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‘Magnificent’: the meditation grove at Skogskyrkogården, the woodland cemetery near Stockholm created by the young Sigurd Lewerentz and Gunnar Asplund in the late 1910s, now a Unesco world heritage site.
‘Magnificent’: the meditation grove at Skogskyrkogården, the woodland cemetery near Stockholm created by the young Sigurd Lewerentz and Gunnar Asplund in the late 1910s, now a Unesco world heritage site. Photograph: Johan Dehlin
‘Magnificent’: the meditation grove at Skogskyrkogården, the woodland cemetery near Stockholm created by the young Sigurd Lewerentz and Gunnar Asplund in the late 1910s, now a Unesco world heritage site. Photograph: Johan Dehlin

Architect Sigurd Lewerentz: master of the sacred and profane

This article is more than 2 years old

The great 20th-century Swedish architect is revered for his spiritual devotion to his craft, and poetic designs for everything from churches and wallpaper to a floating dancefloor. So what was his secret?

At the age of 77, the architect Sigurd Lewerentz (1885-1975) was commissioned to design a church. Some of the parishioners worried that he was too old to manage the project, others that his low-key designs looked like a garage. The building that he achieved is, like a late play by Samuel Beckett, austere in means but luxurious in thought and imagination. Everything – walls, floors and ceilings, inside and out, pulpit and altar – is as much as possible formed of one material - brick - that performs a kind of magic. The interior is like an exhalation, a bubble, which since bricks are unlike soapy film, seems miraculous.

St Peter’s, as it is called, in the southern Swedish town of Klippan, has since its completion in 1966 become an object of veneration for architects around the world. In Britain, Lewerentz has inspired a generation for whom the poetry of architecture comes above all from the facts and actions of construction, out of the way that bricks are laid or glass is fixed to an opening. Adam Caruso and Peter St John, for example, who won the 2016 Stirling prize for London’s Newport Street Gallery , designed for Damien Hirst, have a large and acknowledged debt. Their admiration resembles that of musicians for those with deep understanding of their instruments – they like to see the tools of their trade honoured.

Lewerentz’s St Peter’s Church, Klippan, built 1962-66: ‘an object of veneration’. Photograph: Johan Dehlin

Everyone who knows his work agrees that Lewerentz was a craftsman. He went daily to the construction site of St Mark’s in the Stockholm suburb of Björkhagen, a church he realised just before St Peter’s, discussing every detail with the builders. He forbade the common practice of cutting bricks to make them fit a given location, insisting that they remain whole, a rule that requires forethought and skill to follow. He worked with brickworks to achieve exactly the tone and finish he wanted on their products. He had a powerful sense of the sheen on a bronze rail or a copper lightshade or the sharpness of the shadows of a classical moulding. He invented new ways to make steel-framed windows and doors, and set up a company to manufacture them.

It’s also widely agreed that he was in some sense spiritual, but that’s a quality that can take many forms. As indeed can craftsmanship. And beyond their acknowledgment of his spirituality and craft, architects choose their own version of Lewerentz. For some it’s about the deep shadows in his churches, from which areas of light emerge. For others it’s his expression in architecture of modern religious experience. One or two focus on the new life that he gave to ancient classical detail in his early designs.

“Everyone who loves Lewerentz’s work feels like they’ve discovered him for the first time,” is how Kieran Long, director of ArkDes in Stockholm, puts it. This institution, which is Sweden’s national centre for architecture and design, is now putting on a mighty exhibition, its installation designed by Caruso St John. With 550 exhibits drawn from ArkDes’s archive of more than 13,000 Lewerentz-related items, and accompanied by a 700-page book, it can only multiply the number of possible interpretations.

Both book and show are called Sigurd Lewerentz: Architect of Death and Life. The “Death” part of the title is easily explained, as Lewerentz launched his career by winning a competition to design a woodland cemetery to the south of Stockholm, in partnership with another great Swedish architect, Gunnar Asplund. This magnificent work, where chapels and graves are subtly placed in a landscape of hills and trees, is now a Unesco world heritage site. Lewerentz designed another major cemetery without Asplund, in Malmö.

The 1930 design for a floating dancefloor by Sigurd Lewerentz. Photograph: ArkDes samling/ArkDes collections.

Long also wants emphasise the “life” part of the title. For, if Lewerentz’s career is bracketed by churches – in the cemetery near the beginning and in Klippan at the end – and if the best-known images show a gaunt old man in a long black coat, inspecting wintry building sites like a cigar-smoking raven, he had another side to his character. He designed places of frivolity and leisure, especially in the 1930s: restaurants, shops, even a proposal for a flag-decked floating dancefloor for the Stockholm exhibition of 1930. His office produced colourful drawings of smart and languid young people enjoying these modern spaces. Lewerentz, says Long, “dealt with the immortal and shallow, the most profound and trivial aspects of being human and nothing in between”.

Sigurd Lewerentz. Photograph: Karl-Erik Olsson-Snogeröd. ArkDes samling/ArkDes collections.

Like other great mid-century architects – Gio Ponti, for example – he worked fluidly between media. He designed everything from landscapes to churches to government office buildings to factories to shops to furniture to advertising posters to wallpaper. He was sometimes questioned for the superficiality of some of this work, for what critics called his “pseudo-functionalism”. He also moved easily between historical and modern styles and between handmade craft and industrial production. There was, for him, no catastrophic conflict between the two.

All of which came together in the two churches at the end of his career, St Mark’s and St Peter’s, which use a similar palette of reddish-brown bricks set within thick layers of mortar. You can see, for example, the influence of landscape design in their arrangement, as in the approach to St Mark’s on an oblique path through birch trees. In the woodland cemetery, Lewerentz modified mounds and planting to guide you through the landscape. Areas of shadow and light work in a comparable way in the churches.

St Mark’s, Björkhagen. Photograph: Johan Dehlin

The paving of St Peter’s was inspired by the patterns of a crossword puzzle that he cut from a newspaper, by the time-dishevelled stones of the ancient Roman Via Appia, and by the ornate Cosmatesque pavements of medieval Italy. So an ephemeral diversion of modern life is combined with enduring works of antiquity. Lewerentz described his brickwork as “Persian” – together with his Italian inspirations it brings a touch of southern warmth to this Nordic building. The never-cut bricks give the churches a relentless feeling, but in a few details they are lush.

Some elements stop you on your tracks with their coming-from-nowhere strangeness, for example a seashell font perched on a thin metal frame above a stark gash in a mounded brick floor. Windows are frameless sheets of glass placed over raw brick openings. In both churches the rough bricks are offset by refined metalwork and warm tapestries. Doors are made of glued and laminated timber, kneelers of sheepskin. Then, in St Peter’s, a big, T-shaped pillar of steel stands in the centre like a piece of conceptual sculpture, a tree or a cross perhaps. It is the structure that allows the brick vault to hover above the space, which creates that bubble-like effect.

In the end, it is the solemn aspect of Lewerentz that most defines him. With St Peter’s, Adam Caruso has said: “He is compelling us to confront the condition of our existence, all of the time.” But without his sensuous and playful side, Lewerentz’s spirituality would become ponderous and his solemnity tedious. For, after all, frivolity is also part of existence.

Sigurd Lewerentz: Architect of Death and Life is at ArkDes, Stockholm, until 28 August 2022

  • Sigurd Lewerentz: Architect of Death and Life by Mikael Andersson is published by Park Books, £100. To support The Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply

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