acceptera (1931) is a Swedish modern architecture manifesto written by architects Gunnar Asplund, Wolter Gahn, Sven Markelius, Eskil Sundahl, Uno Åhrén, and art historian Gregor Paulsson.

Combining social analysis with an iconoclastic critique of contemporary architecture and handicraft, acceptera ardently calls upon its readers not to shrink back from modernity, but rather to “accept the reality that exists—only in that way have we any prospect of mastering it, taking it in hand, and altering it to create a culture that offers an adaptable tool for life.”[1] The manifesto was written in connection with, and published shortly after, the 1930 Stockholm Exhibition.

Each of acceptera’s authors played a role in the organization of the exhibition, and the manifesto figured largely as an attempt to further elaborate on the functionalist style and philosophy which they had hoped to model in its pavilions for the Swedish public.

The manifesto might therefore be read as both an attempt to clarify the key tenets of functionalism and an effort to persuade an undecided public of the dire need to revolutionize design and construction.

Åhrén, also an established architect and urban planner, would later become the collaborator of Nobel Prize-winning sociologist Gunnar Myrdal, when the two co-wrote "The Housing Question as a Social Planning Problem" in 1934.

Together, these six men made up the “new establishment” in 1930s Swedish architecture,[3] and in the collective spirit of the work, they wrote acceptera as a group, leaving the details of the authorial division of labor largely uncertain.

The authors question how the contradictory anthropological theories of family proffered by Lewis Henry Morgan, Edvard Westermarck, and Robert Briffault could have all been acknowledged as true at different times and in different societies.

They also sought to show that this pragmatic orientation to modernity is not some import from elsewhere or a philosophical innovation, but rather is a particularly domestic approach rooted in traditional Swedish values of “straightforwardness, moderation, and friendliness".

[5] In outlining the epochal shifts which shaped modern European society, the authors describe the continent as consisting of two irreconcilable but nevertheless interdependent domains: “A-Europe” and “B-Europe”.

Unlike B-Europe, it has been remade in modernity and “resembles a great organism in which all the functions are at the same time specialized and centralized and where all the cells, from the solitary farm to the immense factory or bank, are dependent on each other”.

In their minds, people must achieve a state in which they "no longer conceive of the aesthetic as something that comes from above to merge with the technical, which is of lower origin, but regard every form that does not offer a satisfactory expression of its function as quite simply deficient”.

The manifesto argues that the forces driving cultural and technological shifts in Sweden are not on some distant horizon, but instead exist in the present and shape social conditions and contingencies which must be accepted—hence, the title—and addressed if “building-art” and modernity are to be reconciled and brought into productive harmony.

acceptera, which embedded these ideas in a playful but trenchant critique of contemporary Swedish architecture, was instrumental in distilling key tenets of the functionalist perspective into a simple imperative: accept.