Olof Tempelman
Tempelman designed Gustav III’s Pavilion at Haga and several churches and public buildings in a strict neoclassical style. He taught at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts and influenced a whole generation of Swedish architects.
Olof Tempelman was born in Stockholm in 1745. He trained at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, where architectural teaching was based on classical theory, the orders and drawing exercises after French models. He belonged to the generation that grew up as the Rococo gave way to neoclassicism and that received its commissions during the reign of Gustav III, when the king’s interest in art, theatre and antiquity gave architects new opportunities. Tempelman worked early on commissions for the court and for state institutions. He became a teacher at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts and later a professor there, and through his teaching he played a central role in how younger Swedish architects learned their profession around 1800.
Tempelman’s best-known work is Gustav III’s Pavilion in Haga Park, built from 1787 with a restrained rendered exterior in strict neoclassicism. The interior, with its famous Pompeian-inspired rooms, was designed by Louis Masreliez. Together with the French architect and stage designer Louis Jean Desprez he worked on the Linnaeanum, the large orangery building in the Botanical Garden in Uppsala, begun in 1787. He also designed churches and public buildings around the country. His formal language is simple and clear: smoothly rendered façades, distinct volumes and sparingly used columns and temple fronts, in the spirit of Gustavian neoclassicism, for which the calm of antiquity was the ideal.
Tempelman died in 1816. His importance lies less in a handful of famous buildings than in his role as a teacher and transmitter of neoclassicism. Through the Royal Academy of Fine Arts he passed on principles of symmetry, proportion and restraint to a generation of architects active in the first decades of the 19th century, when neoclassicism lived on in Sweden under the name of Empire. Gustav III’s Pavilion is today regarded as one of the finest examples of Gustavian architecture and stands in Haga Park, part of the Royal National City Park in Stockholm. His simple, elegant style has often been seen as a Swedish contribution to European neoclassicism, and it returned as a model in the Nordic Classicism of the 1920s.