Lars Israel Wahlman
Wahlman designed the Engelbrekt Church and Tjolöholm Castle and was a professor at KTH. He combined National Romanticism with elements of English Arts and Crafts and taught a whole generation to draw with pencil and feeling.
Lars Israel Wahlman was born in 1870. He trained at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm in the 1890s, when Isak Gustaf Clason was one of the leading teachers and historicism was beginning to give way to a more national architecture. He made study tours and was particularly impressed by the English Arts and Crafts movement and its country houses, in which a building was meant to grow out of its site, materials and craftsmanship. His early commissions were villas and manor houses. Early on he also received one of the great private building commissions in Sweden around 1900, Tjolöholm Castle in Halland, which made his name and gave him the opportunity to collaborate with many craftsmen.
Tjolöholm Castle, built in 1898–1904 for the Dickson family, is designed in the English Tudor style with modern technical installations. Wahlman’s own house, Villa Tallom in Stocksund, on the other hand shows his Swedish side: a log house with tarred walls, large roofs and rooms that follow everyday life. His principal work is the Engelbrekt Church in Östermalm, Stockholm, consecrated in 1914, which rises on a rocky outcrop with a very tall nave, great parabolic vaults and a massive tower of brick and granite. Its formal language combines National Romanticism, Art Nouveau and a distinctive, almost expressionist force, with carefully designed details and artistic decoration.
Wahlman was a professor at the Royal Institute of Technology for several decades from the 1910s and taught a long line of Swedish architects. He taught an architecture grounded in sketching, freehand drawing, materials and a feeling for place, and his students carried these ideals forward into both Nordic Classicism and modernism. He died in 1952. The Engelbrekt Church is regarded as one of Sweden’s most remarkable 20th-century church buildings and is a landmark in Östermalm. Tjolöholm is now a museum and a popular film location. Wahlman combined English and Swedish influences in a way typical of Swedish architecture around 1900, when national identity and international models were woven together.