Gunnar Asplund
Asplund is Sweden’s best-known architect. He designed the Woodland Chapel and the Stockholm Public Library in the Nordic Classicist style, was chief architect of the 1930 Stockholm Exhibition and co-wrote the manifesto “acceptera”. His last work, the Woodland Crematorium, was completed in the year of his death.
Erik Gunnar Asplund was born in 1885 in Stockholm. He first wanted to be an artist but studied architecture at the Royal Institute of Technology from 1905 to 1909. Dissatisfied with the academic teaching, in 1910 he helped found the independent Klara School, where Ragnar Östberg, Carl Westman, Ivar Tengbom and others taught. In 1913–1914 he travelled in Italy and Greece, drawing and studying classical and vernacular architecture. His early buildings, such as schools and villas, show both National Romanticism’s feeling for materials and a growing attraction to classicism. Together with his friend Sigurd Lewerentz he won the competition in 1915 for the new Southern Cemetery in Stockholm, Skogskyrkogården, the Woodland Cemetery.
Asplund’s early masterpiece, the Woodland Chapel, 1918–1920, is a small chapel in the forest with a tall shingled roof. The Lister County Courthouse in Sölvesborg, 1917–1921, and the Stockholm Public Library, 1924–1928, with its cylindrical rotunda rising from a cubic base, are key works of Nordic Classicism. As chief architect of the 1930 Stockholm Exhibition he introduced functionalism to a wide public with light pavilions of glass and steel, and in 1931 he co-wrote “acceptera”. He extended Gothenburg City Hall and designed the State Bacteriological Laboratory. The Woodland Crematorium, with its great cross and open loggia, combines modern construction with a timeless, almost classical atmosphere.
Asplund became a professor at the Royal Institute of Technology in 1931. He died in October 1940, the year the Woodland Crematorium was inaugurated, and was buried there. In 1994 the Woodland Cemetery was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List as one of only a few modern works. Asplund is regarded as Sweden’s most internationally renowned architect, and his ability to unite classicism and modernism, landscape and building, rationality and feeling has influenced architects far beyond the Nordic countries, from Alvar Aalto to later generations in Europe, Japan and the United States. The library is one of Stockholm’s best-loved buildings. His summer house at Stennäs and his late works show a humane modernism that is still studied in architectural education.