With his designs for Skansen Restaurant, Ekeberg Restaurant and the Horn Building, the architect Lars Backer brought the International Style in architecture to Norway. Many people had felt that a new era was imminent, and now it had arrived.
The exhibition “Lars Backer – architect. A pioneer of Norwegian Modernism” tells the story of Lars Backer’s life, explains his contribution to Norwegian architecture, and sheds light on the era he lived in.
A time of transition
The mid-1920s were a time of transition in
Norway. Neoclassicism was still the predominant architectural style:
power stations, banks, housing developments, sports facilities, museums
and cinemas all bore the hallmarks of Ancient Greek and Roman
architecture. Lars Backer
contributed to this movement with his Frogner Cinema, the beautiful
Villa Larsen, and a university project executed in the neoclassical
style.
At the same time Backer, along with his contemporaries, was writing about the need for a new kind of architecture. In Norway the breakthrough came in 1927 with the completion of Skansen Restaurant. This building made Backer a star – a national celebrity. He proceeded to build up a successful architectural practice, which was probably the largest in Norway at that time.
The breakthrough of Functionalism
In Norwegian and Nordic
architecture, the year 1930 marked a watershed. A major exhibition in
Stockholm that summer presenting a vision of architecture in the future
aroused great public enthusiasm. In Scandinavia, the new style was
nicknamed “Funkis” (an abbreviation of the word “Funktionalism”).
The year 1930 was also the year that Lars Backer died at the age of just 38 of a streptococcal infection. His three last buildings contributed to paving the way for the new architecture in Norway. The first two, Skansen Restaurant and Ekeberg Restaurant, encountered fierce criticism. In contrast, the Horn Building, completed in 1930, was well received. The new architecture was victorious.
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