National Romantic architecture

National Romanticism was a Nordic architectural movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, spreading from Denmark and Norway across Sweden and Finland to Estonia and Latvia. International surveys often treat it as a regional form of Art Nouveau; in Sweden it is defined against jugend, the local Art Nouveau, which it displaced around 1910. Architects turned to medieval buildings and vernacular traditions to give their work a distinctly national character, with a respect for honest materials and craft drawn partly from the English Arts and Crafts movement.

You recognize the style by its weight. Facades are dark and closed: brick fired to imitate old hand-struck brick, rough-hewn granite in bases, portals and sometimes whole walls, steep roofs, and small-paned windows set in heavy masonry. Doors are often noticeably small in their stone frames, ornament is carved and storytelling, and the small windows and massive walls give many buildings the look of a castle.

Martin Nyrop’s Copenhagen City Hall (1892-1905) set the Danish standard, its asymmetrical tower modeled on the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena. In Finland, Lars Sonck’s Tampere Cathedral (1902-1907), with its rough granite facades, became one of the strongest expressions of the new national spirit, and Eliel Saarinen, with Herman Gesellius and Armas Lindgren, won the 1902 competition for the National Museum of Finland. Sweden’s leading names were Carl Westman, Ragnar Östberg and Lars Israel Wahlman.

The movement was short-lived. Saarinen turned toward a more rational architecture after 1904, and around 1920 the Nordic countries swung to Nordic Classicism, a deliberate counter-reaction toward universalism and simpler form. Much of what was built is now protected heritage, and conservation guidance treats the hand-worked details with care: coarsen them in renovation and the character of the era goes with them.