Sigurd Lewerentz
Lewerentz designed the Woodland Cemetery together with Asplund and then, after a long hiatus, two of the most celebrated churches of post-war Sweden: St Mark’s Church in Björkhagen and St Peter’s Church in Klippan. His rule of never cutting a brick has become legendary.
Sigurd Lewerentz was born in 1885 in Bjärtrå in Ångermanland, where his father owned a glassworks. He trained as a mechanical engineer at Chalmers in Gothenburg from 1905 to 1908 and then turned to architecture. He worked for a few years in Germany for Theodor Fischer and Richard Riemerschmid, among others, where he was influenced by German reform architecture and the Deutscher Werkbund. On his return he studied at the Klara School in Stockholm and opened a practice with Torsten Stubelius. In 1915 he and Gunnar Asplund won the competition for the Southern Cemetery in Stockholm, the Woodland Cemetery, and his collaboration with Asplund on its landscape and chapels lasted two decades.
At the Woodland Cemetery Lewerentz designed the Chapel of the Resurrection, 1923–1925, in an austere classicism, and shaped the landscape with the Meditation Grove. He also designed Malmö Eastern Cemetery, on which he worked for fifty years, the National Insurance Office building in Stockholm, and, with others, the Malmö City Theatre. After a dispute over the Woodland Cemetery he withdrew for a time and ran a company manufacturing windows and fittings. Late in life he designed St Mark’s Church in Björkhagen and St Peter’s Church in Klippan, where dark brick, uncut bricks, wide mortar joints and frameless windows create a dim, sacred atmosphere. He never allowed a brick to be cut; each was to be used as it was.
Lewerentz died in 1975 in Lund. For most of his life he was less well known than Asplund, but since the 1980s he has gained a great international reputation, and architects and students from all over the world travel to Klippan and Björkhagen. His work with brick, light and detail has influenced architects such as Peter Zumthor and many contemporaries in Britain and the Nordic countries. The Flower Kiosk at Malmö Eastern Cemetery, one of his last works, is now a small memorial. The Woodland Cemetery, which includes his landscape and chapels, has been a World Heritage Site since 1994. He shows how Swedish post-war modernism could become deeply personal, severe and yet poetic.