When British architecture critic Kieran Long became director of ArkDes, Stockholm's center for architecture and design, in 2017, he decided to put Sigurd Lewerentz in a new light. Even if he is one of the most important architects of modernism in Sweden, important parts of his work are little known. Long therefore commissioned new photo series of Lewerentz's best buildings and selected 800 drawings and objects, some of which were unpublished, from the huge collection slumbering in the house's archives. The exhibition with the title “Architect of Death and Life” impressively shows Lewerentz's diversity and brilliance. It is the largest monographic exhibition that has ever been seen at ArkDes and helps to rewrite the history of modernism in Scandinavia.The fact that a British of all people opens the eyes of the Swedish public to a local hero is explained by Long's widespread aversion to hero worship among Swedish society.

Masterpieces such as St. Mark's Church in Björkhagen and St. Peter in Klippan are known worldwide for their distinctive architecture. Its rough masonry, its formal freedom, combined with rigor in the design, appear radical and inventive in view of the prevailing neoclassical traditions in Northern Europe. Lewerentz's oeuvre does not fit into the narrative of the pleasing Swedish culture; he refused to accept the mainstream of post-war architecture. He offered creative resistance to the rational construction of modern Sweden as a welfare state. Instead, his buildings are diverse and inventive in their position between history and modernity, eternity and transience, community and loneliness, warmth and alienation. His partly brooding and serious works are unconventional in construction and materiality,inspired by members of the Deutscher Werkbund such as Richard Riemerschmid, for whom he worked in Munich, and by the national-romantic style in Scandinavia.

Lewerentz is considered an enigmatic architect whose work is poetically and symbolically charged.

It has drawn generations of architects under its spell.

Since Lewerentz's death in 1975, however, there has not been a comprehensive portrait of Sweden's most interesting, headstrong and high-profile architect of the 20th century.

His pioneering churches and cemeteries have been analyzed several times, but Long is the first to present Lewerentz's contribution to urban life.

The architect, born in 1885, has also helped rethink Stockholm as a modern metropolis.

For Swedish conditions it is unusual that he refused to accept the welfare state as a client.

He did not design a single apartment for the state building program.

Subtle transitions

The office building of the Riksförsäkringsanstalten, i.e. the National Insurance Company, in Stockholm, built by Lewerentz in 1932, has recently been extensively restored. Some interiors were recreated in detail, furniture and clocks were painstakingly restored - this is also an impressive expression of the new appreciation for a work that refuses to be classified into stylistic categories and largely managed without a predecessor. The magnum opus, Skogskyrkogården (Forest Cemetery) in Stockholm (designed with Gunnar Asplund), on which Lewerentz worked for decades, is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The architect's creative approach stands for a “symbolic connection between life and death”.

His best buildings derive their strength from the materials used and the sometimes gloomy mood they convey.

As a man who was both a craftsman and a thinker, Lewerentz struggled with a construction industry that paid little attention to details and was primarily interested in efficiency.

On the other hand, he sought to create subtle transitions between landscape and building, outside and inside, as well as wall and roof.

Its architecture is quiet, never polemical or political.

The focus is on the sensory and spatial effect.

Concentration on irrational needs of the people

Lewerentz was obsessed with his work. His ideas could change radically, and he always worked on several solutions in parallel; they were the result of his long and lonely struggle at the drawing table, the constant revisions made colleagues nervous. But only in this way was he able to cultivate his love of detail and overcome types and topoi. The reduced material palette of his churches creates effects that are reminiscent of the original idea of ​​places of worship instead of citing typical sacred spaces. The symbolic order he gave burial sites skillfully mixed forms of Christianity with older Nordic traditions. Despite his training as an engineer, technology and symbolism were by no means mutually exclusive. He gave space to the deepest, existential moments - for death and remembrance, religion and burial.

The exhibition sees itself as a turning point in the museum's mediation of architecture, as a “material turn” and a return to archive research.

She wants to present buildings as places of artistic importance, less as “symptoms of political currents”, as Long writes in the extensive catalog.

Lewerentz represents a different modernism in Sweden.

He focused on human needs that cannot be fully understood rationally.

Architect of Death and Life

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At ArkDes in Stockholm until August 28, 2022. The accompanying publication costs 120 euros.