Printing a new architectural style in mid nineteenth-century Sweden

Abstract

In 1850, a small group of liberal reformers and business partners in Stockholm launched a magazine entitled Tidskrift för praktisk byggnadskonst och mekanik m.m. [The Journal for Practical Art of Building and Mechanics etc.], the first architectural magazine in Sweden. This article situates the magazine in its historical context. Through a close reading of published articles and editorial correspondence, it explores the magazine’s main objectives. It argues that this shortlived magazine was used as a tool for implementing comprehensive architectural and societal reforms. Above all, the magazine served as a laboratory for creating a new Swedish architectural style. Since this new architectural style was originally envisioned to be used by white Europeans all over the world, the transnational network of architectural magazines played a crucial role in the highly ambitious endeavour of its founders. This article shows how a national architectural style was conceptualised as an exportable commodity in mid nineteenth-century Scandinavia. In so doing, it further illuminates architectural magazines as agents and mergers of highly ambitious aesthetic, commercial, and patriotic aims.