Jean de la Vallée
Jean de la Vallée came to Sweden as a child and became one of the leading architects of the Swedish age of greatness. He designed Katarina Church in Stockholm and gave the House of Nobility its curved roof, a motif that became Swedish.
Jean de la Vallée was born in 1624 in France, the son of the architect Simon de la Vallée, who moved to Sweden in 1637 and became royal architect. Jean came to Stockholm with him as a child. His father was killed in 1642, and Queen Christina gave the young Jean the opportunity to travel and study. He spent time in France, Italy and the Netherlands in the 1640s and returned to Sweden around 1650, where he was appointed architect to the court.
He completed the House of Nobility, which his father had begun, and designed its curved säteri roof. For Axel Oxenstierna he built a palace on Storkyrkobrinken. His foremost church is Katarina Church on Södermalm, a centrally planned church with a large dome, begun in 1656. He also designed the Bonde Palace, today the Supreme Court.
Jean de la Vallée died in Stockholm in 1696. He was the foremost architect of the Swedish age of greatness before the Tessins and brought French and Italian models into Swedish architecture. The säteri roof became a national motif that spread to manor houses all over the country and was revived in National Romanticism around 1900. Katarina Church, which burned in 1723 and 1990 but has been rebuilt, shows his feeling for monumental centrally planned buildings.