Sigurd Lewerentz: Church of St Peter, Klippan, 1963–66
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history This modest building questions basic assumptions about processes and finishes, about the nature of brickwork and the detailing of window frames – and provides a powerful space for worship. Sigurd Lewerentz: Church of St Peter, Klippan, 1963–66 Peter Blundell Jones The wall is rough brick, very rough with unusually thrown into question. It produced a new and wide joints. The pointing is not raked or trowelled as unexpected architectural vocabulary, but it can also usual but ‘bagged off’, crudely wiped with an old be read as a commentary on the significance of sack, causing the bricks to be smeared. From time to expressed construction, on deriving a building’s time this texture is relieved by another in acute identity from its tectonic nature. St Peter’s was contrast: a pure semi-reflective plane of glass with a Lewerentz’s last major work, begun when he was 78 perfect silver edge, evidently applied to the outside of years old, and carried through with great the wall [1a]. Its delicate form is held in position by fastidiousness and constant site-supervision. It is as the crudest means: a bracket in each corner secured extreme a statement in its different way as Mies’s with two screws [1b]. This window in St Peter’s Church gallery described in the last chapter. The two Klippan, by Sigurd Lewerentz, is a favourite with buildings were conceived and built at more or less architects, for once seen it is never forgotten; but it is the same time, and the two architects were almost only imitated by the brave. First a brick hole is precise contemporaries, Mies born in 1886 and formed, a pure rectangular void surrounded by a Lewerentz in 1885. Arguably, they were equally pure brick edge. A thick layer of mastic is then obsessive in their pursuit of materials and detailing, applied to the outside face of the hole, and a sealed and equally indebted to the Classical Tradition, but double-glazing unit a few centimetres larger is Lewerentz’s work moved in quite a different direction pressed into place, the brackets screwed on to retain from Mies’s. From the beginning of his career, he was it. From inside there seems hardly a window at all, interested in irregularity and conflicting orders for the glass remains invisible and frameless, simply rather that in the calm finality sought by Mies. And a brick hole in a thick brick wall. On the outside the far from purifying a building’s appearance by precision and fragility of the glass contrast erasing every mark left by the hand, Lewerentz asked poignantly with the brutality of the brickwork. It is of course a fixed window, ventilation being supplied 1 Once seen, never vocabulary showing brick hole, by other means. forgotten and a Mirror-like mastic bed and This arresting detail is typical of numerous imitated only by the windows of parish metal bracket. brave. Part of an rooms at outer Note the ‘bagged- instances at St Peter’s when assumptions about unexpected south-east corner off’ brickwork building methods and ‘good practice’ are apparently architectural b Fixing detail pointing 1a 1b history arq . vol 6 . no 2 . 2002 159 160 arq . vol 6 . no 2 . 2002 history 2 Classical vigour. in logs and and imposed orders: Lewerentz’s early granite Chapel of the masterpiece: Chapel Resurrection of the Resurrection, 4 A synthesis between a The portico stands Enskede Cemetery, opposite poles: at the end of the Stockholm, 1926, Stockholm Patent longest straight route west side seen Office by Ragnar in the cemetery from the sunken Östberg b Plan showing the garden a Main front 2° shift between the b Corner detail: the chapel (aligned with 3 Classicism meets the intended render was the sunken west Nordic farmhouse never applied garden – see 2) and a Classicism in the portico (aligned painted wood 5 The subtle with its approach b Rough farmstead interaction of given route) 2 3a 4a 3b 4b Peter Blundell Jones Sigurd Lewerentz: Church of St Peter, Klippan, 1963–66 history arq . vol 6 . no 2 . 2002 161 5a 5b his workers to refrain from tidying up, making the an international stage.2 Its ubiquitous half-round marks of the process more obvious. In complete arches, for example, derive from H. H. Richardson in contrast with Mies, for example, he had them leave the United States, learned through publications. the welded and soldered joints with irregular Even the most apparently local manifestations were pimples of melted metal protruding. At times the part of this larger debate: the quintessentially rawness is shocking, a dirty architecture as opposed Catalan Gaudí is unthinkable without the example to Mies’s obsessively clean one. And if, like Mies, of Viollet-le-Duc, just as the Glaswegian Mackintosh Lewerentz still held to a concern for geometry and depends on Pugin and the Arts and Crafts Movement. proportion visible in the completely orthogonal Even the intense regionalist Theodor Fischer, for plan with its square within a square and carefully whom Lewerentz briefly worked on a visit to modulated dimensions, the three-dimensional Germany around 1910, was not tied to one place. He composition of St Peter’s is untidy, asymmetrical, thought respecting a context meant learning the contextual, contingent; its irregularities are not local architectural language, and he built repressed but relished. Despite the Classical rigour of contrasting Bavarian, Swabian and Tyrolean an early masterpiece like his Chapel of the buildings not from the viewpoint of the artless local Resurrection of 1926 [2], Lewerentz seems in his late but as visiting professor. What he relished in the task work to have returned increasingly to the National – quite legitimately – was the discovery of and Romanticism of his youth, reworking it in an entirely dialogue with the place, the participation in genius new form. loci.3 Behind the pan-European National Romantic The Scandinavian background movement the Gothic was a powerful inspiration – That this symphony of the raw and the rough should the Gothic, that is, as understood through the simple have occurred in Scandinavia is no accident. Cities polemic of Pugin, the sophisticated aesthetic stance were small, industrialization late, and in the extreme of Ruskin and the scholarly analysis of Viollet.4 It was northern climate the powers of nature were more relished for its honest and direct use of materials, directly felt. Classicism [3a], romantically linked with but also for its complex, irregular and articulated the distant Mediterranean sun, was opposed by the forms. Understandably, it was taken as a refreshment raw Nordic farmhouse of rough-hewn logs set on for the architectural debate in counterpoint to granite boulders [3b], celebrated at the time of various forms of tired academic Classicism. It could Lewerentz’s architectural education by the National be seen as a design philosophy of responsiveness to Romantic movement, for he and Asplund were local need as opposed to the imposition of an ideal taught by two of its Swedish leaders, Ragnar Östberg order, and of returning to naked building as opposed and Carl Westman.1 For both these architects, to the grafting on of borrowed iconographies like however, the Classical example was also ever-present icing on a cake. The adoption of local vernacular and they struggled to achieve a synthesis between building traditions as manifestations of a ‘Gothic’ these opposite poles. So while Östberg’s masterpiece spirit makes sense for both of these oppositions, Stockholm City Hall drew on the irregular Venetian however nonsensical it may seem in relation to Gothic of the Doge’s Palace, his Stockholm patent Gothic as a style.5 The Classical heritage within the office boasted a symmetrical and Classical front [4a]. Gothic could, of course, be ignored. Even so, the patent office has the rawest and roughest Lewerentz and Erik Gunnar Asplund were both brickwork, as if waiting for a coat of render that was students of the breakaway Klara School. Their careers never applied [4b]. developed in parallel and they worked together for National Romanticism, which exploded across 18 years on their mutual masterpiece, Enskede Europe in the 1890s from Finland to Hungary, was a Cemetery in southern Stockholm.6 Having absorbed complex phenomenon. The celebration of local the lessons of National Romanticism they both culture and identity that seems to lie at its heart was passed through an intensely Neo-Classical period in already artificial and self-conscious, performed on the late teens and 1920s, when they not only applied Sigurd Lewerentz: Church of St Peter, Klippan, 1963–66 Peter Blundell Jones 162 arq . vol 6 . no 2 . 2002 history 6a Classical decorative forms but could adopt the most added to the cemetery in 1926, is his most severely formal of schematic plans and build in ways that formal Classical building, yet its asymmetry is the were not just constructionally deceptive but making of it. The noble portico [5a], set on the axis of positively scenographic.7 The faked facade of high the Way of Seven Wells, the longest straight route on culture with its references to Greece and Rome the site, is detached from the chapel, whose remained as much a possibility as the primitive hut orientation follows the axis of the sunken west or log-cabin, and they could switch from one garden. The two axes are not normal but 2° out, and precedent to the other even within a single project.8 rather than concealing this fact like most architects, This meant that expressing construction – to isolate Lewerentz played it up through the skewed one issue – was not so much a rule as a perpetual disjunction of the two buildings [5b].