Sigurd Lewerentz: Fragments, Context & Influence

During a career that spanned more than sixty years, the Swedish architect Sigurd Lewerentz challenged the very language of architecture—from his early sublime classicism to the raw, honest, archaic forms of his later buildings which culminated in his masterpiece in Klippan, The Church of Saint Peter. This exhibition celebrates Lewerentz’s accomplishments at St Petri through archival drawings, images, and fragments of process, placing it within the lineage of his greater body of work.

The exhibition also served to introduce the work of architect Bernt Nyberg through his films of St Petri and interviews with Lewerentz, giving voice and image to an architect who never lectured and rarely spoke about his work. Initially meeting on the construction site of St Petri, the two architects developed a close relationship which resulted in multiple collaborative competition entries and exercised significant influence on the direction of Nyberg’s later architecture and resulted in an intense collaboration that lasted until Lewerentz’s death in 1975.

A publication was prepared to accompany the exhibition edited by Professors Matt Hall, Hansjörg Göritz (University of Tennessee) and Nathan Matteson (Depaul University) Hall’s role involved inviting all the major scholars on Lewerentz’s work as well as new emerging critics and historians. He also authored the introductory essay, curated and collected the archival material and provided all of the new photography from over ten years of documenting the architect’s work.

The goal of this exhibit and publication was to situate the building’s position within a greater body of Scandinavian and Euro-pean architecture whose continued lineage remains valid within contemporary architectural practice and discourse. Through invited writings from most of the existing scholars of his work. Along with Göritz and Matteson, Hall is working on an expanded version of this content for publication with ACTAR, Barcelona in 2020.

The exhibition was made possible through generous support from the Birgitta and Peter Celsing Foundation, The Swedish Center for Architecture and Design, the Municipality of Klippan and Ljungbergs Press AB.

Matt Hall is Associate Professor of Architecture at Auburn’s School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape Architecture.