På många stolar : Axel Nyström som arkitekt och kulturbyråkrat

Sammanfattning: The aim of the dissertation is to examine the work of Axel Nyström (1792–1868), describing the distinctive features of his architecture and discussing his significance for Swedish architecture during the nineteenth century, as a teacher, theorist, administrator, and practitioner.Three main questions serve as a basis for the study: 1. What was Axel Nyström’s role as administrator and teacher? 2. How did he perceive architecture? 3. To what extent and in what way did his buildings influence and shape Swedish architecture?Axel Nyström was working in a time of change, as regards both architecture and society as a whole. Classicism was no longer the given model to emulate. Industrialism was gradually growing and a new bourgeois class was emerging. This led to new types of buildings and new demands for academically trained architects who could give a suitable architectural form to the public spaces of the new bourgeoisie.The quest for a contemporary style increasingly began to occupy architects and writers on the continent – a debate in which Nyström participated and which he transferred to Sweden. He was involved in architectural education, which he radically reformed, and he strove to bring about a redefinition of the concept of architect. Nyström played an important part in the emergence of a new role for the architect: from the eighteenth-century architect who had been a pupil of a master or had received his training in the military, to a professional with an academic education – thus pointing the way forward to the professional category that today’s architects constitute. Many of Nyström’s ideas can also be said to have been ahead of their time. A great deal of what would become a concrete reality in the second half of the nineteenth century was already expressed by him in the 1840s, for example as regards the use of genuine materials and an eclectic attitude to historical forms of architecture.