Folkhemmet

Folkhemmet, “the people’s home,” is an era rather than a strict style: the decades around 1930-1960 when Sweden’s welfare state set out to house the whole population well. The name goes back to Per Albin Hansson, the Social Democratic leader who launched the folkhem concept in a debate in the Swedish parliament on 18 January 1928. The architecture that carries the era’s name still has a recognizable register, clearest in the housing of the 1940s and 50s: in Sweden it reads as both a further development of functionalism and a reaction against it.

You spot it in facades of red or yellow brick or render in earth tones such as ochre and oxblood, pitched roofs of clay tile, and windows that shrink and turn playful: hexagonal, octagonal, round. The window bands of 1930s functionalism disappear, balconies get decorative ironwork, and courtyards keep their pines and rock outcrops. The building types go by Swedish names: smalhus, lamellhus, punkthus, stjärnhus.

A policy machine ran behind the soft forms: state-subsidized barnrikehus flats for large low-income families until 1948, the cooperative builder HSB, and a continuing wave of smalhus, narrow blocks lit from both facades. The canon includes the star-plan Stjärnhusen in Gröndal by Backström & Reinius (1944-1946), Årsta centrum by the Ahlsén brothers, Vällingby, whose town center opened on 14 November 1954, and Tuna backar in Uppsala by city architect Gunnar Leche.

British critics named the Swedish register The New Empiricism in the Architectural Review in 1947 and 1948. Strict 1930s functionalism has its own page in this guide; after folkhemmet came Sweden’s record years and the large-scale million homes program, miljonprogrammet. The era’s boundaries are loose, but the architectural core is the 1940s and 50s.