Helgo Zettervall
Zettervall was Sweden’s most powerful architect in the second half of the 19th century. He restored the cathedrals of Lund, Uppsala, Linköping and Skara, often giving them new towers and details according to his own image of the Middle Ages – controversial today. He also designed All Saints’ Church in Lund.
Helgo Zettervall was born in Stockholm in 1831. He studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm and made study tours on the Continent, where he encountered European historicism and French and German ideas on restoration, not least Viollet-le-Duc’s notion of returning medieval buildings to an ideal state of completion. In 1860 he came to Lund to work on the restoration of the cathedral, which he took over from Carl Georg Brunius. The work in Lund became the foundation of his career. He became cathedral architect and soon received commissions all over the country. In 1882 he was appointed Superintendent and head of the Office of the Superintendent, a post he held until 1897.
Zettervall’s restorations of the cathedrals of Lund, Uppsala, Linköping and Skara transformed them considerably. In Lund he gave the cathedral new west towers and rebuilt large parts of the church in the Romanesque style, and in Uppsala in 1885–1893 the cathedral was given tall new spires and a completely remodelled exterior. He also designed new churches, such as All Saints’ Church in Lund with its tall tower and St Paul’s Church in Malmö, as well as Lund University’s main building, the Universitetshuset, with façades in the Italian Renaissance style. His formal language alternates between Gothic Revival, Romanesque Revival and Renaissance Revival, always with an emphasis on a unified whole. As Superintendent he reviewed the designs for hundreds of churches and public buildings across the country.
Zettervall died in 1907. Even in his lifetime his stylistic restorations were criticised for destroying genuine medieval fabric and replacing it with 19th-century notions. The criticism led to new principles of heritage conservation in Sweden, where the aim was instead to preserve and repair what existed, an approach championed in the 20th century by the National Antiquarian Sigurd Curman. Several of Zettervall’s interventions have since been toned down, particularly in the interiors. At the same time his towers still define the skylines of Lund and Uppsala, and his buildings are today heritage in their own right. He is a clear example of how 19th-century historicism and national medieval romanticism shaped Swedish architecture and attitudes to cultural heritage.