Concept and content
Guest Curator Martin Rörby.
This exhibition is presented in association with Vasakronan.
Thanks to:
The Bærtling Foundation, Huge Fastigheter AB, Håkan Bull, Fredrik Larsson and Håkan Nilsson.
Helldén + Baertling
Helldén + Bærtling = Aesthetical spaces
Partnership between architecture and art is all the rage in the mid-20th century. The ideas are in keeping with the times and both architects and artists are looking for new forms of expression and collaboration.
The architect David Helldén and artist Olle Bærtling move things one step further forward by unreservedly collaborating as equals, thereby generating one of the artistically most consummate of 20th century interiors – the lobby of the first of the Hötorgscity tower blocks.
David Helldén the architect
David Helldén is engaged by Sven Markelius, Director of the City Planning Office, to head an office charged with producing a new area development plan for Lower Norrmalm. The plan, presented in May 1946, provides for five tower blocks, with a new, pedestrianised Sergelgatan, and a large new piazza intended to be the hub of the new inner-city development.
The lobby of the first Hötorget tower block
The cooperation between Helldén and Bærtling begins in 1954 with the creation of the lobby of the first Hötorget tower block. When Olle Bærtling came on the scene, the basic shape of the room was already decided. Even so, the working model he presented the following year amounted to something noticeably different. The entrance is not completely finished until 1960, by which time it has moved away somewhat from the earlier proposals. With this lobby Helldén and Bærtling have fully realised a shared vision of a room in which architecturally and painterly expression are inseparably integrated.
Sergels Torg
David Helldén is also in principal charge of the architectural design of Sergels Torg, In the final solution, completed in 1960, the centre of the piazza has assumed the shape of a super-ellipse. This “new” geometric shape – which in fact was known previously – is the creation of Piet Hein.
In 1961 Olle Bærtling’s close contact with Helldén results in a concept for a monumental sculpture in Sergels Torg – ASAMK. Helldén is all for it and pleads for Bærtling being included among the artists invited to compete for the assignment, but in vain. In 1964 the competition is won by another of Helldén’s friends, Edvin Öhrström, with his Crystal-vertical-accent of glass and steel installed in 1967. An important part of the final concept is the black-and-white triangular pattern designed by Helldén’s associate Jörgen Kjærgaard and based on the contour lines of the lower level.
Stockholm University, Frescati
In 1962, following a complicated and unpleasant competition process, David Helldén was engaged for the new Stockholm University campus at Frescati. Helldén envisages a group consisting of a 25-story tower block for the university administration and student housing, a two-storey student union building and a hall. Bærtling influences the design of the hall, though his degree of involvement in the actual work is unclear. In the end, the only part of Frescati to be built more or less as intended by David Helldén is the so-called South Building, which is really six tower blocks linked together by a low-rise auditorium and communication enfilade. Helldén and Bærtling join forces again for the artistic part of the South Building, preparing an ambitious plan for decorating the public areas of the complex with non-figurative art.
The remarkable thing is that Helldén and Bærtling are now pleading for architecture and art not to be fully integrated. The new line of reasoning means that the ten canvases contributed by Bærtling are not specially painted but are selected from works completed previously. Bærtling’s is uncharitably looked upon, he is pilloried by the press as a “progenitor of migraine art” and several of his canvases are vandalised by the students. The ambitious art programme, thus torpedoed, is never completed.
After Frescati
The withering criticism incurred by Frescati was a major cause of dwindling work intake, but Helldén continued, with indomitable enthusiasm, to take part in competitions, and in the 1980s he presented interesting schemes, for example, for the Södra Station redevelopment and the Vasa Museum, both in Stockholm.
Olle Bærtling returns to his and David Helldén’s hall concept in a spectacular project devised by him in 1978 in collaboration with the German architect Gerd Fessel and the artist Axel Knipschild. In Düsseldorf the “hall” is to serve as a parliament building for the state of Nordrhein-Westfalen. The project is never realised.