Education Quote by Arne Jacobsen

Boarding school, in Jacobsen's telling, is less a trauma to confess than a material to build with: comradeship as the warm grain, hard training as the tensile steel. The line has the measured understatement of someone who designed chairs and buildings to outlast fashion. He isn’t romanticizing suffering; he’s describing a formative system that produces "resistance" the way good construction does - by combining load-bearing discipline with social glue.

The phrasing matters. "Besides" signals an aside, a casual footnote that quietly elevates adversity into a credential. "Especially then" nods to a harsher early-20th-century regime without dramatizing it. That restraint is its own argument: you don’t earn resilience by narrating it loudly; you prove it by functioning.

Subtextually, Jacobsen is translating a personal biography into a professional ethic. Modernist architecture was obsessed with clarity, endurance, and the honest expression of structure. His boarding-school memory offers a human version of that: endurance forged not just through solitary toughness, but through group life - "fine comradeship" - that makes austerity tolerable and, eventually, useful.

Culturally, it’s a distinctly Scandinavian way of justifying rigor: not as individual domination, but as shared training toward competence. The sentimental part is there, but it’s disciplined too. He’s pointing to a paradox that runs through his work: comfort that doesn’t collapse into softness, elegance that’s been stress-tested.