Reconstructing the Stockholm Exhibition 1930. Stockholmsutställningen 1930 rekonstruerad

The Stockholm Exhibition 1930 of Arts and Crafts and Home Industries (›Stockholmsutställningen 1930 av konstindustri, konsthantverk och hemslöjd‹) and the manifesto Acceptera, published the following year by the exhibition organizers, mark the breakthrough of Modern Architecture in Sweden as well as in other Nordic countries. The exhibition is organised by Svenska Slöjdföreningen (›Swedish Arts and Crafts Society‹), managed by its director, Gregor Paulsson, and designed to a large extent by Gunnar Asplund — aimed at achieving »beauty and festivity«.

The Stockholm Exhibition is a phenomenal success and attracts more than four million visitors, including 25000 foreign guests. Despite its enormous success the architecture of the Stockholm Exhibition has been studied surprisingly little in detail and its buildings are astonishingly poorly documented.

In order to reconstruct its architecture, rediscover its qualities and bring it to life, in 2014 and 2015 master students of Chalmers Department of Architecture undertook to reconstruct the pavilions in the form of models.

The reconstruction led to a series of discoveries testifying to an architectural quality that cannot be discerned from pictures or drawings, but is documented in this volume. Through the construction of the models of the pavilions of the Stockholm Exhibition, the quality of an architecture, which for over 80 years nobody had seen, could be reconstructed and reexperienced — an architecture which proved to be so important for the culture of modernism in the Nordic countries.