Gunnar Asplund Biography, Buildings and Best Books

Erik Gunnar Asplund (1885-1940) was a Swedish architect and the most important figure of Nordic architecture between the wars. His Stockholm Public Library, a cylinder on a cube, is a masterpiece of Nordic classicism; his buildings for the 1930 Stockholm Exhibition launched functionalism in Scandinavia; and his Woodland Cemetery, designed with Sigurd Lewerentz, is one of the great landscapes of the twentieth century.

Stockholm and the Klara school

Asplund was born in Stockholm in 1885 and studied at the Royal Institute of Technology, graduating in 1909. Dissatisfied with the academy, he and a group of fellow students founded the short-lived Klara school, led by architects including Ragnar Östberg and Carl Westman.

The Woodland Cemetery

In 1915 Asplund and Sigurd Lewerentz won the competition for a new cemetery in a pine forest south of Stockholm. Asplund’s small Woodland Chapel (1920), a steep shingled roof on Doric columns, and later the Woodland Crematorium with its open loggia and great cross (1940) frame a landscape of paths and clearings that is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

The Stockholm Public Library

The library (1924-1928), Stockholm’s first public library on the open-shelf model, places a tall cylindrical lending hall over a square base, with books lining the walls of the rotunda. Its stripped classicism made it a model for libraries across Scandinavia.

Functionalism

As chief architect of the Stockholm Exhibition of 1930 Asplund built light pavilions of steel and glass that introduced functionalism to the Nordic countries, and he co-authored the manifesto acceptera. His extension to the Gothenburg Law Courts (1937) reconciled the new language with an old building. He became professor at the Royal Institute of Technology in 1931 and died in Stockholm in 1940.