Architect: Erik Gunnar Asplund
Erik Gunnar Asplund at Drawing Matter
2 April 2024
Erik Gunnar Asplund at Drawing Matter2 April 2024
– Editors and Nicholas Olsberg
Erik Gunnar Asplund (1885–1940), trained first at the Royal Institute of Technology (where he would teach from 1931), and then at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm, undertook an extensive study tour of Greece and Italy, and opened his own practice around 1913, working entirely in Sweden, and… Read More
The Evolving Role of Drawing
29 April 2022
The Evolving Role of Drawing29 April 2022
This text was first published in The Architectural Review in 2013. Carlo Scarpa, in a famously infamous gesture, opened all his courses in design at the University of Venice by demonstrating the art of sharpening a pencil. That was the precise point, he claimed, from which all architecture proceeds. And… Read More
The wobbly line: Asplund, Johansson and the influence of Tessenow in Sweden 1915–1925
27 July 2020
The wobbly line: Asplund, Johansson and the influence of Tessenow in Sweden 1915–192527 July 2020
There is a drawing in a 1923 issue of the Swedish trade journal Byggmästaren (The Master-Builder). It is part of a presentation of a new three-storey house by the architect Cyrillus Johansson. To illustrate his text the architect has included photos and a drawing of the front elevation and a plan of… Read More
Working with Asplund
29 May 2020
Working with Asplund29 May 2020
Asplund’s office was two floors up in an old building in Regeringsgatan, behind the NK department store. There were civil engineers there and Asplund collaborated with them as well. They worked on regional planning. Asplund’s office was a very smart room, a chapel for meditation you might say. It was… Read More
Aalto on Asplund: Stockholm Exhibition (1930)
9 March 2020
Aalto on Asplund: Stockholm Exhibition (1930)9 March 2020
Alvar Aalto, from an interview for the Swedish newspaper Åbo Underrättelser, May 22, 1930. Reprinted in Göran Schildt, ed., Alvar Aalto: Sketches, trans. Stuart Wrede (London: MIT Press, 1979), 16.
Alternative Histories: Smith and Taylor Architects on Erik Gunnar Asplund
10 April 2019
Alternative Histories: Smith and Taylor Architects on Erik Gunnar Asplund10 April 2019
Erik Gunnar Asplund’s 1921 drawing of the gable elevation of Karl Johan School presents a composed, formal, broadly classical and definitely Scandinavian façade. The potential symmetry of the façade is undermined by its off-centre presentation on the sheet, and by its constructed context: the profile of the hipped-roofed building on the left,… Read More
Alternative Histories: Johan Celsing Arkitektkontor on Erik Gunnar Asplund
9 March 2019
Alternative Histories: Johan Celsing Arkitektkontor on Erik Gunnar Asplund9 March 2019
Model The cast-epoxy model developed from reflections on Gunnar Asplund’s work of the mid-1930s. The yellowish tone of the epoxy touches on the soft curvatures and almost bodily character of Asplund’s shapes during these years. Some of his shapes are interpreted as sensual membranes that may adjust to the structure,… Read More
Alternative Histories: Gustav Appell Arkitektkontor on Erik Gunnar Asplund
6 February 2019
Alternative Histories: Gustav Appell Arkitektkontor on Erik Gunnar Asplund6 February 2019
The model examines and highlights the way in which Asplund worked with interior space. Often the interior and exterior of his buildings show striking dissimilarities. His ability to hide unexpected spaces within unassuming volumes has always inspired us. This beautiful plan drawing of Villa Snellman speaks of this, we think,… Read More
Alternative Histories: Tony Fretton Architects on Erik Gunnar Asplund
19 December 2018
Alternative Histories: Tony Fretton Architects on Erik Gunnar Asplund19 December 2018
We recognise modernism as a continuing program to find architecture for the present time, and Asplund’s work as part of its history. Our project is a thought experiment on the central aspects of architecture’s modernism – social responsibility in combination with freedom to work with current sensibilities. It has proceeded… Read More
The Politics of the Image
5 January 2018
The Politics of the Image5 January 2018
– Maria S. Giudici, Joseph Mercer, Florian Scheucher, Keranie Theodosiou, Livia Wang, Sophie Williams and Feifei Zhou
My course, The Politics of the Image at the Royal College of Art, drew on the Drawing Matter Collection amongst others to explore the construction of images since the Renaissance. This construction has allowed a crafty lie to evolve, be challenged and ultimately influence reality – albeit not always in straightforward ways.… Read More
Erik Gunnar Asplund: the father
14 August 2015
Erik Gunnar Asplund: the father14 August 2015
Erik Gunnar Asplund’s son Ingemar told me that their father would pick him and his brother Hans up on Sundays to take them to the summer house. (He was then living with a woman other than their mother.) Father would make a little conversation as they made their way to… Read More
Gathered Moments: Asplund’s Villa Snellman
28 September 2023
Gathered Moments: Asplund’s Villa Snellman28 September 2023
– Andrew Carr
Virginia Woolf’s use of short stories to form larger works, and her bracketing of inner discourse with physical objects and phenomena, suggest a similar episodic approach to architectural composition. Discrete moments are assembled to form a whole which is often held within an overarching temporal structure. This structure does not… Read More
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