The Myth of the Little Red Cottage: the Circulation of Vernacular Romanticism in Scandinavian Architecture in the Twentieth Century

This chapter focuses on the representation and mediation of the vernacular form of the red-painted cottage in Finnish and Swedish architectural culture. Based on an examination of a wide range of material featuring such cottages, this chapter explores the important role of this building type as a mediator of transnational as well as national ideas during a period of almost 150 years. The tracing of how the idea of the red cottage developed historically reveals how an architectural type that originally had a marginal role in the vernacular culture of Scandinavia became codified as something that could define each nation’s architecture. When re-circulated back into the international context, it could be inscribed with ideas about Scandinavian characteristics as a combination of history and future, continuity and modernization.