In 1960, the Swedish furniture designer Bruno Mathsson built a small one-level summerhouse for himself and his wife Karin at Frösakull in southern Sweden. The house was an experiment and was also dubbed the “House of Tomorrow.” Even though not internationally renown today, the house was praised for its innovative architecture at the time and, as Martin Friedman writes in Design Quarterly in 1965: “Constructed over sand dunes and tucked into a forest of dwarf pines, it is undoubtedly one of the most remarkable buildings in modern Sweden”. 

 Frösakull reveals a tension between elegant, sleek American mid-century modernism and brutalist anti-aestheticism. The large, illusory window sections and the undulating, transparent ceiling co-exist with recycled steel rafters, wood slats nailed on slightly askew, and the most basic steel draining board. The building oozes pragmatism rather than aestheticism, and the builder underlines this with his affirmation that Frösakull was not built according to the drawing board but that a great deal was left to the handymen to solve. The design and the solutions are usually the simplest and cheapest possible, and they do not consistently adhere to predetermined notions of measurements, proportions or aesthetics.

Alongside the emergence of Swedish functionalism, another vital movement evolved: the fitness culture. Already at the Stockholm exhibition in 1930 a new anti-consumerist body culture centring on hygienism, outdoor sports, and nudism was presented in parallel with the new media and consumer culture. Bruno Mathsson was a veritable “health architect” who converted the plans of the health programme into a lifestyle.