws of its formation only by understanding its spatial formation from within.Here the creator and the appreciator, the deviser and the observer, part company.It is an act of free aesthetic contemplation when, with the aid of our imagination, we transport ourselves from the exterior that we see before us into the center of the interior space; when, by inquiring into its axial system, we strive to open up a remote organism to the analogues feeling within ourselves. 92 Asplund's design for the Woodland Chapel, a 'processional path' which lies on the axis of entry creates an appropriate mood for mourners prior to the funeral service.Asplund, who gives a description of the Woodland Chapel in Arkitektur (1921), writes that the chapel should be modestly subordinate to the forest.He explains how he guides the mourners through the woodland creating expectations along the way: Outside, in between the tree trunks, one sees only the greyish white of the walls and, contrasting with the black shingling of the roof, Carl Milles' beautiful wrought-copper, gold-glittering Angel of Death. 93cording to Schwarzer, transitional areas between spaces are of exceptional importance for Schmarsow's theory: 'Spatial openings, to one or more sides, marked by walls or by columns, increase spatial relations by linking and com- bining inner spaces'. 94The dome in the Woodland Chapel is hidden behind the pyramid-shaped roof, and Asplund's description of the Woodland Chapel emphasises the transitional relationship between two distinct realms, expressed through gathering places and entrances: The woodland approach leads straight up to the ante-room, supported by 12 columns, where the mourners gather and wait.The iron-bound doors open, and beyond the lattice gate inside one discerns the bright space of the chapel. 95e space is dominated by a hemisphere covered with white-painted plaster, with a central circular skylight in etched glass, through which indirect light floods in.And as the mourners finally enter the assembly room, into the whiteness of the dome, mobility has come to a standstill.The columns have fluted shafts and carved capitals (achieved with paint) as if they, in contrast to the tree-trunk columns in the portico, are dressed up for the ceremony.The limestone flags in the portico continue through and into the chapel, and the view of the trees outside is filtered through the swirling curves in the wrought-iron gate, which are not opened again until after the ceremony.
In the Stockholm City Library, there is a visual and spatial continuity between the lending hall and adjoining spaces.The open passages into the reading rooms on the north-south axis, with a view back the outside world, link the visitor to the exterior space.On the way out from the lending hall, the staircase widens up to a view of the city through the huge glass window in the Egyptian portal.
Asplund states in his inaugural lecture: 'Mature Classical thought, in accordance with its feeling for mathematics, could only appreciate the principles of dimensions, scale and proportions in relation to material [solid] objects'. 96He adds that 'Classical architecture is a material, constrained architecture; its character is static'. 97Because space cannot be individualised in a material shape, space was not a subject for ancient artistic creation, explains Riegl, in the first chapter about architecture in Late Roman Art Industry: 'Thus we must conclude that in antiquity, architecture at least in the beginning gave preference to bordering of space whenever possible, while it suppressed and concealed its other responsibility, the creation of space'. 98Riegl finds that the oldest preserved, enclosed interior space of truly significant dimensions with obvious artistic intentions is the interior of the Pantheon in Rome.The interior 'has niches cut into the surface of the arch of the interior walls while the exterior is still a completely uninterrupted cylinder', writes Riegl: 'From such observations one immediately recognises the creation of space as the motivating element in the development of Roman Imperial architecture'. 99In the Woodland Chapel, the catafalque does not stand right under the middle of the dome.It is pushed back towards the altar which has been built forwards from the niche in the back wall.Asplund describes the niche as a 'deep tomb-like vaulted niche' (Fig. 17), suggesting progress beyond the wall, a transitional zone between the inside and the outside world, to the graves which are laid out in the forest. 100A recurring theme in Asplund's design is the alternation of darkness and light, of light and shadow, that creates an optical attraction.

Shadows and shade as formal architectural qualities
In 'Our Architectural Conception of Space', Asplund refers to Gothic and Baroque architecture as 'our Western architecture'. 101Spengler writes in The Decline of the West: 'Gothic and Baroque are simple the youth and age of one and the same vessel of forms, the style of the West as ripening and ripened'. 102He finds that something purely Western, relating to the idea of Baroque and Gothic architecture, is 'the deeply-necessary tendency of a waking consciousness to feel pure endless space as the supreme and unqualified actuality'. 103Spengler states that this tendency in the Baroque differs from 'the deliberate aims of the Renaissance' in additive space (space being constituted as a series of compartments). 104Asplund formulates the smooth flow of space in Baroque architecture as follows: The thesis of infinitive space, as our Western signature, has some relevance during the Baroque period, if not always to the eye then at least to the sensibility of relating internal space to the external square or park.It did not, like the Greek or Byzantine, treat external and internal space separately, but allowed internal architecture to become as external as the external itself. 105iegl's The Origins of Baroque Art in Rome was still popular at the time Asplund designed the Woodland Chapel and the Stockholm City Libraryenough that it warranted the publication of a second edition in 1923. 106Eva Eriksson writes in Swedish Grace: The Forgotten Modern: The [B]aroque was now studied with a focus on space instead of the details of style.This perspective brought the psychological dimensions of architecture to the fore.High and light ceilings, giving a dynamic impression, were one characteristic of the architecture of the twenties, especially important for Gunnar Asplund. 107egl states, 'Only the Baroque is a real style of space, not the Renaissance'. 108he development from the vision of a flat surface to the vision of depth was 'a decisive move toward the optical, because depth and air space [volume] cannot be touched but only judged through observation', writes Riegl. 109He finds that the Kunstwollen in Baroque architecture consists of the tension between the plane and the deep space, and between touch or tactile perception [Nahsicht or close-up view]form and lineand sight or optical perception [Fernsicht or distant view]light, shadows and colours.A prerequisite for movement is variety and contrast through the wanderings of the eye, 'shade, like light, is an optical element that is especially suited to connect the eye of the beholder with space', writes Riegl. 110According to him, the 'Baroque was an in-between period' in which artists 'learned how to overcome all the technical issues of classical architecture'. 111iegl finds that architecture more readily allows formal development than does painting or sculpture.He notices that the four walls in the vestibule of the Biblioteca Laurenziana (c.1520) in Florence illustrate 'Michelangelo's Barock Kunstwollen in architecture'. 112Here the columns are paired, implying that 'the will' to support has increased.However, Michelangelo demonstrates how the columns are being hindered in their function, as the core of the wall pushes forward, and the wall bulges out.'Deep space thus tries to emancipate itself in details such as the blind panels on the projecting wall surfaces', explains Riegl. 113In Michelangelo's design, '[a] conscious increase of shadows and shade as telltale characteristic of deep space becomes an artistic element'. 114herefore, Riegl concludes: 'The principal, decisive issue, for which Michelangelo provided the impulse to his successors and became their guide, lies in his resolute departure from the classical rules as they were defended by theoreticians'. 115When Riegl here refers to Michelangelo's Kunstwollen, 'it is more to signify personal style rather than to reveal a broader cultural-artistic tendency'. 116'[B]y taking the spectator into consideration, Riegl identifies the crucial, defining feature distinguishing the Renaissance and the Baroque.' 117 Asplund's architecture, which is shaped around the idea of experiencing spatial awareness through contrasting and uniting effects, is carefully considered in terms of its impact on the viewer.For example, the plan of the Woodland Chapel shows eight external columns.However, Asplund decided to add a third line of columns next to the wall.The added columns throw shadows on the wall and give a visual illusion of the weight of the pyramidal roof (the empty volume above the portico).The plan reveals an illusionary thickness in the walls gained by hidden staircases on either side of the vaulted niche, and by the passage between the iron-clad doors and the wrought-iron gate.One of the two alcoves which are visible from the inside provides a discreet entrance for latecomers through a wooden side door.
The Woodland Chapel is encircled by a low concrete wall with pine trees dominating the space.Asplund has emphasised that the character of this area should be denser and darker than the surrounding forest. 118The dense and 'impenetrable' forest that is divided into two parallel vertical planes, oriented axially toward the chapel, defines the woodland pathway.The darkness of the forest continues under the portico's low and oppressive ceiling supported by twelve white columns (Fig. 18).It seems to find its way through the keyhole (formed as an eye of a skull, the opening to death) in the iron-clad doors and through the wrought-iron gate (with Christian symbols), and then ends up in the 'deep tomb-like vaulted niche'.The niche is associated to an ancient cave or 'a return to the land of the dead'.Shadows and shade become telltale characteristics of deep space, to use Riegl's observation above.
'In the art of creating space that relies on optical perception, lighting becomes a central issue', writes Riegl 119 ; he goes on to say: 'It reaches its perfection at the Pantheon, with its true skylight in the apex of the dome providing even lighting to all parts of the interior'. 120However, in the Baroque the dome is the lightest area, but the style did not require even lighting, rather it sought tension and variety, explains Riegl. 121Inside the Woodland Chapel, the light is accentuated by the difference between the room's illuminated, circular centre and the dim light of the corners.The dome sheds light on the catafalque, the final resting point of the coffin, while candles cast shadows and throw light into the cornersas if applauding that deep space that has made its way from the forest and into the niche.The tension between the plane and deep space finds it climax under the pine trees where 'deep space tries to emancipate itself' in the gravestones scattered around in the landscape.In Riegl's words: 'Deep space and feeling are thus parallel phenomena, to a certain extent two sides of the same coin, the psychological and the physical'. 122The ceremony itself was to be experienced as a walk from darkness to light.
In his design for the Stockholm City Library, Asplund incorporates the position of the viewer and actively involves the visitor in the artistic space.Upon entering the vestibule in the Stockholm City Library, the visitor is confronted with black polished stucco reliefs with scenes from the Iliad that seem to disappear up into a vast dark space.The drawings of the library's floor plans reveal a space between the circle and the square, which forms a third rooma shaft of space with two flights of stairs ascending left and right.The side stairs that Asplund introduced in the corners of the vestibule next to the axial staircase leading up to the lending hall create a multidirectional area.The steps project forward and into the vestibule while the main staircase seems to be moving backward.By introducing secondary axes, perpendicular to the flow of the space, Asplund modulates the directional quality of the space.The axiality of approach, which is being interrupted, creates an impression of movement.At this point, the eye begins to wander, so to speak.It is caught by the stairs that curve around the cylindrical shape of the lending hall and disappear into the 'depth' (up to the offices above the main entrance) (Fig. 19).However, the sight of the light of the lending hall beyond and further above seems to balance the tensions within the symmetrical layout.In addition, the axiality is reinforced by the Egyptian portal that frames the view of the straight flight of stairs.The tension within the symmetrical layout is balanced.The steps, which narrow as the visitor moves upwards, lead up to a cylindrical space lit by vertical, clear glass windows high up on the outer wall, where the grey-white heavy-stucco walls reflect the light that shines in.Upon entering the lending hall, the visitor must be struck by its liberating spaciousness.

Conclusion
This article concludes that Asplund's architecture can be understood as a high point of the Arts and Crafts movement in Sweden.Asplund worked along the Ruskin-Morris axiom (introduced by Swedish Arts and Crafts architects at the start of the century) with impulses from the Austrian and German Secession movements.In his design for the Woodland Chapel and the Stockholm City Library, Asplund used a combination of a few basic forms of geometry which had been handed down or diffused transculturally to synthesise architectural forms and motifs of timeless value.In the chapel and library, where Asplund formalised complex visions in a rich architectonic synthesis behind enclosed, permanent forms, he reveals that his concept about form and space parallels Riegl and Schmarsow's formalist approach to architecture.
Asplund's contrasting of light and shadows, high and low ceilings, textures and colour, all combining to infuse a quality or atmosphere as an integral part of space, illustrates a shared concept behind his projects and those of his contemporaries in the Nordic countries.The Secession movements might have offered a way forward for younger architects who were searching for a simpler form of expression without wanting to break off ties to history and the use of traditional buildings materials and high-quality craftsmanship.
In his inaugural lecture as professor, Asplund argues 'that our conception of architectural space has changed, so that the supremacy of formal architectural values has been broken in favour of other values'. 123At this time, as with many of his colleges, Asplund was changing direction, a change which found its manifestation in the Stockholm Exhibition of 1930.However, his designs for the Woodland Chapel and the Stockholm City Library show the potential for the application of formalist aesthetics to architecturein forms that do not threaten, but invite.

Figure 9 .
Figure 9. Section and plan of the Art and Industry Pavilion, Gothenburg Exhibition, 1923, in 'Bilder med randanteckningar från konstindustribyggnaderna på Göteborgsutställningen' ['Pictures with Marginal notes from the Gothenburg Art and Industry Exhibition'], Byggmästeren, 1923, reproduced with permission

Figure 13 .
Figure 13.Drawing of stairs leading up to the lending hall, Stockholm City Library, designed by Gunnar Asplund, 1921, CC PDM, courtesy of Arkitektur-och designcentrum, Digitaltmuseum.se