A Snapshot of Buildings in and around Stockholm

My awesome friend Amanda, architect and deep-thinker, asked me a few months ago about the building styles in Sweden. How the buildings feel and how the building environment is different from the US. This is something I have actually thought about often since I moved here.

Our first apartment was in the most gigantic concrete building you've probably ever seen.

But the apartment itself was lovely and modern. On the 10th floor looking out onto a big forest of trees.

Rather than build a town center, or a main street, they built a gigantic shopping mall. This is something I still have trouble with here in Sweden. While the shopping mall is convenient, it just doesn't give me the sense of being in a town or of a community that a main street with (ideally) cute family-owned shops would.

But with everything, once you get on with your life you stop noticing and caring.  It just becomes the background to the walk (usually run in my case) to the train.

Living in Stockholm I see a mixture of these two styles: the beautiful, majestic old buildings and the ugly blocks (million homes program.) The million homes project was the government's solution to affordable housing in the late 60's and early 70's.

Here are some examples of the beautiful:

The really old and classic red style (and one green):

 

And the not so beautiful:

And the interesting:

There are a few things I've noticed about the inside of Swedish apartments too, to generalize for a bit... It's not typical for there to be a window in the bathroom. I don't understand why?! Didn't architects think about ventilation? All other windows are not very big. Usually double-paned. Walls are white. Furniture is white, black or brown... it was an expensive struggle trying to find a chair that wasn't one of those three colors.