Fredrik Lilljekvist
Lilljekvist was an architect at the Office of the Superintendent and designed the Royal Dramatic Theatre, one of Sweden’s finest Art Nouveau buildings. He also restored Gripsholm Castle.
Fredrik Lilljekvist was born in 1863 and trained as an architect at the Royal Institute of Technology and the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm in the 1880s, when teaching was shaped by historicism and the study of earlier styles. He belonged to the same generation as Ragnar Östberg and Carl Westman and began his career when Stockholm was growing rapidly and new stylistic ideals were arriving from the Continent. He joined the Office of the Superintendent, the state authority responsible for royal palaces and public buildings, which also reviewed church designs. There he was given early responsibility for the restoration of older buildings and learned a great deal about Swedish architectural history, something that shaped his later work both on new buildings and on historic settings.
In the 1890s Lilljekvist directed the restoration of Gripsholm Castle, where he largely sought to recover the castle’s Vasa-era character. The restoration was extensive and has since been criticised for removing later additions, in line with the stylistic restorations of the time. His best-known new building is the Royal Dramatic Theatre on Nybroplan, built in 1901–1908, one of Sweden’s finest Art Nouveau buildings. The white marble façade has gilded details, and the interior brought together the leading artists of the day, among them Carl Larsson and Carl Milles. The building reflects Art Nouveau’s pursuit of a Gesamtkunstwerk in which architecture, sculpture, painting and craft form a whole.
Lilljekvist died in 1932. The Royal Dramatic Theatre became one of Stockholm’s best-known buildings and has been the national stage for spoken drama since its opening in 1908. It is regarded as one of the clearest examples of Swedish Art Nouveau and has been restored several times, preserving the original colour schemes and furnishings. His restoration of Gripsholm is today itself part of the castle’s history and an example of how attitudes to restoration changed around 1900. Lilljekvist shows how architects in Sweden at the time worked both with the new international styles and with the nation’s architectural history, two sides that were later united in National Romanticism.