A Country House Goes to Town : The Relocation and Restaging of Skogaholm Manor

• In the winter of 1930, the old timbered manor house at the Skogaholm estate was dismantled, log by log, loaded on a train and transported from its rural setting to Stockholm, the capital of Sweden. Reinstalled among the old farmhouses at the open-air museum Skansen, the main building was soon supplemented with two freestanding wings (with a different origin) and a suitable formal garden. Skilled craftsmen and academically trained curators carefully staged the whole ensemble, in order to present the architectural heritage and the living conditions of the landed gentry to an urban public.Skogaholm manor in its new context was clearly a success. To generations of museum visitors it became an emblem of the increasingly popular Swedish eighteenth-century manor. Although well preserved and still an attraction, the eighty-year-old staging of Skogaholm is a challenge today. The curators of the 1930s sought to combine the careful preservation of historic remnants with an urge to construct an ideal manor, which inevitably led to compromises. And some of these make it difficult for today’s visitors to interpret the environment.By looking closely at the installation of Skogaholm in the 1930s, this paper aims at a better understanding of the manor complex on display at the open-air museum. Despite its authentic components, Skogaholm manor can be seen as a full-scale historical experiment, driven by a variety of motives and professional practices within museology, historiography, architecture and conservation. To uncover some of these motives will shed light over Skogaholm as a museological artefact, and it will help today’s visitors to understand its inherent complexities and contradictions.

Ämnesord

HUMANIORA  -- Konst -- Arkitektur (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Arts -- Architecture (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

Skogaholm manor

open-air museum Skansen

Swedish eighteenth-century architecture

museological display

Arkitektur

Architecture

Publikations- och innehållstyp

ref (ämneskategori)

kon (ämneskategori)