Scandinavian style used to be synonymous with clean-lined, good-for-you design. But in the 21st century, Swedes are looking positively frisky.

At the Stockholm Furniture Fair in March, which drew fans from across Europe, designer Anna Kraitz turned heads with a floor lamp named Girl, which turns on at the tug of a long Rapunzelish braid.

In fact, edgy Swedish design turned up in Washington recently. Ten students from Stockholm's Beckmans College of Design provided a private one-day showing of hip fashions and lively graphics on the bare concrete floor at the House of Sweden, which is under construction.

Cool Swedish modernism had given way to digital baroque. The display of "Brickworks: A Flat Exhibition" included a white porcelain bowl encased in a metal basket of cut-out flowers, which looked like an upside-down crown. On a poster worthy of MTV, lime-green Viking ships crossed a sea of Swedish alphabet soup made of three letters that don't exist in English.

Glossy mock fashion advertisements included one with a model in a white quilted jacket sprawled on the ground and doused with chocolate. According to Els-Marie Lioberg, who designed the togs, that's what could happen if you spent the night in a shopping mall.
The land of the midnight sun has segued into a fantasy of midnight chocolate. "The average Swede really enjoys good design," says Claes Thorson, embassy spokesman, who was passing out bottles of Ramlosa mineral water. "Design is not only very important for Swedes. It's important for all of us," he says.

The point of the event was to announce that in September, when the House of Sweden on the Potomac is complete, Swedish design will be omnipresent.

The high-profile, glass-walled box here already makes a statement. Designed by Gert Wingardh, the building will shelter diplomatic functions and corporate apartments (Volvo, Saab and the president of International Finance Corp. will get the best views from the top floor). Nearly a-third of the building has been set aside for public activities including exhibitions, which Swedish Ambassador to the United States, Gunnar Lund, hopes will keep the embassy from becoming "a fortress."

The embassy has scheduled a calendar of shows, starting with design and architecture. The students served as the vanguard of what Lund calls "a whiff of modern Sweden." Next up is a model apartment filled with the everyday necessities of a design-obsessed nation.
Thorson promises more than an Ikea shopping expedition. One would hope for polished designs by the likes of Thomas Sandell and the firm of Claesson Koivisto Rune. A return visit from Kraitz, the designer of the braid-operated lamp, would also be welcome. She was last in Washington for the 2004 exhibition "Nordic Cool: Hot Women Designers" at the National Museum of Women in the Arts.

Additional exhibits will explain Wingardh's architecture, show off the distinctive design materials found on the island of Gotland and expose avant-garde fashion inspired by environmental concerns, from global warming to clean air.

While anticipating what wearables might emerge from a fashion designer moved by melting ice caps, design fans can head to the Finnish Embassy to see what contemporary architects can make from birch and pine trees.

An exhibit of wood buildings now on view shows how spectacular modern design is achieved with age-old materials. "From Wood to Architecture" includes airy houses perched at water's edge and a preschool as cheerful as a toy box. Chapels, offices and an artist's studio share the same affinity for simplicity and nature without falling into rusticity.

Over the past decade, the Finnish Embassy has raised its profile, as Sweden hopes to do, through superb design shows introducing past masters such as Alvar Aalto, as well as youthful innovators from across Scandinavia. It helps that designers from Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Iceland have provided some of the most exciting innovations in glass, furniture, jewellery, fashion and textiles of the past 100 years.

High-tech materials

The current exhibit was created by the Museum of Finnish Architecture for display at the 2004 Venice Biennale. At this world's fair of architecture, the cutting-edge is more defined by high-tech materials and avant-garde forms. For instance, the American pavilion featured apartment towers by Sulan Kolatan and William MacDonald, with plastic living pods formed like molecular structures.
In Finland, where trees cover two-thirds of the land, architects create equally fantastic environment by letting wood flow up the walls and curve into staircases.

The material is not problem-free. "Unless wood architecture is honest, its use-life will remain brief," says Roy Manttari, curator of the Museum of Finnish Architecture. But that's what makes wood so human.

It's little wonder that the deceptively simple and universally elegant structures won critical acclaim in Venice.

Humankind's relationship with trees remains as fresh as the nearest stand of birch, or so it seems, standing in the glass-walled aerie that looks out over Rock Creek Park here.

"Wood is a very important material," says an admiring Thorson, the Swedish Embassy spokesman, who notes that his nation is also two-thirds covered with trees.

Which country is the leading edge of design? "I can't answer you on that one," he says. "The Finns are so fantastic. We learn a lot from each other.

By Linda Hales, LA Times-Washington Post

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