Buildings I learned about as a student – through photographs and drawings – have a persistence in the mind that real buildings often don’t. Gunnar Asplund’s Bibliotek in Stockholm is one of those buildings. I learned about it more than twenty years ago in an art history lecture and its parti – a cylinder set within a cube – stayed with me. While embedded in the modern canon, it’s a building celebrated for its eccentricity. It stands for a very early modernism, a non-International Style modernism, and a Scandinavian brand of modernism. It’s the building’s plan I remember best, with its awesome platonic geometries.

Visiting the library itself was something altogether different. The building is in good condition and remains a working branch of the Stockholm public library. It’s close to the city center, near Stockholm University, tucked away behind a large stagnant pool (also designed by Asplund), next door to a McDonalds. The evening I visited the place was busy with children, college students, and adults stopping by on their way home from work. The drum-like central hall, lined with stacks of low, curving, bookshelves and lit from windows high above, was cluttered with a temporary stage, display tables, folding chairs, and carts of books waiting to be reshelved. It’s finishes were just as dreary as those one would find in any public library: linoleum floor tile, varnished woodwork, and painted brick. Through it all the pristine geometry of the central hall asserted itself, reaffirming Architecture within the assault of everyday life. I doubt that most Stockholmers see that their library is an icon of modern architecture. But the building adds some splendor to their lives, which is much more than most.

July 03, 2012 by Nalina Moses

I’m an indoor girl, but as I rode through the countryside outside Stockholm I was tremendously moved by the landscape. Not the raw power of it, but the quiet, incisive ways people have intervened to tame it. There are farmhouses here standing in thousand-acre plots, yet they’ve been set within small yards that as are intensely and exquisitely maintained as those in the most precious American suburb.

I’ve always felt that New Yorkers fetishize outdoor space, colonizing any square foot of occupiable roof, courtyard or sidewalk with stanchions, potted plants and cafe tables, however uninspiring the results. Mayor Bloomberg and his transportation commissioner Janette Sadik-Kahn are using similar strategies to domesticate our streets, using concrete bollards, folding chairs, and green paint to shape no-drive pedestrian zones in Times Square and Union Square. But in the Swedish countryside, where there are land and views all around, farmers have done just the same thing, claiming small spaces for themselves in the simplest manner, with a row of bushes, stone paving, a big tree, wood fences, or a pair of lawn chairs. Against field and forest, these little suburban yards look like they’ve fallen out of the sky. This way of building a fence might be a primeval, civilizing act; it’s how we make a place for ourselves in the world.

July 02, 2012 by Nalina Moses

The splash image of the Norwegian National Opera and Ballet, by Snøhetta, on the architect’s website is a powerful one. In that photo, taken after a snowfall, the building looks like: mountain, iceberg, fortress and ocean liner. When the building is approached on foot from the city center, on a temporary steel footbridge, over a road that will be eventually channeled underground, the building is actually lower, broader and less imposing. It looks like: spaceship, folly, and something-still-under-construction. It has no center and no front, no strong image at all. It just barely looks like a building.

While the artfully sloping structure (this sloping is Snøhetta’s signature) feels as if it’s going to tumble into the water, it actually directs one back to the city. Its roof, clad in blindingly-white travertine tiles, can be occupied like a landform. As one steps up and walks the perimeter Oslo emerges all around as a modern commercial city, thick with with towers and cranes. And as one turns back to the building itself, its peaks emerge and recede cinematically in a way that’s pleasingly disorienting. The roof is public park, promenade and theater. The evening I visited people sat facing a floating stage listening to a soundcheck for the following evening’s Justin Bieber concert. To get back to our hotel, where The Biebs was in residence, we had to navigate a crowd of swooning, screaming and stampeding pre-teen girls. It’s impressive that such a cerebral, elegant building could host, comfortably, this kind of pop-cultural happening.

June 29, 2012 by Nalina Moses

In 2004 the Edvard Munch paintings The Scream and Madonna were stolen from the Munch Museum in Oslo. They’ve since been recovered, repaired and reinstalled. But look what’s going on over at the Nationalmuseet, which houses its own extraordinary collection of Munch paintings, including versions of The Scream and Madonna that are displayed behind glass shields. There’s a uniformed guard at the gallery door, who spends most of his time and energy enforcing the no-photography rule. The glass shields only draw attention to those two paintings so that visitors head straight for them, their cellphones cocked.

I don’t think the Munch theft was a crime of passion, because if it had been the thieves would have made away with the painter’s portrait of his sister Inger, or Puberty, or The Dance of Life, which get under the skin in a deeper, more unshakeable way. If I were to steal one painting it would be Four Girls on a Bridge, which charges an innocent subject with longing and dread. Munch was a masterful printmaker, and many of his paintings retain a strongly graphic quality – an energy in the line – that trumps modeling and space. His most poweful paintings, however, don’t employ line so much as molten streams of color. In some, like The Kiss, figures melt into one another. In Four Girls (and in Moonlight too) figures melt into everything around them. Here it is into the street, the bridge, and the sky. The world, and not just the figures, is charged with life.

June 27, 2012 by Nalina Moses