page_title: Acceptera
section_title: A-Europe and B-Europe
hierarchical_section_title: Acceptera / Key Ideas / A-Europe and B-Europe
caption_attribution_description: The farmer Wilhelm Fredriksson, 73 years old, digging in a garden. Lantbrukaren Wilhelm Fredriksson, 73 år, som gräver i en trädgård. Parish (socken): Husby-Långhundra Province (landskap): Uppland Municipality (kommun): Knivsta County (län): Uppsala Photograph by: Einar Erici Date: 1934 Format: Print Kulturmiljöbild: 16001000285504 (Persistent URL) Read more about the photo database (in english): www.kms.raa.se/cocoon/bild/about.html
context_page_description: acceptera is a Swedish modern architecture manifesto written by architects Gunnar Asplund, Wolter Gahn, Sven Markelius, Eskil Sundahl, Uno Åhrén, and art historian Gregor Paulsson. Claiming that Swedish “building-art” has failed to keep pace with the revolutionary social and technological change sweeping Europe in the early 20th century, the authors argue that the production of housing and consumer goods must embrace a functionalist orientation in order to meet the particular cultural and material needs of both modern society and the modern individual. Combining social analysis with an iconoclastic critique of contemporary architecture and handicraft, acceptera ardently calls upon its readers not to shrink back from modernity, but rather to “accept the reality that exists—only in that way have we any prospect of mastering it, taking it in hand, and altering it to create a culture that offers an adaptable tool for life.”
  The manifesto was written in connection with, and published shortly after, the 1930 Stockholm Exhibition.
context_section_description: In outlining the epochal shifts which shaped modern European society, the authors describe the continent as consisting of two irreconcilable but nevertheless interdependent domains: “A-Europe” and “B-Europe”. A-Europe, they argue, is made up of the industrialized urban centers and towns of the continent which are linked by railroad, and through which the most striking evidence of modernization is visible. Unlike B-Europe, it has been remade in modernity and “resembles a great organism in which all the functions are at the same time specialized and centralized and where all the cells, from the solitary farm to the immense factory or bank, are dependent on each other”.
  In contrast, B-Europe is made up of the isolated agricultural communities whose major cultural patterns have largely remained the same through the past few centuries. It is unorganized and fragmented, standing beside unified A-Europe as “an amalgam of autonomous undertakings and alternating ethnic groups with no other unifying forces than religion and the powers-that-be, the latter often only by virtue over their swords”.  Bringing this division closer to home, the authors describe Sweden itself as a combination of “Sweden-then” and “Sweden-now”.
  For the purposes of the manifesto, the most critical outcome of this sociocultural division of Europe into its “A” and “B” aspects is the fact that the demographic, technological, and social transformations in A-Europe are “creating a new world” and “a new type of individual” who require “building-art” shaped “according to the conditions that have created them”.
caption: B-Europe: traditional, isolated, anachronistic
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