Lewerentz, Sigurd (1885–1975). Swedish architect. At the beginning of his career he worked with Fischer, Möhring, and Riemerschmid in Germany (1908–10), where he absorbed the new rational attitude. His work was within the camp of National Romanticism, as with his influential but unrealized project for the Hälsingborg Crematorium (1913–14), and indeed it was in cemetery and crematorium design that he was to make his name. In the Hälsingborg project the relationships of building, water, and landscape were carefully and sensitively designed, and this was to be true of his later works. For the Hälsingborg project and the various houses he designed around the time of the 1914–18 war he worked with Torsten Stubelius (1883–1963). In 1915 he began a long collaboration with Asplund in the design of the Woodland Cemetery, Stockholm, which was to last until his death. There he designed the landscapes and the exquisite Neo-Classical Resurrection Chapel (1922–8), one of Sweden's finest and most subtle essays in C20 Neo-Classicism. Other major commissions for cemeteries included that for Malmö's Eastern Cemetery, work on which likewise extended from the 1920s until the end of his life. There, the buildings, with their severe geometries, recall Roman Antiquity and late-C18 Neo-Classicism. The mortuary-chapel, Stora Tuna (1928), employs the simplest of means for its tenderly conceived dignity.

In 1930 Lewerentz designed the sans-serif lettering, posters, and many pavilions for the Stockholm Exhibition of 1930, marking a change of direction in his style. For his two late churches, St Mark's at Skarpnäck, Stockholm (1956–60), and St Peter's, Klippan (1963–6), he used naked, unadorned brick to great effect, and virtually all historical references are absent.

Bibliography

Ahlin (1987);
Andersson & and Bedoire (1986);
Caldenby et al. (1998);
Constant (1994);
Kalman (1994);
Flora et al. (eds.) (2002);
Johansson & and Galli (1996);
Paavilainen (ed.) (1982);
SBL (1979)