House by House, Parish by Parish, County by County
The Aspiration to Register all Buildings in Sweden
To collect information about material culture has been one of the main tasks for the Cultural Heritage. This article deals with the background of the aspiration to collect information of all buildings, mainly in the countryside, in Sweden from the 1930s onwards, in the beginning in books and today in databases.
During the 1930s many books, or catalogues, of farmbuildings were published with information of houses and owners as well as a photograph of the main building. These books became popular but many projects failed after one or two volymes. However two were outstanding, Svenska gods och gårdar (Manors and Farms in Sweden) and Sveriges bebyggelse (The Buildings of Sweden).
Svenska gods och gårdar was published around 1935–1945 with 44 volumes of brief information about 400.000 buildings on 155.000 farms. Each volume had also introductory articles about the History of Culture and Nature in the parishes and in the county. The idea was to produce a kind of local encyclopaedia or history book for everyone based on the subscribing house-owner’s knowledge. The project became a financial success and the publishing house started, before the last book was published, a new, and much bigger book project.
The following project, Sveriges bebyggelse, was produced in almost the same way but held a higher quality since the introductory articles were written by academic experts. The big difference was that not only the subscribing house-owner’s property but every property, was meant to be introduced. This expansion made Sveriges bebyggelse an enormous publication of 400 volumes, with information about 15–20 million buildings on 4 million properties. As an understatement it has to be stated that the project failed. Only 52 books were published and the whole project collapsed in 1966.
Today local museums and municipalities deal with similar problems and the National Heritage Board is also building an expanding database of Swedish houses. My critical question in this article is how to create an updated register in a changeable world.
