Gunnar Asplund

by Peter Blundell Jones

Although a contemporary of Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier, Gunnar Asplund pursued an architecture that does not fit easily into their view of Modernism as a movement that rejected the applied styles and ornamentation of the nineteenth century. Instead, Asplund was at ease with classical or vernacular elements blending with modernist ideals, and displayed a sensitive understanding of the relationship between architecture and its surrounding landscape. His abilities are amply demonstrated in masterpieces like the Woodland Cemetery. In 1915 Asplund and Sigurd Lewerentz won the competition to plan a new cemetery for Stockholm. Their romantic plan, in which a symbolically straight, narrow pathway abruptly curves blindly away into the forest, and with open fields capped by burial-mound-like hillocks, earned both of them further commissions for buildings within the cemetery. Asplund’s Woodland Chapel of 1920 is tucked into the forest and uses classical elements such as Doric columns, but sparingly and in unusual ways, while manipulating scale in ways that further the spiritual and contemplative nature of the building. The Crematorium and Monument Hall of 1935 are dignified and powerful, unornamented but not austere, to offer comfort to those who use them. The Gothenburg Law Courts, another critical work which was finally completed in 1937, shows how Asplund relates the architecture of Modernism to a historical plan and facade. Buildings such as the architect’s own summer house at Stennäs and the crematoria at Kviberg and Skövde, dating from the later part of his life when he had begun to embrace Modernism, still show traditional classical and vernacular influences and are evidence that not all forms of Modernism constituted a fresh start. This will be a comprehensive monograph on Asplund and will include extensive new colour photography as well as many original drawings.

Genres: Architecture

240 pages, Hardcover

First published April 25, 2006

Reviews

[Tom M (London) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Erik Gunnar Asplund’s life (1885-1940) spans the period between neoclassicism, proto-modern eclecticism, and the first stirrings of the modern movement. His first 1913 project for the Gothenburg Law Courts, the Enskede Cemetery (begun 1915), the 1920 Woodland Chapel, and the brilliant Lister courthouse (1918-24) were all in this idiom, leading up to the great 1928 Stockholm Library when suddenly, he changed his style. In this authoritative new critical study, Peter Blundell Jones explains the circumstances of that change, which saw Asplund embrace modern architecture, in a style of his own that started with the 1930 Stockholm Exhibition and culminated with the Woodland Crematorium (1940). Blundell Jones examines Asplund’s cultural development and background, finding parallels with the painter Carl Larsson, whose drawings, though sentimental and folklorish, use line, composition, and colour in modern ways. This conjunction of the folkish with the modern, he says, is the secret of Asplund’s creativity; a tension between the nostalgic and the forward-looking, and an ability to imagine architectonic space as cosy and domestic. But there were non-folklorish influences as well, brought about by industrialisation and technological innovation.

During the latter part of his education Asplund met Sigurd Lewerentz in 1910, at the Royal College of Fine Arts. Rebelling against the stuffy approach there, they formed their own breakaway school- a venture that did not last long but which allowed them to bring in all the best architects, including eclectics like Ragnar Östberg, the architect of Stockholm City Hall. Asplund’s career got off to a strong start with Isak Gustav Clason, the leading architect of the time, whose Bünsow House of 1888 and Hallwyl Palace of 1898 (writes Blundell Jones) “could have been built by two different architects” (stylistic pluralism seems to be a problem for Blundell Jones, but is an essential component of Asplund’s design approach). In 1913 Asplund won the competition to design an extension to the Gothenburg Law Courts building and in celebration, he set off for the first of several Italian tours. Some drawings in his travel sketchbook are adulatory, like his watercolour of the Greek temples at Paestum; others are analytical, like his meticulously scaled plan of the market at Cefalù in Sicily. Back in Sweden he teamed up with Lewerentz on the competition for Stockholm cemetery crematorium, which they won. Like the Gothenburg Law Courts, this project dragged on throughout Asplund’s career until the end, changing considerably in the process and carried on after his death by Lewerentz. His workload built up rapidly and by 1921 included two masterpieces, the Woodland Chapel and the Lister Courthouse. In addition, he undertook a number of town planning projects, also finding time to travel again to Italy, and to America. In 1928 he completed the Stockholm Public Library, arguably his greatest work and certainly one of the great buildings of all time. Significantly, it had nothing to do with the modern movement, which was going full blast by that time. Sven Markelius and others had already imported modernism into Sweden, but Asplund - an establishment figure - had not taken part in its debates, so there was something opportunistic about his decision to espouse modernism in 1928. He had no choice; dissatisfied with Asplund’s first sketches for the 1930 Stockholm Exhibition, Gregor Paulsson, his client, asked him to adopt the new modern style and took him to see modern architecture in Germany and Czechoslovakia. As a result, Asplund’s modernist pavilions for the Stockholm exhibition ”exploited transparency and assymmetry to the full, while still creating a place of great variety, humanity, and charm”; but this was a modernity never far away from neoclassicism, always sensitive to context and full of an expressionist spirit that owed more to Erich Mendelsohn than Le Corbusier. Other interesting modernistic projects followed and in 1935 Asplund was commissioned to design the crematorium at the Woodland Cemetery, a sublime and serene work that got him into the modern architecture history books; but it was not until much later that some came to regard his Stockholm Library as an even greater achievement.

Some of Blundell Jones’s architectonic analyses have a plodding, professorially didactic tone that does not sit well with the explorative delight of Asplund’s drawings. But he can also be incisive, when describing how critics like Nikolaus Pevsner and Siegfried Giedion marginalised Asplund, unable to accept that a building like the highly contextual Gothenburg Law Courts extension “could undermine the whole notion of tabula rasa as starting point for the Modern Movement”. But he is wrong to lament that Asplund is not in “the Pantheon of modernist heroes”. Alvar Aalto was the first to press for his recognition, and Asplund’s subsequent influence on English architects, from Charles Holden to James Stirling, surely makes his position unassailable. This monograph, which follows on from Stuart Wrede’s 25 years earlier, will inspire yet another generation of admirers.