Asplund and Lewerentz: the Two Architects of the Woodland Cemetery

Gunnar Asplund (1885–1940) and Sigurd Lewerentz (1885–1975) were architects of the same age who in 1915 won the competition for the Woodland Cemetery in Stockholm and shaped it over more than twenty years. Both began in Nordic Classicism. Asplund then moved to Functionalism and became Sweden's most famous architect with the Public Library and the Stockholm Exhibition. Lewerentz withdrew for a time and, in old age, built two dark brick churches, St Mark's Church and St Peter's in Klippan, which are now admired all over the world.

Facts

Two Young Architects and a Forest

Asplund was born in Stockholm, at first wanted to become an artist and studied architecture at the Royal Institute of Technology. Dissatisfied with the teaching, he co-founded the independent Klara School in 1910. Lewerentz came from Bjärtrå in Ångermanland, where his father owned a glassworks. He trained as a mechanical engineer at Chalmers, worked for some years in Germany and then also attended the Klara School. There they met.

Stockholm needed a new burial ground in Enskede, in an area of pine forest and old gravel pits. The competition was held in 1914–1915, and the two won with a proposal that made use of the forest instead of felling it. The graves were to lie among the trees, and death was to be met in nature. The collaboration was close at first but was divided: Lewerentz took particular responsibility for the landscape, Asplund for the large buildings.

The Woodland Cemetery: Two Chapels, Two Temperaments

At the Woodland Cemetery their first buildings stand close together and already show the difference. Asplund's Woodland Chapel from 1920 is a small cottage in the forest with a steep, black shingle roof and a white dome inside, intimate and almost fairy-tale-like. Lewerentz's Chapel of the Resurrection, completed in 1925, is an oblong chapel in severe classicism, with a freestanding columned portico at the side instead of at the short end, like a temple that has been moved out of its usual order. How a classical temple is otherwise built up is shown by the temple drawing in the basics.

Lewerentz shaped the Meditation Grove, a ring of trees on a hill visible from the whole area, and the long path along the wall towards the great granite cross. Asplund designed the crematorium with the Chapels of Faith, Hope and the Holy Cross and the open colonnaded hall. After a dispute over the Woodland Cemetery, Lewerentz withdrew for a time, and the crematorium became Asplund's alone. It was inaugurated in 1940, the year Asplund died, and he is himself buried there. The Woodland Cemetery became a World Heritage Site in 1994.

Asplund: from Courthouse to Funkis

Asplund's path was swift. Villa Snellman in Djursholm and the courthouse in Sölvesborg are Nordic Classicism with small, playful displacements. The Public Library, opened in 1928, was first designed with a dome but pared down to a pure cylinder on a cube. Only two years later he was chief architect of the Stockholm Exhibition of 1930 and brought Functionalism to Sweden. The transition is described in more detail in the guide Swedish Grace or Funkis?

In the extension to Gothenburg Law Courts, on which he worked for almost thirty years, and in the Woodland Crematorium, he combined modern construction with a calm, almost antique atmosphere. He became a professor at the Royal Institute of Technology in 1931. His ability to unite classicism and Modernism, landscape and building influenced architects far beyond the Nordic countries, among them Alvar Aalto, as can be seen in the architect network.

Lewerentz: Silence and Brick

From 1916 Lewerentz worked on the Eastern Cemetery in Malmö, which he kept at for fifty years, and designed the State Insurance Institute building in Stockholm. For a period he withdrew and ran a firm that made windows and ironmongery. For a long time he was far less known than Asplund. At around the age of seventy he won the competition for St Mark's Church in Björkhagen, built 1958–1960, where he followed the construction almost daily.

His rule was that no brick could be cut. The walls were adapted to the bricks, and the broad joints take up the differences. The rooms are dark, with low brick vaults between steel beams. In St Peter's Church in Klippan, 1962–1966, he went still further: a single cruciform steel column carries the roof, the windows are sheets of glass fixed to the outside of the wall without frames, and the font is a mussel shell over a crack in the floor. The churches belong to the Record Years but resemble nothing else from the period. Closest comes Peter Celsing, who was impressed by both Asplund and Lewerentz and built brick churches in Gothenburg, Uppsala and Vällingby in the same years.

The Comparison in Brief

Asplund was the more outgoing of the two: an architect for public commissions, exhibitions and debate, who designed everything from the building to lamps and handles. His buildings are bright and open, and they move from classicism's symmetry to Functionalism's free plan. Lewerentz was the inward-looking one. He worked slowly and close to the craftsmen, and his late works are dark, enclosed and heavy. Where Asplund let form grow lighter, Lewerentz let material grow ever more important.

Yet they share much: a feeling for landscape, for how people move through a room and for light. Both took their starting point in classicism, described in the guide to Nordic Classicism and under the period Swedish Grace. Lewerentz's late churches are often counted as Brutalism in the broad sense, but they are rather a path of their own: a modern way of building with one of the oldest materials.

Asplund or Lewerentz

Exercise

Which building did Sigurd Lewerentz design on his own?