The Modern Museum — Temple or Showroom by Michael D. Levin (review)

industrialists who built and managed the A.E.G., and a bibliography. The present volume is a translation of an earlier German language edition; the illustrations are excellent and include both color reproductions from original A.E.G. catalogs and supplementary black and white photographs . Industriekultureis an eruditelandmark in the literature of design history. It will be of considerable interest to any student of the relationship of technology to society. Reviewed by Donald J. Bush, Arizona State University, Dept. of Design Sciences, Tempe, A 2 85287, U.S.A. The Architecture of Erik Gunnar Asplund. Stuart Wrede. MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts , 1983. 433 pp.. illus. Cloth, $50.00. ISBN: 0-262-73068-5. Stuart Wrede composed this work as a foundation for an exhibition of the architectural designs of Erik Gunnar Asplund at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1978, when Wrede was guest director. Both the exhibition and the book call attention to this major Swedish architect and designer of considerable originality and intriguing changeability. Wrede gives us brief but clear essays on the background and formation of Asplund’s earliest creative efforts through phases of romantic naturalism, classicism, functionalism of the international style, and finally a reaction against that functionalism. Wrede’s sensitive appreciation of how Asplund was affected by the major movements in twentieth-century European architectureisthe most significant contribution of this book. This is also an important essay on the meaning of modern architecture tuned to the deepest implications of the post-modernist movement. Wrede’s book is detailed and historical enough to be useful as basic reading for teaching the history of twentieth-century architecture. Using an interesting and telling collection of preliminary sketches, presentation drawings, models and photographs, the author has also shown in a remarkably compact, illustrated essay a great deal about Asplund’s creative process. A wide selection of works is discussed including the architect’s domestic and public building, urban planning, and a few tantalizing examples of Asplund’s important work as a designer. Wrede’s critical essays on the architect’s intention and his interpretation of form are sensitive and often inspired; there is a good balance between the consideration of Asplund’s cultural climate and Wrede’s characterizations of functional and aesthetic attitudes that result from his encounter with the work. I will comment on a single example of Wrede’s analysis, the project for the Stockholm Public Library. This work, the culmination of Asplund’s classicism, is taken from its conception as a commissioned project, 1922-24, to its completion in 1928. The completeness of documentation for the planning of the site makes a detailed study of the evolution of the design possible. The architect in his original scheme planned a domed building in which the hemisphere was expressed on the exterior and interior, rising directly from the square perimeter of the reading room. Wrede suggests that in the first scheme the spherical center hall (evoking the Newton Memorial of BoulCe) with its chambered periphery is a form meant to be a reflection of the human mind, the rotunda being the interior of the cranium. This extraordinary interpretation seems to be supported in other decorative details and seems quite appropriate to Asplund’s visionary image-making, which cuts across all the changes in the architect’s style. I am not happy with some of Wrede’s characterizations of eclecticism. In Asplund’s second scheme the spherical conception of the center element was largely rejected; the rotunda rose as a cylinder from the peripheral rectangle. This, the scheme as built, is rather distant from the suggested references to the Pantheon dome. There is a new severity here; only two horizontal mouldings and a single row of unframed windows break the curving surface of the great central cylinder. The forms evoke nothing so much as late antique architecture (Thessalonica , Rotunda of St George; Rome, Santa Costanza). Against the massive, simple volumes are set traditional and more-or-less correct classical forms, as around the main entry (not really ‘Egyptian’ in derivation, as Wrede suggests, even if the small friezes contain pseudo-hieroglyphs). In elements such as the thin, brittle relief decoration set against the polished plain expanses...