Sigurd Lewerentz: Architect of Death and Life

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Campo-Ruiz, Ingrid (2015). Construction as a Prototype: the Novel Approach by Sigurd Lewerentz to Using Building Materials, Especially in Walls and Windows, 1920-72. Construction History 30 Nov (2015): 67-86. ISSN 0267-7768. A visit to the Woodland Cemetery is a carefully delineated journey through a landscape that Colin St John Wilson has called ‘tragic and sublime’. Visitors are embraced by funnel-shaped entrance walls and progress up an incline towards the loggia of the Crematorium. Straight ahead is a grassy mound topped with the birch forest known as ‘the grove of remembrance’. These apparently natural forms in fact took many years to prepare and are a central part of the architectural work of the Cemetery. A subtle romantic naturalism is key to the impact of the place: the mingling of forest and woodland, buildings and graves. And he challenges the “Marxist” paradigm that dogs a lot of modernisthistory: “It is of course true that buildings are signifiers of wealth and power structures. But art, likearchitecture, is not reducible to only this”. Long cites the paradigm-shifting recent work of art historiansAlexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood (from Anachronic Renaissance, 2010) emphasising “thepotential of art to be enduringly moving across time”, suggesting that: “It is this possibility of a‘conversation across time’ that Lewerentz holds out to us… His unique body of work, it seems to me, canbest be understood as a creative resistance to the rational project of building modern Sweden… throughhis architecture, Lewerentz embraced the full extent of what it means to be a citizen, to be human.” German architect Wilfried Wang recently praised its “invention of a cyclical procession for the mourners to affirm the continuity of life.” Lewerentz was involved with project development since the mid-1920s and won first place in two design competitions held in the mid-1930s. However, the client also liked the second-place entry by architects Erik Lallerstedt and David Helldén and asked Lewerentz to team up with them. The completed project is a hybrid of their two proposals.

This authoritative new monograph on Sigurd Lewerentz is based on extensive research undertaken at ArkDes, Sweden’s national center for architecture and design, where his archive and personal library are kept. It features a wealth of drawings and sketches, designs for furniture and interiors, model photographs, and more from his estate, most of which are published here for the first time, alongside new photographs of his realized buildings. Essays by leading experts explore Lewerentz’s life and work, his legacy, and lasting significance from a contemporary perspective.MFI was wondering whether Asplund’s death, in 1940, might have freed up Lewerentz’s imagination in some way? In the words of Adam Caruso, designer of the exhibition: “Lewerentz’s late projects represent an unprecedented integration of making and thought. Like Matisse, who advised young painters to cut off their tongues and communicate with brush, paint and canvas, Lewerentz was famously laconic. He did not teach and few of his own project descriptions survive. He built.”

Then [Colin St John] Sandy Wilson’s book came out, so that was another narrative, a more phenomenological reading of Lewerentz’s work. The outer vestibule is separated from the inner by large swing-doors of glass. In the inner vestibule are the cloakrooms, the counters of which have a total length of nearly 400 feet. In the middle of the vestibule, flanked by two broad marble stairs, which lead up to the foyer, stands Thalia, a work by Bror Marklund; he presents her full of life and, in deliberate contrast to convention, as slightly vulgar. The staircases leading up to the foyer are bounded by a white wrought-metal railing, which also runs round the foyer. This balustrade is repeated in the balcony. Along the inner wall of the foyer, beneath the balcony, runs a long series of concertina-doors which lead to the auditorium, while four doors in the inner vestibule lead to the lower stalls. Another three doors connect the foyer with a terrace communicating with the restaurant terrace, which seats 200 guests. The architects’ use of the natural landscape created an extraordinary tranquil beauty environment that had a profound influence on cemetery design throughout the world.The basis for the route through the cemetery is a long route leading from the ornamental colonnaded entrance that then splits, one way leading through a pastoral landscape, complete with a large pond and a tree-lined meditation hill, and the other up to a large detached granite cross and the abstract portico of the crematorium and the chapels of the Holy Cross, Faith, and Hope. Free AHMM carbon calculator covers full project lifecycle Free AHMM carbon calculator covers full project lifecycleThe goal of this exhibit and publication was to situate the building’s position within a greater body of Scandinavian and Euro-pean architecture whose continued lineage remains valid within contemporary architectural practice and discourse. Through invited writings from most of the existing scholars of his work. Along with Göritz and Matteson, Hall is working on an expanded version of this content for publication with ACTAR, Barcelona in 2020. Campo-Ruiz, Ingrid (2015). From Tradition to Innovation: Lewerentz’s Designs of Ritual Spaces in Sweden, 1914-1966. The Journal of Architecture 20/1 (2015): 73-91. ISBN 978-1-138-80283-4. DOI:10.1080/13602365.2015.1009483.

This authoritative new monograph on Sigurd Lewerentz is based on extensive research undertaken at ArkDes, Sweden’s national centre for architecture and design, where his archive and personal library are being kept. It features a wealth of drawings and sketches, designs for furniture and interiors, model photographs etc. from his estate, most of which published here for the first time, as well as with newly taken photographs of his realised buildings. Essays by leading experts explore Lewerentz’s life and work, his legacy and lasting significance from today’s perspective. is very good on the quotidian and daily struggles ofarchitectural practise as a business – “… by now he was all too used to difficult, protracted commissions”– and very strong on historical facts, yet somewhat weaker on interpretation of the symbolic meaning ofLewerentz’s work. He sometimes seems (inadvertently?) content to remain trapped in the binaryfunctionalist opposition of “purely aesthetic” vs. “practical considerations”.A few of us were teachers so our students got interested in it as well. It’s interesting that it was in Britain that there was this real attention to Lewerentz’s work, because much later, in Holland and in Switzerland, there were reassessments of Alison and Peter Smithson, let’s say, and Lewerentz was part of that somehow. His connection to the Smithsons and to Brutalism is rather slight, I think, but they knew the work, they talked about it. The museum just opened a new, comprehensive exhibition, Sigurd Lewerentz: Architect of Death and Life, of the life and work of Lewerentz, from his student days in the 1900s until his death in 1975. It includes nearly 400 architectural drawings on display, as well as models, furniture, many artworks from his buildings, lamps, models, and photography, and is the biggest exhibition ever about a Swedish architect. In this second installment of his revamped “ Beyond London” column for ArchDaily, Simon Henley of London-based practice Henley Halebrown discusses a potential influence that might help UK architects combat the economic hegemony currently afflicting the country – turning for moral guidance to the Brutalists of the 1960s. He continued to work at competition proposals and furniture designs until shortly before his death in Lund, Sweden during 1975. [6] [7]