Among the many surprising details to be found in Sigurd Lewerentz: Architect of Death and Life, a new book from Stockholm’s ArkDes museum, is a 1937 advertisement for Idesta, a brand of metal door and window units created by the architect Sigurd Lewerentz and civil engineer Claës Kreuger in 1929. The advertisement ran in the Swedish daily Svenska Dagbladet, and was created to promote Idesta’s shopfronts. “Glass and stainless steel are in her blood,” it declares (the “her” here being the modern consumer), while also displaying a prominent drawing of a contemporary shopfront. “Modernise the facade now!” the advert implores its readers.

Assuming you can swallow its gender politics, there is nothing particularly strange about the advert itself – it arrived partway through a decade in which modernism made firm inroads into Swedish architecture, heralded by the triumphant 1930 Stockholm Exhibition. What may be surprising to contemporary readers, however, is to learn of the advert’s connection to Sigurd Lewerentz (1885-1975), a veritable giant of 20th-century Swedish architecture. Although Lewerentz was heavily involved in the creation of the Stockholm Exhibition, he is not typically associated with the more commercial aspects of modernism. “Lewerentz’s obstinate refusal to fit easily into stylistic categories causes problems for those trying to give an overview of Swedish modernism,” writes Kieran Long, ArkDes’s director and one of the book’s authors in his introduction to the publication. “[Not] pure enough in his modernity” for some, Long notes, Lewerentz created a body of work that was difficult to categorise within familiar -isms, and which was, instead, “so poetically, symbolically and materially charged that a lifetime could be spent contemplating it”. Lewerentz was, in the public imagination, “an obsessive, brilliant artist who spoke little and was fixated on details,” notes Johan Örn, one of Long’s co-authors. And yet here he was flogging shopfronts?

By the time of his death in 1975, Lewerentz had already begun to assume a sage-like role in Sweden’s architecture history. “Photographs from that era of a stooped Lewerentz, wearing a long black overcoat and holding a cigar in his gnarled hand,” writes Örn, “became the image of the architect that imprinted itself on the popular imagination.” Writing in Sydsvenska Dagbladet in December 1966, the critic Folke Edwards noted that “[for] many – especially younger – architects who have become frustrated and disillusioned by the conditions of the present, with its hardening standardisation requirements and increasingly narrow scope for a creative imagination, Sigurd Lewerentz appears as the great liberator, the enviable Master, with free hands to create superb architectural works of art and to realise the bittersweet dream that almost every architect harbours.”

Interior perspective, gouache, watercolour and pencil on cardboard (courtesy of ArkDes).

In part, this reputation was driven by Lewerentz’s most celebrated works, four of which have come to define his reputation. There were the two great, brick churches: St Mark’s, Björkhagen (1960), and St Peter’s, Klippan (1966). The former church drew praise upon its completion from the critic Eva von Zweigbergk for its “medieval” sense of spirituality, which she predicted would see it “become a place of pilgrimage for all friends of architecture”; the latter was selected by writer Poul Erik Skriver as evidence that Lewerentz was a modern-day William Morris, able to create architecture that could serve as a “a stance against industrialisation, perhaps, but also a generally valid, humanistic view”. Alongside these churches are the two cemeteries. Stockholm’s Woodland Cemetery, for which Lewerentz won the design competition in 1915 with Gunnar Asplund, includes a number of Lewerentz’s designs, including the Resurrection Chapel (1925), a tall slender facade whose smooth walls are brought into relief by its classical portico. Malmö Eastern Cemetery, for which Lewerentz won the competition in 1916, saw the architect focus on emphasising and refining the qualities of the site’s flat landscape, while also executing a series of chapels, a crematorium and flower kiosk for the project over the course of several decades. In the public imagination (and, to an extent, within wider architectural discourse too), Lewerentz is defined by these works: he is an “architect of death”, whose transcendent works and resistance towards theorising or otherwise explaining his projects in print, developed into mystique and mythologising. “He has become,” to return to Edwards, “a symbol of the freedom that has been lost.”

“Photographs of a stooped Lewerentz, wearing a long black overcoat and holding a cigar in his gnarled hand became the images of the architect.”

— Johan Örn

Architect of Life and Death, which accompanies a major exhibition that opened at ArkDes on 1 October 2021, is an attempt to redress this mythology and provide a more encompassing assessment of Lewerentz’s work. Built from painstaking research into the architect’s drawings, personal archive and library (which are held in ArkDes’s collections), as well as careful study of the academic literature surrounding Lewerentz’s work, it is a project that knocks down the barriers imposed by the Lewerentz myth and restores the man and his work to their rich, full complexity. As regards its accompanying publication, the famous projects are all there, albeit photographed anew by architectural photographer Johan Dehlin, but so too is Lewerentz’s work with Idesta; his designs for pianos, buses, wallpaper, furniture, posters, and neon signs; as well as the host of commercial interiors and shopfronts he created through Blokk (none of which now survive), a company he set up in 1930 and whose success saw the trade magazine Byggnadsvärlden identify Lewerentz as a “specialist in shop architecture”. It is a far cry from the spiritual majesty of St Paul’s or the Woodland Cemetery, but then “Lewerentz was much more than the author of idiosyncratic churches and cemeteries,” as Long notes in his introduction to the book. “Contrary to many of the clichés, we have discovered an architect who was at the heart of Swedish architectural culture, and was deeply engaged with questions of urban life in a modern metropolis, trying to balance new technology with the need for enduring symbols. Alongside the architecture of death, Lewerentz was concerned with an architecture that provides settings for the lives of modern citizens, with all their contradictions, beliefs, anxieties, fleeting pleasures.”

Markuskyrkan, Björkhagen, Stockholm, 1960.

The Lewerentz myth is tantalising: an architectural sage whose works revealed the full profundity of the discipline, and whose acolytes saw “their master ‘as equal – or even superior to – the pioneers of modern architecture’,” as Edwards observed. Yet the complexity and contradictions of Lewerentz that are brought to light by Architect of Life and Death are richer, stranger and ultimately more satisfying. At the time of Lewerentz’s death on 29 December 1975, his friend and follower Bernt Nyberg was working on a multi-volume book exploring his architecture. For the section on St Peter’s, Nyberg collaborated with the architect Per-Olof Olsson, who expressed reservations when shown a mock-up of the publication. “All in all, it’s nice but maybe a little too nice,” Olsson wrote in a 1976 letter. “I mean, one should be careful about making a book that revolves so strongly around the persona of Lewerentz. There should be fewer pictures of the cigar-smoking.” Forty-five years on, ArkDes has achieved just this.

To explore Sigurd Lewerentz: Architect of Death and Life further, Disegno convened a roundtable focused on Lewerentz’s enduring influence and reception within architecture. Present on the panel were architects from around the world, all of whom are admirers of, or have studied, Lewerentz’s work and been influenced by his practice.

The panel are:

Ingrid Campo Ruiz is a practising architect and a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions fellow at KTH School of Architecture and ArkDes, Stockholm. Her PhD thesis focused on Lewerentz’s work in Mälmo, and she has contributed a number of articles about Lewerentz’s work to peer-reviewed journals.

Yung Ho Chang is the founding partner and principal architect of Atelier Feichang Jianzhu (FCJZ). He has worked extensively within education, heading the architecture department at MIT between 2005 and 2010, as well as serving as Pritzker Prize jury member from 2012 to 2017.

Tony Fretton is the founding partner of Tony Fretton Architects, as well as emeritus professor at TU Delft and visiting professor at UEL. Alongside his own work on projects such as the Lisson Gallery and Camden Arts Centre, he has been a passionate and informed advocate for Lewerentz’s work.

Kieran Long is the director of ArkDes, the Swedish national centre for architecture and design. Together with Johan Örn, he is the curator of Sigurd Lewerentz: Architect of Death and Life, with the pair having authored the accompanying publication with Mikael Andersson.

Lyndon Neri is a founding partner of Neri&Hu Design and Research Office. Working with his partner Rossana Hu, Neri is active across architecture, furniture and industrial design, as well as teaching at universities including the Harvard Graduate School of Designand Yale School of Architecture.

What value does Sigurd Lewerentz have for contemporary architecture?

Tony Fretton Very little architecture achieves greatness. There’s a lot of very good architecture, but greatness is rare, just as it’s rare in people. So people like Mies van der Rohe and Sigurd Lewerentz are important because they show the capacity or the possibility of architecture to talk culturally and experientially. And that’s especially important now, when a lot of architecture is very superficial and people who should really know better – like art-museum directors – are seduced by it. We’re seeing a lot of architecture that has no social responsibility.

Yung Ho Chang I was a student at Berkeley in the early 80s, where I had a Swedish professor called Lars Lerup. I learned a few names from him, of whom Lewerentz was one. At the time, it didn’t do much for me, except that I remembered the name. It was only about eight or nine years ago, when I had an opportunity to be in Sweden to see the Woodland Cemetery and the two remarkable churches, that I realised what kind of architect Lewerentz was. I was deeply moved. When you visit these buildings, it’s almost as if the architect is talking to you. I see him as a very special architect. Mr Fretton, you used the word “superficial” to comment on some of the contemporary work of architects and I feel the same way. I would say that Lewerentz is a “fundamentalist” architect because he believes in something so profoundly fundamental about architecture, which a lot of people today have forgotten.

Lyndon Neri I’m one generation younger than Yung Ho, but I was also taught by Lars Lerup. I remember that during one of his reviews at Berkeley, he proclaimed that he was really confounded by my presentation. He said, “This is a Lewerentz quandary that I could not demystify.” I absolutely did not understand where he was going with this. I didn’t even know who Lewerentz was, let alone the quandary. Being a good Asian student, I went to the library to research Lewerentz. For the next two days, I tried to understand whether that comment was positive or negative. What I learned was that Lewerentz had the ability to allow his buildings to speak for themselves; this immense talent to work on his buildings, landscapes, interiors, details and furniture with the same intensity and rigour.

Ingrid Campo Ruiz In terms of my interest in Lewerentz, I initiated new research into Malmö Eastern Cemetery, which had previously been considered a secondary project in his career. So my PhD thesis and subsequent articles in peer-reviewed journals have focused on Lewerentz’s works, assessing the relationship between his projects and their sites, and addressing the potential of architectural limits to connect a project with significant areas of people’s lives. Malmö Eastern Cemetery is a central project in Lewerentz’s career because, throughout its almost 60 years of construction, it yielded broader experiments than his other, shorter projects – from there, I have gone on to assess Lewerentz’s entire body of work, including religious and secular buildings, through field work and archival analysis in Sweden. I would like to congratulate the authors and the team at ArkDes for their new book and its valuable contribution to ongoing research on Lewerentz.

Kieran Long Sigurd Lewerentz is probably the greatest architect in Sweden’s history, and one of the great architects of the modern period, full stop. There are those four works that people tend to focus on, which have to do with the most profound understanding of our human souls and the relationship of architecture to existential questions, and they’re very brilliant. But as soon as we started looking into Lewerentz’s archive, we realised that there’s a whole part of the chronology which isn’t really a part of the critical narrative. He also designed a lot of shops, a lot of hotels – commercial architecture, quite simply, which doesn’t survive because many of those interiors are not preserved in Sweden. If your building is listed, the interior is not listed with it, so very few of the interiors and shopfronts and department stores that he designed survive. But we wanted to explore this architecture of, I would say, a city life or a modernist citizen. He was as much a part of imagining this as he was his late works and his great cemeteries.

Lyndon I find it interesting that he was extremely prolific. Wilfried Wang [an influential writer on Lewerentz’s work, who penned the introductory essay to the two-volume Architect Sigurd Lewerentz (1997) and a+u: Sigurd Lewerentz Drawing Collection 1+2 (2016), ed.] said that it was a very limited body of work, but it’s not actually. Many of his works, the shopfronts and the retail, we just don’t know. So there’s a breadth to his work, but there’s also a precision. I think it was Colin St John [see Sigurd Lewerentz, 1885-1975: The Dilemma of Classicism (1989), ed.] who wrote about Lewerentz by saying that his classicism was more refined, more deeply felt, more original than that of any of his contemporaries; his late work was more austere than any minimalist, more uncompromising than any brutalist. Reyner Banham completely dismissed him [Banham described St Mark’s in Björkhagen as the “hardest case” in The New Brutalism (1966), capturing his difficulty in fitting him into a historical narrative, ed.], because he could not group him as part of that brutalist movement. I think it’s that relevance which people can look at, because with Corbu, you either like him or you don’t. Mies is the same. But with Lewerentz, he surprises you. My youngest boy, who is thinking of studying urban design, was captivated by the narrative of and efficient transport system. We characterise Lewerentz in the book with the Swedish word “motståndsman”. It doesn’t translate well, but it’s a person in resistance to the orthodoxies of their time in productive and interesting ways. Lewerentz is not exactly a rebel – he was also an institutional figure, won all the big prizes in Sweden, and was part of the establishment – but his work was, artistically, in creative resistance to the social-democratic project. What is interesting in Lewerentz’s work is that rather than committing himself to a certain way of doing things, he holds them in tension. You have this sense that he’s a deeply literate classicist, but he makes it almost disappear. The Resurrection Chapel’s internal decoration is so thin, it begins to fade into the wall, for example – it’s almost not there, but of course it’s very much there. There’s this sense of things being held in productive tension with each other. That’s certainly true of the cemeteries, which I think comes from them being works that took his whole life to complete: 40 or 50 years. In these projects you begin to see the tensions, I think, in the history of Swedish culture – the tension between national romanticism and the modern culture that was built on top of that; the tension between the growth of the city and a desire to create these narrative, almost mythical landscapes. It’s all written into the architecture and it’s extraordinary to see work like that.

Perspective (grocery store), watercolour, gouache and pencil on cardboard (courtesy of ArkDes).

Ingrid The way Lewerentz innovated is relevant for architects. Whereas other approaches have innovated by making a drastic break with the past, Lewerentz used tradition to produce novel designs. He transformed old construction methods to address the specifics of his time and place, and used everyday materials in non-conventional ways. In my research, for instance, I have shown that Lewerentz used both local and foreign resources and simple design solutions, adapting them to the specifics of users’ needs. He enhanced significant areas of everyday life through elements as quotidian as a window and as spiritual as a baptismal font. His projects established connections between the existing topography, local traditions, urban transformation and emerging social needs in a non- conformist way. In Malmö, for instance, you see an enormous landscape with barely any monuments in the traditional sense. Instead, the connection between the person and the landscape prevails.

Kieran Is it possible to be Lewerentz today? No, but that’s because architecture itself, at least in Sweden, is not strong enough. Like today, Lewerentz lived in a time of industrialised construction and unwilling institutional clients, but the people who came into contact with him wanted to make the things he designed. They wanted to make those things real. We actually found one very small detail in the collection – a song that was composed for the topping-out ceremony (the completion of the roof) of St Mark’s. So there is this song, in which the client is mentioned and the bricklayers and everybody else, and then there’s a verse about Lewerentz. It’s all about how, try as they might, they can’t get Lewerentz to tell them how the project is going to turn out in the end, but they’re pretty sure it will be fine. Just imagine everybody working on that project, then singing a song to him as a kind of joke – he was definitely somebody who made decisions late on, who changed his mind, who wasn’t sure, and who was doubtful about his own work. But his collaborators believed in his doubt and in his process. They went with him down that road and made these works with him in a time when Sweden was full of industrialised building techniques. I think that’s his value. He shows us a way of practising that inspired others to make these works the works they became. They’re not all by his hand, but he had the artistry to inspire them.

Ernst Malmströms familjegrav, Norra begravningsplatsen, Stockholm, 1927.

Tony I don’t think Lewerentz necessarily talks to all architects, however. I think that, like a lot of very focused artists, many people just wouldn’t get it. If I show Lewerentz to my students, sometimes they are taken by it and sometimes they’re not. But that is the condition of somebody very great: they will not be widely understood.

Kieran Tony, my own first consciousness of Lewerentz is partly your fault. It was architects such as yourself and Adam Caruso, and then a younger generation of architects in London who found his work interesting, which brought him to my attention. What do you think it meant to those generations of architects?

Tony Well, I think for a fairly small group, such as Sergison Bates and others who worked hard at meaning and architecture, he was some kind of dynamo. The effect of a substantial architect on other practitioners is not direct. It’s a kind of encouragement. If I just digress a little, the architect Bernt Nyberg, who was Lewerentz’s great friend in later life, did work in Lewerentz’s late style and I think that was a mistake. Lewerentz can offer nothing stylistically, in the way that Corbusier could for the generation of architects in the 50s and 60s. But Lewerentz did offer a kind of stimulus for the architecture that you’re describing. At that time, surprisingly, the space for architectural innovation was very open in London, and there was a significant creative moment. Creative minds are energised by other great practitioners, not just in architecture, and l take courage from that. Lewerentz seemed to offer a sense of there being great possibilities in architectural expression.

Lyndon I find Lewerentz’s work to be full of paradox. This morning, just out of curiosity, I went around my office and asked the young architects if they know Lewerentz. To my surprise, 80 per cent did – clearly I have the right people in my practice. But if you were to ask them which projects they like, you’d be surprised. You think it’s all going to be St Mark’s and St Peter’s, but it’s not. The National Insurance Board building held a lot of ground. The Flower Kiosk held a lot of ground. And to my surprise, the Resurrection Chapel had some votes. I asked two people who voted for the Resurrection Chapel, why? And one said, “He was very precise with his classicism, yet despite that, he was also very clear about the building next door to it. It was not classical anymore.”

Interior perspective, rental apartment No. 2, watercolour and pencil on cardboard (courtesy of ArkDes).

Ingrid Lewerentz’s projects are excellent and some have received exceptional praise. Among many other awards, he received the Kasper Sahlin Prize in 1962 – the highest possible award for architects in Sweden – for his design of Markuskyrkan [the original Swedish name for St Mark’s, ed.], while the Woodland Cemetery was eventually recognised as a Unesco World Heritage Site. He did have a specific personal interest in churches and cemeteries – he designed 21 cemeteries, of which six were built, and had an extensive personal collection of books about cemeteries and churches. At Malmö, he also found professional allies who supported his design initiatives.

Kieran The mythology of Lewerentz is really the theme of my introduction to the book and I think my conclusion is that we make the myths you need in our field. There was a moment where Lewerentz represented craftsmanship, commitment to material, commitment to care, and collaboration with bricklayers and so on, at a time when Sweden needed examples of that because we were going in the opposite direction. And I think what Tony mentioned about London was the same thing, where Lewerentz was useful for a group of London practitioners. In Lewerentz’s particular case, however, it only captures a part of him. He also always dressed elegantly. He always had a grand piano in his house. He was a rather grand figure. His grandchildren talk about meeting him and always being struck by how nice his shoes were. He lived in the most fashionable addresses in Stockholm. He enjoyed fine things. In Sweden, there can be a real suspicion of pleasure. We have to be equal to the point of not allowing people to have nice shoes and so on. So celebrity is a problem for people here, and you have to play up the, “Oh, he’s very profound and speaks to the soul.” Yes, but he also speaks to having nice shoes.

Tony The lack of a spoken or written record by Lewerentz makes us guilty of turning Lewerentz into something we want: a rebel or a mystic. When I heard that Nyberg had made extensive film and tape recordings of Lewerentz with a view to making a publication, I hoped that this situation could be corrected. Kieran, was that material available to you when you were making the publication and did it give you access to Lewerentz’s thinking?

Lewerentz during a visit to a building site in Klippan (courtesy of ArkDes).

Kieran It’s interesting, because this is seen as the Holy Grail. Everybody’s always known there were these interviews with Lewerentz and even some phone calls that Nyberg recorded, seemingly without Lewerentz knowing. We’ve got those recordings. He was very old by that point, it’s right at the end of his life, but we’ll have some small sections of them in the exhibition. They’re not tremendously revealing about the work, but they are very telling about who Lewerentz was. He constantly avoids answering questions directly. Nyberg plays the willing disciple, asking questions like, “Tell me about the famous windows (at St Peter’s). Where did they come from?” And Lewerentz starts saying, “Oh, I don’t know, I don’t know. I remember in Berlin, we used to go to these boxing matches and, ah, they were fun.” Suddenly he’s somewhere else. Very charming and very compelling, but he’s a person avoiding the question all the time. We’re making a television documentary now, which more of that stuff will be in, but there’s no Rosetta stone in there.

Tony His lack of response reinforces something that I have been thinking recently. Currently there can be an anxiety about appreciation of architectural objects in themselves and pressure to replace it with verbal narratives, and more currently with narratives of social utility. An artist board member of an arts centre we designed said that while he accepted the necessity for social responsiveness, there always needs to be a space where an artist can just be an artist. In your text, Kieran, you talk about Anachronic Renaissance [a 2010 book by Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Woodand, which argues that art history’s focus on chronology and historical context obscures the capacity for a work to serve as a “conversation across time”, ed.], and make the point that we have to find a way to look at the work for what it is. Lewerentz was internalised as a thinker and not explicit, even to himself, but as a highly intelligent creative architect his only duty was just to be himself.

Ingrid Lewerentz left behind hardly any explanations of his architecture, which has opened up the possibility of many interpretations of his work. Although enthusiastic about practical skills, he was distrustful of excessive theoretical speculation. So I based my own research on field work, documentation that I found in more than 15 archives and libraries, and contact with people who knew Lewerentz closely. I also looked at his personal collection of newspaper clippings about philosophy, religion and politics, and his photographs, letters and books, which give a broader perspective of his way of approaching life and architecture. I found, for example, a letter from Lewerentz to Bruno Zevi [an architect and influential critic and historian, ed.] from 1949, after Zevi had asked him to write an article forhismagazine,Metron-architettura.Lewerentz replied, “I have no means of finding time to write anything for your magazine.” Recently, a number of other researchers have also produced evidence- based PhD theses on Lewerentz, including Hector Fernández Elorza and José Quintanilla in Spain, and Carlotta Torricelli in Italy, after the initial cornerstone publications, such as those by Janne Ahlin, Caroline Constant, Colin St John Wilson, Nicola Flora, Paolo Giardello and Gennaro Postiglione.

Yung Ho The architect was silent, but his buildings are not. And if we could truly talk about architecture with words, then we wouldn’t need architecture. Architecture is an experience, it’s material, tangible, temporal and spatial. It’s about being there and experiencing it. That’s really what design is about. I’m a little critical of academia, of which I’m a part myself, because there’s so much rhetoric that it really dilutes architecture. If there’s something we could learn from Lewerentz, it’s to have faith in the physicality of architecture. Explanation is not as necessary as we now tend to think it is.

Tony An architect like Lewerentz makes a statement in material. The value of commentators is that they find things in the work that the architect didn’t see that have a place in the formation of cultural knowledge. That is where I see the conjunction of writing and architecture. Design always comes first and the interpretation is elucidation. Reading Kieran’s book will make me understand Lewerentz more deeply. That’s the right kind of achievement – to start with the work, how it was made and how it affects, then read the commentaries.

Kieran This question of silent or not silent is such an interesting theme, but as a profession we have to be cautious to not equate silence in words with a lack of rhetoric. Lewerentz is a master of rhetoric, just not in written language. We did a little project that will be shown at the very beginning of the exhibition, in which students drew all of the floors of St Mark’s. St Mark’s has a different floor in every room and many different tile layouts outside the building, but we have no drawings of them because they were making these floors on site, with the workmen responding to oral instruction. But as we drew them, you realise there’s a whole language of thresholds, of territories, of theatrical reminders of medieval church floors and in particular early renaissance Cosmatesque Italian church floors. They become these distant echoes of historical practices, which are absolutely rhetorical. They’re removed from any kind of architectural quotation, but this is rhetoric of its own kind – you just need to read a different language to understand it, and that language is architecture. That’s what I think is so valuable about his work. We must believe that our field has this potential. It has this power and we gamble it away at our own risk.

Yung Ho One very important aspect of architecture today is that it’s an open discipline. It prepares people to do things materially and visually in all ways. As well as an architect, Lewerentz was a designer and he made a beautiful clock for the National Insurance Board building, for instance, while some of his handrails were designed as if they were furniture pieces. I think Lewerentz serves as a very good example of this openness – architecture is about how one may engage the physical world in general.

Lyndon What’s interesting about your book, Kieran, was discovering all these other things about Lewerentz. I did not know that he did a lot of interiors, a lot of hotels, and a lot of shopfronts under his company Blokk. And of course, what was really comforting was that when he was 55 years old, when he seemed disillusioned with architecture, he formed Idesta. That just fascinated me. All of a sudden, he became a friend to all architects, because he was detailing for them. I saw this interdisciplinary side of Lewerentz, which I had never known about. Before, it had always been St Mark’s and St Peter’s, which we’re all aware of, or the Flower Kiosk. It was very comforting to see the diversity and amazing breadth of work that he brought to the table.

Kieran As I mentioned, Lewerentz was interested in the extremes of what it meant to be a human being. You see that in the shops and you see that in the drawings of the interiors: people having fun, being vain, being bored, these kinds of ordinary emotions that we don’t see much in architecture. That’s his thinking and that’s what I mean about the most trivial and the most profound parts of being a human being, because being a human is both of those things. There’s not much in the middle. We’re either extremely shallow or extremely profound, and that’s the best of us. Popular culture is the best of us. And those ceremonies of death and marriage and so on are the best of us. The rest of it’s just work. And that’s what I think the myth about Lewerentz misses. If you just let him be a priest on a mountain, who doesn’t say anything and just makes beautiful churches, you miss all of
this playfulness and you miss all of this fantastic stuff that he also allowed to be architecture.

Lyndon It has actually made me feel better about and justify aspects of my practice. We’re designing a piano for Steinway, but for the longest time I kept that a secret because, as serious architects, you have to be a priest out on the mountain. And the fact that he had three kids, two sons and one daughter, like me. And the idea that he was a loving husband with a beautiful wife, as opposed to this whole myth of architects having multiple wives or affairs that seems so prevalent. It seems like the Frank Lloyd Wrights or Louis Kahns of our world are more interesting, but Lewerentz poses a completely different option. It was very refreshing to see that he was also helping other architects and being a salesperson for Idesta, trying to convince people that, “Look, I will make your building better by designing all this hardware.” It breaks away from this myth of the architect as an egotistical prima donna. And yet he could also build beautiful buildings, which is so liberating. And that’s the reason why your book, Kieran, blew open this idea and showed that it’s not just about death. It’s not just about St Mark’s, St Peter’s and Woodland, but it’s also about the life, because I do like my shoes and I do like my fashion. When Mies van der Rohe left for the US, you have to remember that he came from the remnants of the Bauhaus school of thinking where social housing was important. And for him to be in the US and be given the Seagram office building was a cardinal sin among his peers. To be given Farnsworth House, a private home for the super-rich? You can imagine that his peers probably didn’t want to be friends with him after he took those commissions, but he changed the very conception of what a single family home is with Farnsworth House and the notion of an office with the Seagram building. I always argue that, when you come to China, don’t wait to be offered a museum. If people give you a karaoke bar, do a karaoke bar.

Kieran One of the questions I posed is why Lewerentz never did any social housing. He lived and was practising through the greatest expansion of social housing in Sweden’s history. He was alive through most of the Million Programme [the Miljonprogrammet was a Swedish government initiative that ran between 1965 and 1974, and aimed to create 1m new homes, ed.]. He was practising all of that time and didn’t do a single housing building. Why is that? He must have had the opportunity. I think it’s interesting to think about what Lewerentz didn’t do. He didn’t sign the Acceptera manifesto in 1931, which saw the great architects of the time come together to express their commitment to the new modernist style and try to make it make sense in a Swedish context. Lewerentz knew all of those people, was working with all of them, but he didn’t sign that. He was constantly avoiding, I think, diving into the rabbit hole of worthy modernism. He stayed on the side of the human being, the complicated, venal, selfish, difficult, bored human being who also needs profundity in their life.

Riksförsäkringsanstalten, Stockholm, 1932.

Ingrid Lewerentz has often been perceived as solitary, non-conformist and disgruntled, and José Manuel López Peláez, who extensively researched Lewerentz’s long-time partner Gunnar Asplund, unveiled letters between the two architects that illustrated some of these personality traits. Kenneth Frampton, meanwhile, has highlighted Lewerentz’s particular use of materials that contrasted with the ubiquitous white architecture of the early modern movement. To me, it is Lewerentz’s non-conformist production and personality that provide a more nuanced understanding of the extensive contribution of Sweden to 20th-century architecture. Swedish architecture embraced mass production and standardisation, but also other individual high-quality, carefully designed projects. Lewerentz was an essential part of this.

Yung Ho One more thing I learned from Lewerentz is to live a long life if you can, because you never know when you’re going to do your better or best work.

Lyndon Yung Ho, that’s very interesting you should say that because I have an intern who said the same thing. She said, “Well, he lived a long, long life compared to a lot of the modernist architects.” I believe St Mark’s was done when he was in his 60s, close to 70, and I think St Peter’s was when he was in his 70s. The Flower Kiosk was when he was 75, if I’m not mistaken. Some of his best work was very late on.

Yung Ho Lewerentz gives us all hope.

Introduction Oli Stratford
Photographs Johan Dehlin

This article was originally published in Disegno #30. To buy the issue, or subscribe to the journal, please visit the online shop.

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The Design Line: 30 April - 6 May