ABSTRACT
Although architectural historiography has a long tradition in Sweden, it was not until the beginning of the twentieth century that it conveyed a comprehensive image of a domestic architecture with specic, national characteristics. Nationalistic currents inspired these endeavours, which were supported by recently established academic disciplines at the universities. A whole generation of newly graduated art historians were engaged in extensive projects to inventory the large stock of old buildings; which were examined, classied and eventually described in terms of national heritage. Moreover, it was not only universities that were engaged in this project, the cultural history museums also took an active part, through the presentation of concrete visions of national development through history, in exhibitions of artefacts and human environments. It is interesting to look closer at the image that was presented by the museums, and to discuss how their settings contributed to the image of a national identity. The Skogaholm manor, which was relocated to the open-air museum Skansen in the 1930s, is used here to illustrate how a theoretically dened Swedish canon was realized in the form of a full-scale setting.
