Friluftstaden

During the 1930s and ’40s the Swedish builder and inventor Eric Sigfrid Persson (1898-1983) developed a number of extremely progressive housing projects in Malmö. (Persson invented the perspektivfönster, a wide, easy-to-clean hinged window for high-rise buildings.) His visits to New York and the American suburbs convinced him that the high-rise approach did not constitute an appropriate solution for new housing estates. Together with a number of architects, whom he himself personally appointed, Persson designed and built a new estate, Friluftstaden (the open air city), where people would have an opportunity to live in contact with the earth, nature, vegetation, sun and air, in the middle of the city of Malmö…