Left: Harlanda Church, Gothenburg. Right: St. Thomas Church, Stockholm

Urban spaces basking in the sun, groups of people engaged in culture or urban forms of sport or simply enjoying the atmosphere of their shared ‘living rooms'in the streets, squares and parks: this is Peter Celsing’s vision of architecture's capacity to transform reality. The Nordic welfare state may be the best that humankind has achieved in the sphere of equality. The idea of the welfare state culminates in the Swedish ‘national home' of the 1960s; and it has received its most beautiful artistic expression in Celsing's architecture, which he illustrates with his liberated gouaches.

Celsing is, nevertheless, not a one-trick architect: his life's work includes diverse modes of approach. Through them, he opens up possibilities for realising communication between human individuality and society. Like his functional solutions, his forms derive from the content and nature of the brief, the context of the site and the history of the type. It is difficult to find comparisons for Celsing 's architecture in the building of its time; on the other hand, it has strong links with both tradition and the future...[+]