Ralph Erskine

Erskine moved to Sweden in 1939 and designed buildings adapted to the cold, such as Svappavaara and the Byker Wall in Newcastle. In Stockholm he designed Allhuset at Stockholm University and the Aula Magna.

Ralph Erskine was born in 1914 in Mill Hill, north of London, into a family with a Quaker background, and its social and democratic outlook shaped his whole life. He studied architecture at the Regent Street Polytechnic in London and then worked on housing and planning. In 1939 he travelled to Sweden, drawn in part by Swedish housing policy and functionalism. When war broke out he stayed. He built a small cabin himself, known as Lådan (the Box), at Lissma south of Stockholm, where he lived in harsh conditions. He studied for a time at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts and then set up his own practice. He later lived at Drottningholm, where he also had his office.

Early on Erskine designed housing for mill towns such as Gyttorp, and hotels and facilities in the mountains, where he studied how buildings could be adapted to a cold climate, to snow, wind and low sun. Svappavaara in Lapland is a planned mining town with a long building that shelters it from the north wind. The Byker Wall in Newcastle, 1969–1982, is a long housing block that shields an estate from noise and wind, and he invited the residents to take part in the planning. At Stockholm University in Frescati he designed Allhuset, the library and the Aula Magna. His architecture is playful and considerate, with timber, sheet metal, balconies and exposed structure.

Erskine died in 2005 at Drottningholm. He received the RIBA Gold Medal in 1987 and is regarded as one of the most important architects in Sweden in the post-war period. He became internationally known for community participation in planning and for an architecture adapted to climate and place, issues that have gained new relevance today. The Byker Wall is a listed heritage site in Britain and has been a model for participatory processes. In Sweden he influenced views on how housing estates could gain variety, community and human scale after the large-scale building of the Million Programme. His office continued as Arkitektkontoret Ralph Erskine after his death, and his works are studied in Nordic architectural education.