Left: Shed of the rowing club Djurgárdsbrunnsviken, Stockholm. Right: Resurrection Chappel, Enskede.

History has not been fair to Sigurd Lewerentz. He has never fitted the oversimple categories which historians and critics have used to chart the development of modern architecture, and even recent revisionisms have had some difficulty situating his work.

For many years Lewerentz was relegated to the position of ‘also-ran' after Asplund, with whom he designed the Cemetery at Enskede over a twenty-year period beginning in 1915, when they won the competition. Lewerentz made some of the major contributions to the landscape idea, especially to the notion of a burial ground recalling features of an antique necropolis.

His other, independent designs (eg, Malmó Eastern Cemetery, 1922) reveal a precise control of vista, movement, landscape and classical reference, while his intentions for the Chapel of the Resurrection at Enskede supplied more than a little of the inspiration for Asplund’s eventual Crematorium with its stern portico fusing modernist abstraction with a basically classical sense of form...[+]