Sigurd Lewerentz: Architect of Death and Life

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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.

The final chapter, ‘Lund: A Living Legend’, documents Lewerentz’s finaldecade in semi-retirement as a widower. This is the image of the architect – as “a master of his trade,but also a resistance fighter” - that we are familiar with from the previous books about him, by HakonAhlberg and Janne Ahlin.Folke Edwards, art critic and head of Lund’s art gallery, writing in 1966declared, “Lewerentz appears as the great liberator, the enviable Master, with free hands to create superbarchitectural works of art and to realise the bittersweet dream that almost every architect harbours. Hehas become a symbol of the freedom that has been lost.” Sigurd Lewerentz is probably the most significant architect of the modern period in Sweden. Best known for his poetic cemetery landscapes, and for the two extraordinary churches of St Mark’s, Björkhagen and St Peter’s, Klippan, Lewerentz’s work has always been shrouded in myth and has provoked passionate reactions in critics and architects around the world. Campo-Ruiz, Ingrid (2015). Malmö Eastern Cemetery and Lewerentz’s Critical Approach to Monumentality. Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes 35/4 (2015):328-344. ISSN 1460-1176. DOI: 10.1080/14601176.2015.1079422.

Sigurd Lewerentz

Lewerentz also created furnishings and fixtures for the building through BLOKK (later renamed IDESTA), an interior design and architectural hardware firm he co-founded during this period. 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. 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. 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.”

Flora, Nicola, Paolo Giardiello and Gennaro Postiglione, editors (2002). Sigurd Lewerentz, 1885-1975. Milan: Electa Architecture, 2002. (ISBN 9781904313052) 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.

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The symmetry on the outside belies a varied layout within; a circular staircase on one end contrasts with a conventional one on the other.