Neo-Renaissance

Neo-Renaissance is the dominant façade style for what is built between 1850 and 1900. It is introduced in Sweden by Johan Fredrik Åbom and Fredrik Wilhelm Scholander. Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, designed by the German Friedrich August Stüler and opened in 1866, is an early monumental example.

The first buildings are Italianate, with light, richly decorated rendered façades. From the 1880s exposed brick and natural stone take over, in German and French Neo-Renaissance or in the "Nordic" version modelled on 17th-century castles. The Nordic Museum, built 1888–1907, is meant to look like a Nordic Renaissance castle.

The style shapes the stone towns that grow with industrialisation. After the fire of 1888, Sundsvall may only build in stone in its centre, and its Stone Town becomes one of Sweden's most coherent Neo-Renaissance districts. Even Gothenburg's landshövdingehus dress in Neo-Renaissance in the 1880s – with ashlar-rendered ground floors and pediments over the windows.

Stockholm is the great building site of the 1880s. The city is to become a European capital, and the Lindhagen plan of 1866 maps out the way: a grid, straight streets and tree-lined esplanades. Ridges are blasted away. Blocks rise.

The building regulations of 1874 set the frame – a building's height follows the width of its street. On a street eighteen metres wide, it may reach 19.5 metres, five storeys. Builders put up block after block in Östermalm and Vasastaden, often from pattern books and drawings nobody signs. A building takes three years. Everything is done by hand.

The façade tells its story in three acts. At the bottom, a rusticated base of ashlar render. In the middle, the finest floors, dressed in pilasters, pediments and window cornices – the third floor is always the richest. At the top, a lower, simpler storey. Everything is rendered in stone-coloured grey-white or pale beige, and the ornaments are cast in plaster, cement or terracotta. The richer the decoration, the finer the tenants.

When the 1890s arrive, the rendered, strictly symmetrical façades of the 1880s are seen as false and overloaded. The style slides into the freer mix of the revival styles, with exposed brick, natural stone and asymmetrical façades.

Art Nouveau. Buildings from the 1880s and 90s are often loosely called "turn-of-the-century". Neo-Renaissance is symmetrical and classical; Art Nouveau is asymmetrical, soft and takes its ornament from nature.