Ellen Braae & Thordis Arrhenius: Scandinavia and the architecture of welfare.

The A is for Architecture Podcast’s 191st episode is a conversation with two professors, Ellen Braae & Thordis Arrhenius, about their and Guttorm Ruud’s publication, Architecture and Welfare: Scandinavian Perspectives, which came out with Birkhäuser in 2025.

To summarise the book is hard, composed as it is of twenty essays by different authors exploring aspects of postwar Scandinavian architecture and the role it played in materialising welfare state ideals, giving spatial form to principles of equality, collectivism and democracy. Today, as the political consensus around universal welfare has been weakened from within and without, the book asks us to think again of that peculiar and in some ways utopian architectural legacy, examining its contested past and uncertain future, and positioning it as a subject not just for historians, but as a model that still challenges and instructs.

Ellen is Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Copenhagen and is there and on LinkedIn; Thordis is professor of architecture at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden. The book is linked above.

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Music credits: ⁠Bruno Gillick 

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