Gert Wingårdh

Wingårdh started out in the postmodern 1980s and has since designed works including Universeum in Gothenburg, the Swedish Embassy in Washington and Friends Arena. He has won the Kasper Salin Prize several times.

Gert Wingårdh was born in 1951 in Skövde and trained as an architect at Chalmers in Gothenburg, graduating in 1975. He opened his own office in Gothenburg in 1977, at a time when the architecture of functionalism and the Million Programme was being questioned and postmodernism was emerging internationally. Wingårdh’s early works were playful and colourful, with historical references and careful attention to detail. His breakthrough came with the clubhouse at Öijared Golf Club outside Gothenburg, which in 1988 won him the Kasper Salin Prize, Sweden’s leading architecture award. He quickly became one of the most prominent Swedish architects, and his firm, Wingårdh Arkitektkontor, has grown into one of the country’s larger practices.

Wingårdh has moved from postmodernism to a more expressive contemporary architecture, often with a focus on materials and façades. Office and laboratory buildings for Astra Hässle in Mölndal, the Universeum science centre in Gothenburg and the Swedish Embassy in Washington, House of Sweden, designed with Tomas Hansen, are important works. He designed Friends Arena in Solna, Victoria Tower in Kista, Aula Medica at the Karolinska Institutet and the Emporia shopping centre in Malmö, and led the renovation of the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm. He has won the Kasper Salin Prize several times. His architecture is characterised by a passion for form, clear gestures, skilful choice of materials and an interest in how buildings meet their surroundings.

Wingårdh has been one of the most talked-about and debated Swedish architects since the 1980s. He has often taken part in public debate on architecture, urban development and aesthetics and has made architecture visible to a broad public. He has also taught at Chalmers and lectured widely on architecture. His early postmodern works have attracted renewed attention as documents of the 1980s, when Swedish architecture broke with post-war modernism. Many of his later buildings, such as Friends Arena and the renovated Nationalmuseum, are among the most visited public spaces in Sweden. He represents a generation that gave Swedish architecture a more personal and international expression.