Thordis Arrhenius

Ellen Braae

Guttorm Ruud

Architecture was fundamental to the realization of welfare state policy in the Nordic countries, translating democratic ideals into concrete spatial materializations. An inclusive notion of “welfare for all” was embraced by a generation of architects, landscape architects, and planners, who labored to give physical form to ideas of equality, collectivity, and democracy, producing a vast architectural output in Scandinavia during the postwar years. Today, however, the architectural legacy of this era is contested. Welfare for all no longer enjoys the social or political consensus it once did. This publication critically engages with this contested architectural legacy and provides a nuanced portrait of postwar welfare architecture coming to terms with a contentious past and facing an uncertain future With newly commissioned photographic work by contemporary Nordic artists Based on an interdisciplinary research project by KTH Stockholm, Oslo School of Architecture, University of Copenhagen Internationally renown contributors shed light on aspects of the relationship between architecture and welfare

Scandinavian Perspectives

Architecture and Welfare

Coping with post-industrial brownfields is an issue throughout Europe and North America. A point of departure for their broad rediscovery in Germany was the refurbishment of an abandoned steelworks from 1990 on by Peter Latz which subsequently became Duisburg Nord Landscape Park. There, industrial relics were not demolished or converted but perceived as integral parts of the overall concept and then imbued with new meaning and use. Many additional projects with a similar approach were created in the past decades, among them Parc del Clòt in Barcelona, Parque do Tejo e Trancão in Lisbon or Michel Desvigne’s Parc aux Angéliques in Bordeaux, currently under construction.0This book does not only describe a systematic framework for the use of post-industrial ruins it also contextualizes them in design history. The author, professor for landscape design at Copenhagen University, covers a wide range of topics, linking 19th century Romanticism’s preoccupation with ruins to industrial decline (exemplified by Detroit) and then on to the subsequent Renaissance of the transformed landscape and its refound beauty.

Ellen Braae

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