Architect Sigurd Lewerentz, 2 vols. - book reviews

Architectural Review, The, Feb, 1998 by Peter Carolin

When Alvin Boyarsky and AA Publications published Sigurd Lewerentz 1885-1975: The Dilemma of Classicism, a silkscreen-on-sandpaper cover was used that was so sticky that, to this day, each issue is sold in a polythene wallet. The recently published two-volume Architect Sigurd Lewerentz: Photographs of the Work and Drawings and Sigurd Lewerentz: Two Churches have no covers at all. The former has its hard backs coated in building paper while the grey card backs of the latter are left 'as found'. The work of no other architect has, surely, inspired such an unusual response from publishers of his work - even in Sweden, the source of much high quality paper and card.

But Lewerentz, himself a Swede, was nothing if not unusual. Once described by the Smithsons as one of the 'silent architects', he neither taught nor wrote. Trained as a mechanical engineer and construction technologist, he followed this up by working in Germany, first for Tessenow and then with Riemerschmid. Returning to Sweden, he studied for a short period at Stockholm's Academy of Art before setting up, with Gunnar Asplund and others, the independent Klara School. After an initial partnership with another fellow student, Torsten Stubelius, he worked on his own.

Such, then, was the architectural training of the architect who played the major role in the formation of arguably the greatest landscape of the century, Stockholm's Woodland Cemetery; who built the masterpiece of Nordic Classicism, the Chapel of the Resurrection; who went through a 'white' period in the '30s before retreating to design and fabricate metal windows and doors; and who, towards the end of a long life, built two great churches whose affinity to ancient forms belied the profound architectural renewal they embodied. His significance was always recognized by a few but it was not until the centenary exhibition and Janne Ahlin's contemporaneous book Sigurd Lewerentz arkitekt (a shorter English version of which was published two years later) that he became known to a wider audience.

The new two-volume book from Byggforlaget is undoubtedly the most comprehensive publication on Lewerentz. The first volume has an illuminating essay by Wilfried Wang: particularly good on the development of the Villa Edstrand and on the inter-relationship between Lewerentz' and Asplund's work. There are also photographs of 25 built works with written descriptions by Caroline Constant and the Swedish Museum of Architecture. The second volume contains reproductions of drawings for 24 of these buildings. Inevitably, one could criticize some of the sub-editing, drawing selection and rather uninspired photography but this would be mere quibbling.

Two churches, is a well produced study of Lewerentz' last churches, St Mark's at Bjorkhagen, Stockholm and St Peter's at Klippan. Olof Hultin's photography is good but the three essays by the architects Claes Caldenby, Sven Ivar Lind (who worked in Asplund's office) and Adam Caruso are disappointing. Recalling Lewerentz"famously laconic' demeanour, Caruso recounts the story of Matisse advising young painters to cut off their tongues and communicate with paint, brush and canvas. This parallel was drawn some years ago by Colin St John Wilson in a number of essays now summarized in his chapter on Lewerentz in Architectural Reflections: Studies in the Philosophy and Practice of Architecture. The latter is still, surely, the most penetrating and best written of all the studies published on this remarkable architect and, together with Ahlin and the splendid new two-volume Photographs and Drawings, provides us at last with a reasonably comprehensive basis for the study of his work.

PETER CAROLIN