Category: Swedish Grace

During these years Åhrén also designed for Estrid Ericson’s company, Svenskt Tenn in Stockholm.
Amongst his diverse and versatile design work one will find wallpapers, tiled stoves and theatre sets, all showcasing his talent.

Times of change

This success coincided with a time when the earlier, more decorative aesthetics were being challenged by modernist principles. When it comes to this change, it is said that the 1925 Paris Exhibition marked a breaking point for Åhrén. Experiencing Le Corbusier’s Pavilion L’Esprit Nouveau, made him a strong advocate for functionalism; emphasizing simplicity, utility and mass production.
Uno Åhrén even went on to write an essay, “Conflicts” (“Brytningar”), about this ideological shift in which he critiqued his earlier, more ornamental, work and embraced the new modernist approach to design. In the essay, Åhrén distances and criticizes himself from and for his own participation in the Paris Exhibition, but also talks about how the new design movement should be be created by anonymous designers. Designers who would serve society but never emphasize their own individual artistic ability.

In 1927 Åhrén then joined, amongst others, Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe at Weissenhofsiedlung exhibition in Stuttgart, Germany where presented his vision of modern housing.

With start in 1930 Uno Åhrén continued his work emphasizing and developing Swedish modernism. For example, as one of the architects and contributers to the Stockholm Exhibition of 1930. In his contributions he lay focus on solutions for people with limited economic means.

Accept the new times

The following year, he co-authored the influential manifesto “acceptera” (“accept”), which established the social and aesthetic principles of the Swedish functionalism. In the wake of international figures like Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius the manifesto talks about the importance of rationality, standardization, sensible financial choices and social responsibility but also formulates the importance of housing projects that prioritize light, air and spatial efficiency.

Uno Åhrén described the functionalist ideas as a critique of the traditions and authorities belonging to a disappearing society. Every architectural style is an expression of a certain society, a particular culture, he argued. Since modern society was already a reality, it was necessary to simply accept this new style.

Uno Åhrén also went on to collaborate with the Swedish sociologist, reformer and Nobel prize winner [in Economic Sciences] Gunnar Myrdal, between the years 1932-1935. Åhrén contributed to the work “The Housing Question as a Social Planning Problem“. A work that came to influence Sweden’s social democratic policies, the development of the concept “Folkhemmet” and the structuring of the Swedish Social Democratic Party.

Beyond his architectural practice, Åhrén was the editor of PLAN magazine, a significant publication in the field, and also served as Gothenbuurg’s first City Planning Manager 1932-1943. 1943-1945 he served as CEO of the company “Riksbyggen”.
In 1947, Åhrén was appointed Sweden’s first professor of Urban Studies/Planning at KTH, (the Royal Institute of Technology) a position he held until 1963. KTH awarded him an honorary doctorate in technology in 1974.

For his times, Uno Åhrén was quite radical in his opinions, which has made his legacy complex. Because he tirelessly worked for socially conscious design and urban planning he is seen and praised as one of the pioneers who introduced Modernism, the so called Functionalism, in Sweden. But this work has also lent him critic for leading to the so called “city sanitation” which reshaped many Swedish city centers demolishing their older architectural heritage.
But more about all that, and if you want to have a look at his architecture, you will have to google it yourself. This is about a chair…

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