Scandi Noir and Scandinavian Modernism: Light, Landscape and Colour

Scandinavian Modern — Newsletter 04

Recently I began reading Scandi noir novels for the first time. They are addictive: tightly written stories set within austere landscapes. I also realised that they offer an unexpected window into modernism, and Scandinavian design in particular.

The Scandi noir novel is not necessarily modernist literature. It often combines the thriller, the detective story and a macabre Gothic tone. Yet the genre can act as a conduit to Scandinavian modernism through the atmosphere and visual associations produced by its storytelling.

When a lone figure drives across a desolate snowscape, I see the prone, layered glass forms of the Danish designer Per Lütken, and the smoky grey glass associated with his work for Holmegaard. When Peter Høeg writes of ice and snow in Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow, I think of Tapio Wirkkala’s Avena vase for Iittala. Its textured surface was created with wooden moulds that the molten glass scorched and marked.

Scandi noir often bookends the day. Scenes begin in the mist of early morning and close with clandestine meetings at twilight. These are moments when light is muted and atonal. They occupy the same aesthetic ground as much Scandinavian design, where colour can feel interior and psychological rather than applied.

Glass absorbs as much as it reflects, a quality used repeatedly in Scandinavian objects. Light is equally central to modernist architecture, where it can appear cleansing, medicinal or enlightening—almost a physical plane, creating a chiaroscuro of form and shadow.

Mari Jungstedt captures this atmosphere in Unseen: “He looked out across the sea. It was grey and motionless. Exactly like the sky.” The stillness is visual, but it is also psychological.

Timo Sarpaneva often spoke of glassmaking in elemental terms. His work moves between broad landscapes and close observation: ice, bark, water and the textures of his Finnish surroundings.

For me, the relationship between Scandinavian modernism and Scandi noir is especially precise in Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow. Its protagonist feels separated from a language that once connected her to nature. Høeg introduces the Greenlandic word qanik for falling snow, suggesting that language can make visible differences that a universal vocabulary might flatten.

Modernism is often misunderstood as a single language that removed ornament and made everything look the same. Architecture even acquired the name “International Style”. Yet collectors of Scandinavian design know how strongly modern objects can express the local as well as the international.

Kaj Franck’s work is modernist in its clear lines and economy of ornament, but it also reflects Finnish culture, social ideals and craft. Its visual language is quite different from the modernism of the Italian glassmaker Archimede Seguso.

Objects in fiction can locate a character culturally. When Høeg places Royal Copenhagen porcelain beside a Georg Jensen silver teapot, the combination does more than describe wealth or taste. Georg Jensen is not Alessi or Rosenthal: the observation creates a sense of place.

Modernism takes conventional, often mundane objects and looks at them anew. The Aalto vase, designed by Alvar Aalto for the Karhula-Iittala competition in 1936, transforms the vase into a fluid, organic form. Its investigation of the everyday is not unlike the detective’s work: details are separated, examined and slowly rewoven into a narrative.

The uncoupling and reconfiguration found across modernism—from Edvard Munch to Verner Panton—can be understood partly as a response to new urban and industrial life.

Høeg writes, “In a big city you adopt a particular way of regarding the world.” His protagonist contrasts the focused city gaze with the broader vision used to scan ice or desert. That change in perception echoes modernism’s movement from the purely pictorial towards the tactile, visceral and psychological.

Scandi noir also helps us reconsider colour. Modernism is often imagined as monochrome, perhaps partly because so many of its early photographs were black and white. In reality, colour was frequently subtle and nuanced.

Even among the brighter colours of Riihimäki glass, it is often the quieter tones that resonate. Nanny Still’s Stella Polaris vase, introduced in the late 1960s, evokes constellations and expansive northern skies.

This connection with nature is rarely distant in Scandinavian design. Colour, especially in glass, can suggest something liminal and in flux: blue fog over dark water, or white ice flowers forming briefly on its surface.

Exploring contemporary Scandinavian fiction has broadened my understanding of Scandinavian modern design. Both teach us to notice the quality of light, the specificity of language and the small clues through which a place reveals itself.