I like to draft while listening to the morning talk radio shows hosted by Leonard Lopate and Brian Lehrer on WNYC. The voices of these two men are preternaturally soothing, a perfect antidote to the focused graphic and mathematical thinking that goes into computer drawing. Whomever they’re talking with and whatever they’re talking about, it makes perfect Music For Drafting. There’s only one time when what I heard disrupted my work, and that was when Kenneth Branagh visited Lopate’s show this summer to promote a movie. He delivered all the predictable movie star platitudes, but as he started talking I stopped working. Branagh’s unadorned speaking voice is fine and soft; it carries England and Ireland in it, and sadness and music. It’s stunning.

In the PBS series Wallander, based on the crime novels of Henning Mankell, Branagh plays the titular homicide detective. True to the books, the series is shot on location in Sweden and many minor actors are Scandinavians. But Branagh and the other actors in major roles are British. The star adjusts his voice for the part. He doesn’t put on an accent but he holds something back, and in doing so he silences a large part of himself. Wallander is a laconic personality to begin with, so Branagh spends much of his screen time glowering silently and clenching his jaw. The Swedish locations give the stories an aptly gloomy tone. We see the stunted, spiritless streets, ports and parking lots of Ystad where the killers and killed pass their lives. The look of the perpetually overcast skies is remarkable – like aluminum. But what’s the point of these details if Branagh can’t use his voice fully? Why don’t they set the series in Belfast, or Manchester, and let him speak?

October 12, 2012 by Nalina Moses

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

After seeing a show of contemporary art at Scandinavia House last summer I was disappointed to come away without a better idea of what Scandinavia is. What I conjured about the place continued to be based on various random associations: long winters, virgin forests, Bjorn Borg, the Villa Mareia, Aga stoves, the movies of Ingmar Bergman, and the magnificent, misanthropic, coffee- and alcohol-swilling character of Kurt Wallander. This fantasy of Scandinavia was predominantly Swedish. If one image prevailed, it was the views of Faro at the end of each episode of Scenes from a Marriage, which show a lyrical, desolate island landscape. The panoramas offer a stripped-down beauty that refreshed after the heated, tangled emotions of the narrative. (There’s a good account of Bergman’s life in Faro in this spread from W Magazine.)

Then last month I set off for Scandinavia – the real place, that is – still wanting to know what Scandinavia was. I accepted the platitudes that it was an orderly culture within a powerful landscape, whose peoples valued socialist politics, good design, and healthy living. Now, after I’ve returned, I might agree that there is no single, uncomplicated Scandinavia. Nonetheless what I saw left me with a tangle of new impressions, which follow here.

June 15, 2012 by Nalina Moses