For the 1920s, however, the most significant phase was the third, that is the return to Romantic Classicism. This was initiated in Denmark by Carl Petersen (1874-1923) in his Faaborg Museum designed in 1912, and reached its climax immediately after the First World War. In Sweden the parallel phase began a bit later. By the time such men as Fisker in Denmark, Asplund in Sweden, and Aalto in Finland became ‘converts’ to the International Style in the late twenties, Scandinavian traditionalism had become almost as purged of stylistic detail as the architecture of Tony Garnier, or even that of Adolf Loos, had been for a generation.

On the whole the Danes and the Swedes produced the most lively and distinguished traditional architecture of the early decades of the century. Medievalizing churches in Scandinavia, such as the just-mentioned Grundvig Church in Copenhagen, where Jensen Klint followed Baltic modes that seemed strange and even Expressionist to foreign eyes, or Tengbom’s Högalid Church in Stockholm, superbly sited and actually much more Baroque than Gothic in its detail, make the respectable Neo-Perpendicular and Neo-Georgian exercises of contemporary Anglo-Saxon architects look timid and unimaginative. In both cases it is the stylization of proportion—the tremendous verticality—that makes them striking and full of a sort of vitality, at once nervous and lusty, which is comparable to that of the best High Victorian Gothic churches.

The finest medievalizing work is undoubtedly Östberg’s Stockholm Town Hall of 1909-23.[[512]] This is an exceedingly eclectic combination of elements adapted from various periods both of the Swedish and the general European past. Superbly set at the water’s edge, it is sumptuously decorated inside and out with products of craftsmanship that are of a very high order of competence (Plate [174A] and [B]). Despite his eclecticism, Östberg succeeded in imposing on all his disparate elements a high degree of personal stylization at the same time that he exploited the situation with marvellous dramatic effect. There is also a witty allusiveness suggesting the art of the theatre and the exotic fantasies of the late eighteenth century. The Stockholm Town Hall provides a sort of pageant-setting for the ceremonial life of the city, recalling the splendours of town-hall architecture of many epochs of the past, even though it lacks the straightforwardness and the integrity of Nyrop’s earlier Town Hall in Copenhagen.

The outside world had hardly had time to apprehend such new Scandinavian building in the years following the First World War before it became evident that architecture in these countries, hitherto on the whole in stylistic retard of developments elsewhere by almost a generation, had taken a surprisingly sharp turn. Petersen’s museum at Faaborg followed the local Romantic Classical models of C. F. Hansen far more literally than any of the contemporary admirers of Schinkel in Germany were doing. Brought to completion in 1916 during the First World War, it attracted very little foreign attention at the time it was built. But the Police Headquarters in Copenhagen by Kampmann, erected after the war in 1918-22, with its great colonnaded circular court, and the Øregaard School (Plate [176B]) at 32 Gersonsvej in the Gentofte Kommune north of Copenhagen by Edward Thomsen (b. 1884) and G. B. Hagen (1873-1941) that followed in 1922-4 were at once noticed abroad. Both indeed are notable for their grandeur and for their simplicity, the latter realizing old Romantic Classical ideals with extraordinary success, the former coming closer to the academic work of McKim, Mead & White in America.

Still simpler, and not without a similar sort of understated grandeur surprising in such work, were the Danish low-cost housing blocks erected in the early twenties in succession to those of Hansen & Hygom. Those by Povl Baumann (b. 1878) in the Hans Tavsengade or the enormous Hornsbaekhus of 1923 by Kay Fisker (b. 1893), all in Copenhagen, are especially fine. The extreme precision, the elegant craftsmanship in brick, and the ascetic detailing of these blocks of flats, rivalling the contemporary ones by de Klerk and by Kramer in Amsterdam in quality but subscribing to a quite opposed aesthetic, are found also in many Danish private houses of the twenties built by Gotfred Tvede (1863-1947) and other architects both in the city and in the country.

Although Carl Westmann (1866-1936) in the Röhss Museum of Handicraft at Göteborg and Erik Lallerstedt (1864-1955) in the University of Architecture and Engineering at Stockholm approached the simplicity and fine craftsmanship in brick of the Danes, Swedish work of this period was in general richer and more robust, still reflecting the very eclectic sources of inspiration of Östberg’s Town Hall. However, in 1923 Neo-Classicism of a more attenuated and whimsical order than Petersen’s made a striking appearance in the buildings for the Göteborg Jubilee Exhibition. Of these the Congress Hall by Arvid Bjerke (b. 1880), with its serried clerestories carried on arched principals, was the boldest and least reminiscent. These Göteborg pavilions were very influential abroad in the mid and late twenties; detailing of Swedish inspiration then seemed to offer to traditional designers elsewhere a sort of Nordic spice with which to enliven the dead-level of the local eighteenth-century revivals.

Tengbom, deserting the romantic eclecticism and the emotional drama of his earlier Högalid Church, used a highly stylized, almost exposition-like, Neo-Classic mode for his Stockholm Concert Hall of 1920-6. However, the climax in Sweden—if not, indeed, the climax as regards all Scandinavia—came with Asplund’s Central Library in Stockholm, begun in 1921 and much simplified and refined as construction proceeded through the mid twenties. Rejecting the frivolous decorative detail of his Skandia Cinema of 1922-3, Asplund rivalled the Danes in reducing architecture to geometrical simplicity (Plate [176A]). Thus he might almost seem to have passed beyond C. F. Hansen and Schinkel, the Scandinavian idols of the day, to draw the inspiration for his plain cylinder rising out of a cube directly from Ledoux or Boullée (Plate [2A]); while at the base he ran a continuous band of windows derived from the newest architecture of these years in France, Germany, and Holland. This juxtaposition in the same edifice of Ledoux and Le Corbusier, so to put it, is rather awkward; but it is highly symptomatic of the very slight step that the Scandinavians had still to take in the late twenties when they gave up revived Romantic Classicism—already pared down to basic geometry in this library and in much Danish housing—to become outright converts to the International Style.

Although Sweden and Denmark produced no modern architect of the first generation of such individual distinction as the Finnish Saarinen, and must in any case be considered to have started out around 1900 from a position somewhat in retard of the French and the Germans, their early twentieth-century architecture largely avoided the stasis of traditionalism elsewhere, moving through overlapping but discrete phases to an early and sympathetic acceptance of the new international architecture of the twenties even before that decade was over. So clear a picture is hard to discern in most other countries.

In the United States the pattern of development between the 1890s and the 1930s, in so far as one can make out any pattern at all, was quite different; nor was there in America, in the way of England in the twenties, any Swedish influence of consequence. Movements roughly equivalent to the Scandinavian National Romanticism of 1900, the Richardsonian Romanesque and the Shingle Style, had flourished in the eighties and come to an end by 1900. The Academic Reaction that early succeeded them swept on, however, for some forty years. Despite the ruling eclecticism of taste that permitted an archaeological sort of revived Gothic still to thrive as a mode for churches and educational institutions, the more widely favoured Classical, Renaissance, and Georgian stylisms had all been initiated by McKim, Mead & White in the eighties and early nineties. The quality of their work began to decline[[513]] almost as soon as their professional primacy became assured; yet their best buildings of the first decade of the new century undoubtedly remain among the most competent, if unexciting, examples of traditional architecture then produced anywhere. Americans, not Frenchmen, were in these decades the worthiest products of the École des Beaux-Arts, and thus heirs of the strongest academic tradition in the world.

Whether McKim, Mead & White’s models be Renaissance, as in the University Club in New York (Plate [179]) completed in 1900, the series of Branch Public Libraries there that were built over the next dozen years, and the Tiffany Building finished in 1906; or Classical, as in the Knickerbocker Trust in New York and the Bank of Montreal in Montreal, both completed in 1904, the very similar Girard Trust in Philadelphia of 1908, and the vast Pennsylvania Station in New York of 1906-10, this New York firm was clearly one of the truest successors to the nineteenth-century academic heritage that so many of the French were frittering away at the opening of the new century in a half-hearted flirtation with the Art Nouveau.