Peter Elof Herman Torsten Folke von Celsing (January 29, 1920 – March 16, 1974) was a Swedish modernist architect.
Biography
Celsing was born in Stockholm, Sweden and was the son of bank executive Folke von Celsing and Margareta (née Norström) and brother of diplomat Lars von Celsing (1916–2009).
He studied at the architectural school of the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, and at the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts. Celsing has been the assistant of the widely known Swedish architect Sigurd Lewerentz. According to Adam Caruso, it was Celsing that helped Lewerentz to win the design competition for the Church of St. Mark (Markuskyrkan). This building and the later St. Petri Church (Olaus Petri kyrka) are now known as a starting point of brutalist architecture.
He later became professor of architecture at the Royal Institute of Technology. After working for some time in Beirut, he became head of the architectural office of AB Stockholms Spårvägar, the Stockholm tram and local railway authority, and designed a number of suburban metro stations. He also designed several churches: in Härlanda (Gothenburg), Almtuna (Uppsala), and Vällingby, a much-publicized modernist suburb of Stockholm.
Celsing often worked in a brutalist style with large exposed grey concrete surfaces, but occasionally combined this with large glass panes exposing the structure of the building from the outside, and interior details in wood. The best known examples of this are the Kulturhuset (House of Culture) at Sergels torg in central Stockholm (1966–1971), the adjacent headquarters of the Bank of Sweden (1969–1973) the Filmhuset, the house of the Swedish Film Institute in Stockholm (1968–1970), and his addition to Carolina Rediviva, the main building of the Uppsala University Library (1953–1962). In Uppsala, Celsing also designed a new wing for the Stockholms nation building (begun in 1961), and the current Ekonomikum building at Uppsala University (completed 1976).
Kulturhuset cultural center
The cultural center Kulturhuset (begun 1966, inaugurated 1974; the western part including the theatre was completed in 1971) is from most angles dominated by its concrete structure, with the adjacent theatre building having a façade of stainless steel, but from the front by its glass façade and the thin lines of the concrete floors, giving the impression of a number of shelves open towards the open place outside, Sergels torg.
It is located in a part of Stockholm where the old structure of the city, the old architecture and even the topography was almost entirely replaced in the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s with modernist architecture and new functions, mainly finance and large-scale retail businesses. The reaction against this development has been very strong, and many planned building and traffic projects had to be stopped from the 1970s and later as a result of the public opinion against what largely was, and continues to be, regarded as a significant loss of irreplaceable cultural values.
Kulturhuset was intended as a "cultural oasis" in this new city of commerce, with an open library in the bottom floor, a large theatre, and space for exhibitions in the rest of the building; the original intention was for the Stockholm Museum of Modern Art to occupy large parts of the building, but the museum dropped out of the project in 1969.
As the flagship building of the city centre redevelopment, it has, perhaps unfairly, become the target of much of the anger against the whole redevelopment project. Already in 1970, one critic, Claes Brunius, noted in Expressen that "Stockholm is building the largest vacuum in the country". The public opinion against the project may have been strengthened by the fact that the Kulturhuset and the interconnected Stockholm City Theatre were used as a temporary parliamentary building for several years, but as such the structure won the prestigious Kasper Salin Prize in 1972.