Carl Eldh’s Ateljémuseum shows an exhibition with works by Rahel Belatchew

It has been a century since Carl Eldh inaugurated his studio in Bellevue Park. The building was designed by his friend Ragnar Östberg, the architect behind Stockholm City Hall. For its Jubilee Year 2019, architecture will be in focus at Carl Eldh’s Studio Museum and we are very pleased to present a show with the architect Rahel Belatchew. Belatchew, and her firm Belatchew Architects, design bold, sculptural buildings with innovative fundamentals and features that take seriously the concerns of the present and those rapidly approaching on the horizon.

History and future have always intermingled in Carl Eldh’s studio. Ragnar Östberg drafted the plans for the building considering two different perspectives of time. He gave the studio a historic dignity, fashioning it with a tympanum, rotunda, and columns, but at the same time, designed a modern workplace for a sculptor with his future ahead of him. The architect also emphasized sustainability, using natural building materials and recycled roof tiles.

Belatchew Architects is behind some of expanding Stockholm’s most excited building projects. Carl Eldh’s Studio Museum shows several of these in the form of models, drawings, visualizations, and photographs. One such project is the high-rise Discus over Nacka’s new metro station, the highest section rising to thirty stories. The facade of Discus is a prime example of the resurgence of wood as an increasingly common component in contemporary building. Two of the fi rm’s buildings currently under construction, the apartment building Flora in Midsommarkransen and the collective house Rudbeckia in Uppsala, are other examples of pioneering wooden buildings. It is exciting that a historic building like Eldh’s studio can point towards the future.

We welcome visitors to sit in Bris in the studio’s garden, a unique outdoor space formed in wood that Rahel Belatchew has created in dialogue with Ragnar Östberg’s loggia. Follow the light through the ribs in the pavilion’s undulating roof and see the shifting shadow play. Consider Östberg’s century-old building from and through this contemporary structure, go into the museum, and see how the future is shaped in wood.