Historicism

The 19th century has no style of its own. Instead, architects choose among the styles of the past, depending on what a building is meant to say. The umbrella term is Historicism – and for the architecture of the 1890s, "nystilar", the revival styles, becomes the name in Swedish.

The choice follows a logic. Churches are built in Gothic Revival, associated with medieval piety. Museums, banks and apartment blocks get Neo-Renaissance, signalling learning and bourgeois prosperity. Theatres and parliaments dress in Neo-Baroque, while salons and cafés are fitted out in Neo-Rococo. Churches might also be Romanesque Revival, with round arches and twin towers.

Then come the 1890s, and a new era arrives in earnest. The boom turns Stockholm into a European city: straight, tree-lined esplanades, bank palaces in natural stone and corner buildings with towers visible from afar. The building regulations of 1874 tie the height of buildings to the width of the street, and architects such as Isak Gustaf Clason, Erik Josephson, Ludvig Peterson and Johan Laurentz design block after block. Electricity reaches the stairwells – Stockholm's first power station opens in 1892 – and by the end of the decade the first lifts are installed in the finer buildings.

At the same time, attitudes to architecture turn. The rendered, strictly symmetrical façades of the 1880s are now seen as false and overloaded. Materials should be honest and suit the Swedish climate: natural stone, red brick, and render that is allowed to be render. Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque are mixed freely, but every building should be unique. The façade breaks up – windows are grouped by the rooms behind them, the entrance moves off-centre, and for the first time architects care as much about the plan as about the façade.

The pathbreaker stands on Strandvägen. Isak Gustaf Clason's Bünsow House from the late 1880s takes its inspiration from the 16th-century châteaux of the Loire – and breaks the mould. Windows are grouped by the rooms behind them. Towers and gables create a lively roofscape. Brick and stone are allowed to show.

Then architects look west. The 1893 World's Fair in Chicago and H. H. Richardson's mighty stone walls beckon, and Ferdinand Boberg brings the impressions home: the fire station in Gävle, and Stockholm's power station – where the portal is framed by a frieze of carved light bulbs. That same year, 1893, Carl Westman condemns all revival architecture in Dagens Nyheter as a masquerade in borrowed clothes. The critique takes root. It will become National Romanticism.

These buildings become the backbone of the stone towns that grow with industrialisation. Around 1900, Art Nouveau and National Romanticism turn against it all – in search of forms of their own.

The original styles. A "Renaissance" or "Gothic" building from after 1840 is a revival. Check the date – and look for details too perfect to be handmade. Neo-Renaissance. The Neo-Renaissance of the 1880s is usually rendered and strictly symmetrical; the revival styles of the 1890s are asymmetrical and show off their brick and stone.