Founded already in 1962, The Swedish Museum of Architecture constitutes an intriguing fore-runner to the international proliferation of architectural institutions collecting modern architecture's heritage in the late twentieth century. As a founding member and longstanding supporter of the International Confederation of Architecture Museums (ICAM), the museum actively contributed to defining architecture institutions’ role and nature throughout the 1980s and 90s. Simultaneously, it entered a slow but sure phase of expansion, which notably included a significant growth of the museum’s drawing collection and was eventually crowned by the dramatically enlarged premises designed by Rafael Moneo opened in 1998. Today, ArkDes, The Swedish Centre for Architecture and Design (the name and instruction changed in 2013), holds one of the most extensive architectural drawing collections in the world.

This chapter engages with the changing role of architectural drawings to establish and expand this architectural institution. The Museum developed from its initial experimental young years and difficulties to create, properly store and safeguard a collection to a mature museum protecting the legacy of modern Swedish architecture and guarding a collection of significant value. For decades, the Museum formed a discursive interface to advance the architecture discipline. In the Museum, state (welfare) politics was juxtaposed with individual stakeholders’ politics, and the international appreciation of architectural drawings as collectible and marketable art objects was sometimes at odds with national heritage issues. In embracing these entanglements, the chapter speculates on the reciprocity between an institutional framework and its contents; on how the collection and its highlights once helped constructing the institution, and vice versa, how the museum became instrumental in promoting and constructing both the legacy of the individual architects in the archives and national histories of architecture. 

The chapter is based on interviews with former museum directors Bengt O. H. Johansson (director 1964-1978) and Jöran Lindvall (director 1985-1999) as well as archivist Ulla Eliasson and curator Christina Engfors.