Sigurd Lewerentz. Major new monograph of Sweden’s most revered architect.

ArkDes will produce a landmark new book in connection with the exhibition, which will be the first ever published with full access to Lewerentz’s archive. Designed by award-winning graphic designer Malmsten Hellberg.

SIGURD LEWERENTZ: ARCHITECT OF DEATH AND LIFE

Major new monograph of Sweden’s most revered architect.
Accompanying exhibition at ArkDes.

Sweden’s most revered architect Sigurd Lewerentz, regarded as one of the most important and enigmatic figures of modern European architecture, is the subject of a major new monograph, published in May 2021 by Park Books in collaboration with ArkDes, Sweden’s national centre for architecture and design in Stockholm.

This vast new book offers the most comprehensive survey to date of Lewerentz’s achievements, newly researched from original objects and archival material uncovered across Sweden, featuring over 700 pages of photographs, drawings, and sketches with essays by leading experts exploring Lewerentz’s life, work and legacy.

Edited by Kieran Long, Director of ArkDes, and Johan Örn, curator of collections at ArkDes, and co-edited by Mikael Andersson, architectural historian and critic, this landmark book will be a significant moment of reassessment. An accompanying exhibition opening at ArkDes on 1st October 2021, curated by Kieran Long and designed by Caruso St John, will be the first major monographic exhibition of Lewerentz’s work in over 30 years. Lewerentz, who was born in Bjärtrå, Ångermanland, in northern Sweden in 1885 and died in Lund 1975, is a mythologised figure in the history of 20th century architecture. Arguably Sweden’s most distinguished modernist, his influence is admired today by a generation of the world’s leading architects.

Architecture devotees from around the world travel to visit his projects, from his late  masterpieces St Mark’s Church in Bjorkhagen and St Peter’s Church in Klippan, to Stockholm’s iconic woodland cemetery Skogskyrkogården, now a UNESCO World Heritage site.

Cred: Jenny Källman.

Designed by award-winning graphic designer Malmsten Hellberg, this new book features new photography of all of Lewerentz’s major works by the architect and architectural photographer Johan Dehlin, as well as never-before-seen drawings and plans for buildings, furniture and interiors from Lewerentz’s collection at ArkDes.

Kieran Long, Director of ArkDes and Editor of Sigurd Lewerentz: Architect of Death and Life, said: “This monograph is a long-awaited addition to contemporary architecture publishing. There is no Swedish architect with more influence on contemporary architecture today, or with more passionate advocates across the globe, than Sigurd Lewerentz. His work was ubiquitous in the education of all the best architects I had grown up with in my twenty years of writing about, curating and teaching architecture.”

Title information:

Sigurd Lewerentz: Architect of Death and Life
Published by Park Books in collaboration with ArkDes
Eds. Kieran Long and Johan Örn. Co-ed. Mikael Andersson
1st edition, 2021
Hardback
720 pages
23 x 30 cm
ISBN 978-3-03860-232-3
Design: Malmsten Hellberg.
New photos of Lewerentz built work: Johan Dehlin.

Press Enquiries:
Maria Östman, maria.ostman@arkdes.se, 073-273 36 00

NOTES TO EDITORS

Contributers
Kieran Long has been director of Stockholm’s ArkDes since 2017. Prior to that h
established the new Department of Design, Architecture and Digital at the V&A, London.
Johan Örn is an architectural historian and curator of collections at ArkDes.
Mikael Andersson is an architectural historian and critic.

Sigurd Lewerentz
Sigurd Lewerentz was born in the north of Sweden, in Bjärtrå, Västernorrland County, on 29 July 1885, the son of Gustaf Adolf and Hedvig Matilda Lewerentz. He initially trained as a mechanical engineer and an architect at the Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg and followed his education with apprenticeships in Berlin and Munich.

When Lewerentz set up an independent practice in Stockholm in 1911, he was joined by his colleague Torsten Stubelius. His first breakthrough came in 1915 when he was awarded first prize in the competition for a new cemetery in Stockholm (The Woodland Cemetery), a proposal created in collaboration with Gunnar Asplund. For the Woodland Cemetery, Lewerentz designed the neoclassical Resurrection Chapel, completed in 1925. A year following his success in the competition of 1915, he won first prize in the competition for a new cemetery in Malmö.

During the 1930s, while Lewerentz was working on the two cemeteries, he made major contributions to the Stockholm Exhibition of 1930 by way of buildings, furniture, and graphic design. Around this time he also realised two major office buildings in Stockholm. He started to design and produce steel windows and other architectural fittings, a side of his practice that gradually absorbed more and more of his time. In the 1940s, he set up his own factory for these purposes in Eskilstuna.

In the mid 1940s Lewerentz oversaw the completion of the Chapels of St. Knut and St. Gertrud, and the Malmö City Theatre – two projects that he had worked on for many years. His notoriety came with the late churches, however: St. Marks in Björkhagen (1960), and St. Peters in Klippan (1966). When Lewerentz died in Lund in 1975, he was regarded as a legend of Swedish architecture.

ArkDes
ArkDes, located on the island of Skeppsholmen in central Stockholm, is Sweden’s national centre for architecture and design. It is a museum, a study centre and an arena for debate and discussion about the future of architecture, design and citizenship. It is housed in a beautiful building by Rafael Moneo and more recently ArkDes´ new studio gallery, called Boxen, designed by Dehlin Brattgård Architects.

Park Books
Park Books is a European publishing house for architecture and related fields, and an
international platform for architectural book projects. Park Books has been established in 2012 as an affiliate of the renowned art, photography, and architectural publishers
Scheidegger & Spiess in Zürich and likewise attaches great importance to the design and material quality of its publications. The books are published predominantly in English and German and thanks to a competent and extensive sales and marketing network, our program is distributed worldwide. The company is independently owned and run by dedicated employees who bring their various strengths and experience to bear on their work.