Gunnar Asplund, the architect who shaped Stockholm’s modernity

Gunnar Asplund occupies a unique place in the history of Swedish architecture: he was one of the leading figures in the transition from Nordic architectural tradition to the modernism and functionalism of the 1930s. His importance lies not only in a handful of iconic buildings in Stockholm, but also in the transformation he helped bring about in the very way architecture was conceived.

Trained in the context of Nordic Classicism, Asplund gradually developed an architecture in which function, light, use and the relationship with the landscape took on a central role. His Stockholm Public Library, completed in 1928, already reflects this transition: behind a composition that remains deeply classical lies a new way of thinking about space, circulation and the user’s experience.

The real turning point came in 1930, when Asplund became the chief architect of the Stockholm Exhibition. The event played a foundational role in the history of Swedish funkis: architecture, furniture, design and industrial technologies came together to propose a new vision of modern life. The aim was no longer simply to renew architectural forms, but to rethink the home around light, hygiene, functionality and well-being.

Asplund thus helped transform modernity from a purely imported European architectural language into a project adapted to Swedish society. Yet his work retained a particular sensitivity to proportion, materials, nature and the poetic dimension of architecture, as demonstrated especially by Skogskyrkogården, designed together with Sigurd Lewerentz.

Between classicism and functionalism, tradition and avant-garde, Asplund embodies a decisive moment: the moment when Stockholm truly entered modernity.

Gunnar Asplund: a life in an architecture undergoing profound change

Erik Gunnar Asplund was born in Stockholm in 1885, at a time when Sweden was undergoing rapid industrialization and urbanization. He studied architecture at KTH from 1905 to 1909, before continuing his training within Stockholm’s independent architectural circles. His early career unfolded in a context in which Swedish architects were seeking to break away from the eclecticism of the nineteenth century while developing an architecture suited to modern society.

A journey through Europe, particularly France and Italy in 1913–1914, played an important role in Asplund’s architectural education. He was especially interested in classical architecture, proportion and the relationship between buildings and their surroundings. During the 1910s and 1920s, he thus became one of the leading figures of Nordic Classicism, or Swedish Grace, a movement that favoured a restrained and elegant architecture deeply rooted in the quality of form and materials.

In 1915, he won, together with Sigurd Lewerentz, the competition for the Skogskyrkogården cemetery, a project that would accompany him for nearly twenty-five years. He subsequently produced several major works, including the Skandia Cinema and, above all, the Stockholm Public Library, completed in 1928. The library marked the culmination of his classical period while already anticipating a more modern approach to architecture, centred on use, circulation and light.

The real turning point came in 1930, when Asplund became the chief architect of the Stockholm Exhibition. The event played a decisive role in the development of Swedish funkis and marked his own transition towards functionalism. Architecture, design, industry and everyday life were conceived together, around a new vision of housing and well-being.

During the 1930s, Asplund continued to pursue a modernity that was both rational and humane, without ever abandoning his attention to proportion, light, materials and the landscape. He became a professor at KTH in 1931 and exerted a significant influence on the new generation of Swedish architects.

Gunnar Asplund died in Stockholm in 1940, at the age of just 55, while still actively working. He was buried at Skogskyrkogården, where he had just completed the great Woodland Crematorium. His relatively short career thus coincided with one of the major transformations in Swedish architecture: from Nordic Classicism to functionalism and from tradition to modernity.

Asplund, architect and designer: from buildings to furniture

For Gunnar Asplund, architecture was not limited to the design of the building itself: it extended to the interior, furniture and the entire environment of everyday life. This approach was not entirely new in Sweden, architects such as Ferdinand Boberg and Ragnar Östberg had already placed considerable emphasis on decoration, materials, and interior design, but Asplund belonged to a generation that took this integration further.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the architect increasingly became a designer of the complete living environment, a development made particularly visible by the 1925 International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts in Paris. French Art Deco promoted a conception of the interior as a unified work of art, in which architecture, furniture, lighting, textiles and objects were designed to form a coherent aesthetic whole. Asplund himself participated in the Paris exhibition with an interior and furniture ensemble, including a mahogany and leather armchair that is now held by the Nordiska Museet.

Photograph Landin Mats, Nordiska museet

What gradually distinguished Asplund from the generation of Boberg and Östberg was therefore not simply the fact that he “designed furniture,” but the new role he gave to design within the architectural project. Furniture became an integral component of the design, conceived in relation to space, proportion and use.

At the Stockholm Public Library, Asplund worked with designer Gustaf Bergström to create the entire furniture scheme, including nineteen chair models whose forms echoed the geometric motifs of the building.

This continuity between architecture and design accompanied the evolution of his architectural language: still deeply influenced by Classicism and the tradition of the decorative arts in the 1920s, his work gradually moved towards a more restrained and functional aesthetic.

Asplund thus became one of the figures who transformed the Swedish architect from a designer of buildings into a true creator of environments, capable of considering space, furniture and patterns of use simultaneously. It is this holistic approach to design, rather than his furniture production alone, that helps explain his particular place in the emergence of modern Swedish design.

Gunnar Asplund’s buildings in Stockholm: an architecture in motion

Stockholm offers a rare opportunity to trace the evolution of Asplund’s architectural thinking with remarkable clarity.

The Skandia Cinema, 1923

Designed between 1922 and 1923 within an existing building in Stockholm, the Skandia Cinema is one of the earliest projects in which Gunnar Asplund so forcefully expresses his conception of architecture as an interior experience. Although firmly rooted in the Nordic Classicism of the 1920s, the project does not seek to reproduce classical architectural forms literally. Instead, Asplund engages with a relatively new programme, the cinema, whose architectural language was still largely undefined. He starts from the idea that the spectator does not simply come to watch a film: they enter an imaginary world, and the space itself must prepare them for that experience.

The interior is thus conceived as a true theatrical mise-en-scène. Asplund imagines the main auditorium as an inner courtyard open onto a night sky: the ceiling is painted deep blue and dotted with electric globes arranged freely, evoking stars.

Around the main auditorium, the balconies and boxes take the form of small autonomous architectural structures, like pavilions scattered throughout an imaginary city. The side balconies, upholstered in deep red velvet, are paired with motifs inspired by Pompeian painting, while the doors, staircases, lighting fixtures, and decorative elements all contribute to an atmosphere of theatre and fantasy.

Colour plays a fully-fledged architectural role here. The deep blue of the ceiling, the red textiles, the touches of gold, and the contrasts between painted surfaces and sculpted elements are not merely ornaments added to an existing architectural framework: they actively shape the perception of the space. Asplund also works with proportion and surprise, particularly in the circulation spaces and access points leading to the balconies. Doors and openings play with scale, while the lighting helps give spectators the feeling of entering a stage set rather than a functional auditorium. The archives of the Canadian Centre for Architecture also preserve several photographs of the interior, documenting the circulation spaces, doors, light fixtures, balconies and decorative reliefs.

This attention to every element explains why Skandia is essential to understanding Asplund as an architect-designer. He designed not only the overall space, but also part of the furniture that inhabits it: several chairs and armchairs for the cinema were manufactured by Nordiska Kompaniet from his designs. A pair of armchairs now documented by Bukowskis, for example, comes directly from the Skandia-Teatern and reflects the vocabulary of Swedish Grace, with a lacquered wooden frame, curved forms and upholstered seating.

Skandia thus anticipates a conception of architecture in which the building, interior, furniture, light and colour all form part of a single design project. This is precisely what makes the work so important in the evolution of Asplund: although its vocabulary remains classical, it is already modern in the way it places the user and their experience at the centre of the design process. Architecture is no longer simply a composition of façades and volumes, it becomes an environment to be inhabited and experienced, an idea that Asplund would later develop on a very different scale in the Stockholm Public Library and, after 1930, in his functionalist architecture.

The Stockholm public library, 1928

Completed in 1928, the library represents the culmination of Asplund’s exploration of geometry, monumentality and function. It combines an exterior composition of great simplicity with a remarkably elaborate interior organisation. Its central volume, formed by a monumental cylinder set within a rectangular ensemble, gives the building a presence that is both restrained and imposing. This clearly legible geometry lends the building an almost abstract rigour, while creating a striking contrast between the neutrality of the façades and the richness of the interior space.

Inside, the visitor’s journey plays an essential role in shaping the perception of the building. The monumental staircase gradually leads towards the great central rotunda, whose proportions and natural light reinforce the solemn character of the space. Around it, the book galleries organise the library according to a functional and concentric logic, making geometry not only a principle of composition but also a genuine tool for organising space. Visitors thus gradually discover the building’s different scales, moving from the entrance areas to the vast volume of the reading room.

The library thus bears witness to a period of transition in Swedish architecture. It retains certain principles of Nordic Classicism, particularly in its monumentality, the clarity of its composition, and its use of elementary geometric forms, while also anticipating the development of a more modern functionalism.

For Asplund, however, form is never merely decorative: it emerges from function, movement and the user’s experience. The Stockholm Public Library can therefore be seen as a pivotal work, in which the classical tradition is gradually reinterpreted through a more rational and modern approach to architecture.

The Stockholm exhibition of 1930

The Stockholm Exhibition of 1930 marked a decisive moment in Gunnar Asplund’s evolution. When he became its chief architect, Asplund was still deeply influenced by the Nordic Classicism that characterised his early work. Yet the exhibition gave him an opportunity to experiment with a radically different kind of architecture: lighter, more open, more functional and conceived in dialogue with modern life.

The exhibition was driven by Gregor Paulsson, director of the Svenska Slöjdföreningen (Swedish Society of Industrial Design) and its leading intellectual force. Paulsson sought to demonstrate that design and architecture should respond to the transformations taking place in society. Asplund became the figure who gave this vision a concrete architectural form.

Alongside him, Sigurd Lewerentz and several young architects, notably Sven Markelius, Uno Åhrén and Wolter Gahn, contributed to the design of the exhibition’s various buildings and installations. Lewerentz also played an important role in shaping its graphic identity. But it was Asplund who oversaw the architectural direction and gave the project its overall coherence.

In Stockholm in 1930, Asplund engaged directly with the new ideas then circulating across Europe, particularly those of functionalism and the Modern Movement. Yet he did not apply them dogmatically. Instead, he interpreted them through his own sensibility: his concern with light, public spaces, materials, nature and the human experience of architecture.

This is precisely what makes the exhibition so important in his career. Asplund did not simply move from Classicism to functionalism: he transformed his own architectural language. Forms became more refined, structures more legible, and spaces more open, while architecture increasingly sought to respond to patterns of use and everyday life.

The exhibition thus functioned as a true laboratory. It allowed Asplund to experiment on a large scale with temporary, modern and accessible architecture, and to test ideas that he would later continue to develop in his permanent projects.

The contrast becomes particularly clear when comparing the 1930 exhibition with his earlier work. The architect who had created his first buildings in the spirit of Nordic Classicism was now able to incorporate the principles of modernity without abandoning his own architectural vocabulary.

Skogskyrkogården: A Project Shaped by Asplund’s Transformation (1915-1940)

This evolution can be seen particularly clearly at Skogskyrkogården, the woodland cemetery in Stockholm designed by Gunnar Asplund and Sigurd Lewerentz. The project began in 1915, when they won the competition for the new cemetery, and construction began in 1917, well before the Stockholm Exhibition of 1930.

The earliest buildings still reflect an architectural approach very different from the one Asplund would develop during the 1930s. The Skogskapellet (Woodland Chapel), inaugurated in 1920, was one of his first buildings on the site. With its shingled pyramidal roof, small scale and almost rustic atmosphere, it is intimately integrated into the forest. The architecture remains deeply rooted in the Nordic Romanticism and Classicism that characterised Asplund’s early work.

A few years later, the Tallumpaviljongen, built in 1923 as a service building, was added to the complex. But the contrast is even more striking with the Uppståndelsekapellet, designed by Lewerentz and inaugurated in 1925: with its restrained façade, columns, and triangular pediment, it clearly belongs to the classical architectural language.

Then came 1930, and with it the turning point represented by the Stockholm Exhibition in Asplund’s career. The later development of Skogskyrkogården took place within this new context. Between 1930 and 1935, the entrance landscape and Almhöjden were laid out by Lewerentz, while Asplund continued to develop the buildings.

The change becomes particularly visible in the Woodland Crematorium, whose construction began in 1936. By then, Asplund was solely responsible for the project and developed a much more modern architectural language: the volumes are low, horizontal, functional, and subtly integrated into the landscape. The three chapels (Faith, Hope, and the Holy Cross) open onto the surrounding landscape, while the service and technical spaces are placed discreetly at the rear. Inaugurated in 1940, the building is regarded as one of the great examples of Asplund’s “soft modernism.”

What is remarkable, however, is that Asplund did not thereby become a radical functionalist. In the crematorium, modernity remains deeply human and poetic: natural light, materials (stone, wood, glass, ceramics, and metal) as well as proportions and the relationships between spaces all play an essential role.

The chapels are designed to accompany the different stages of the ceremony, with narrow passages at the entrance that gradually open into larger, brighter spaces.

Other iconic buildings in Sweden

Although Gunnar Asplund’s work is primarily associated with Stockholm, several of his major projects can be found elsewhere in Sweden. These buildings make it possible to trace the evolution of his architecture, from Nordic Romanticism and Nordic Classicism to functionalism.

Rådhuset, Gothenburg (1934–1937)

The extension of Gothenburg City Hall is one of Gunnar Asplund’s most important works outside Stockholm. Conceived more than twenty years after his first proposal for the site, the building brings together the seventeenth-century town hall and a resolutely modern new wing. Asplund embraces the contrast between the historic façade and the geometric simplicity of the extension, while creating a subtle continuity through proportion, materials and detailing.

Inside, this search for unity is particularly remarkable: the vast Rådhushallen, the heart of the building, is flooded with light through openings onto the courtyard and large glazed sections, while the long, curved lines of the wooden panels give the hall an atmosphere that is both monumental and welcoming. Wood, plaster and marble are combined with great restraint, and Asplund himself designed much of the furniture, lighting fixtures, textiles and even some of the finer architectural details.

Architecture and interior design thus form an inseparable whole, in which every element contributes to the experience of the place. This work perfectly illustrates Asplund’s transition from Nordic Classicism towards a freer and more humanized form of functionalism.

Lister County Courthouse, Sölvesborg (1917–1921)

The Lister County Courthouse in Sölvesborg belongs to the early period of Asplund’s career and is considered one of his first masterpieces.

Tingshuset i Sölvesborg. Foto: Mattias Ostrowski

The building combines a monumental presence with a domestic quality, characterized by simple volumes, an imposing roof, and particular attention to proportions and detail. Its language, still strongly influenced by Nordic Classicism, reflects Asplund’s interest in an architecture deeply rooted in local tradition, yet already freed from excessive academicism.

Realskolan, Karlshamn (1912–1918)

The former secondary school in Karlshamn is an early work that offers valuable insight into the origins of Asplund’s architectural language. Built at a time when he was gradually moving away from academic conventions, it combines a classical composition with references to Swedish National Romanticism.

The volumes, materials and details are handled with great care, giving the building a presence that is both institutional and welcoming. The subsequent alterations and extensions also reflect the evolution of Asplund’s architectural thinking.

Villa Sturegården, Nyköping (1913)

Villa Sturegården is a private residence designed early in Asplund’s career, at a time when his architecture was still strongly influenced by Swedish National Romanticism.

Its relatively simple composition and careful response to materials and context nevertheless anticipate several concerns that would remain central to his work. More intimate than his public buildings, the villa reveals Asplund’s interest in a form of domestic architecture in which proportions, openings, and details contribute to an overall atmosphere rather than pursuing monumentality.

The Iconic Furniture of Gunnar Asplund

This continuity between architecture and design can also be seen in his most celebrated pieces of furniture, particularly the armchairs and chairs designed for his own buildings and the models produced in collaboration with Nordiska Kompaniet. For Asplund, furniture was not an object added to architecture: it was an extension of it at the scale of the human body. It is precisely this ability to move from landscape to building, from building to interior and from interior to object that makes him such an important figure in Scandinavian architecture and design.

The Armchair at the International Exhibition of Decorative Arts in Paris (1925)

Presented at the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts in Paris in 1925, this mahogany-and-leather armchair, decorated with ivory medallions on the armrests, embodies the refinement characteristic of Swedish Grace. Sweden’s participation in the exhibition was an important international success: the Parisian public was particularly receptive to the elegance of the objects, the quality of their craftsmanship and the dialogue between artisanal tradition, decoration and modernity.

For Asplund, however, this decorative exploration was never reduced to ornament. The armchair becomes a true exercise in form and geometry: he experiments with different curves for the seat, armrests, and legs before arriving at a continuous silhouette, almost as if drawn in a single gesture. The S-shaped line of the frame, the polished mahogany surfaces, and the understated geometry of the decoration are thus conceived as a coherent whole.

This attention to line, proportion and the relationship between the different parts of the piece reflects a broader line of thought that accompanied Asplund’s development throughout the 1920s: form should no longer simply be embellished, it should be constructed, structured and tested in space. The 1925 armchair thus emerges as a pivotal work, still deeply rooted in the refinement of Swedish Grace, yet already exploring a simplicity, geometry and formal coherence that would find further expression in his later architecture.

The Chairs of Stockholm Public Library (1927–1928)

For the Stockholm Public Library, Asplund worked with designer Gustaf Bergström to create the entire furniture scheme, including 19 different chair models. Each piece was designed in relation to the space and its intended use.

The forms of the furniture echo the library’s geometric vocabulary, particularly the circle and the square, which also structure the architecture of the building. The materials and proportions were likewise carefully studied to create a sense of continuity between the space and the objects within it.

This approach shows that Asplund did not regard furniture as a merely decorative element: the chair, table or lamp fully participates in the architecture. He conceived the building down to its smallest details, creating a coherent environment in which architecture and design become one.

The 1931 Tubular Steel and Leather Chair

This chair is particularly interesting for the story of Asplund’s work because it illustrates his shift towards functionalism following the Stockholm Exhibition of 1930. Produced by Nordiska Kompaniet, it is now part of the collections of the Nationalmuseum.

The chair nevertheless differs from the austerity of some contemporary modernist designs in the care given to proportions and comfort. Asplund retains a certain softness in the curves and in the relationship between metal and leather. This tension between the geometric rigor of the structure and the sensuality of the material is characteristic of his approach: industrial production does not necessarily imply coldness or abstraction, but can instead become a new means of exploring form, lightness and space.

The chair thus reflects Asplund’s rapid evolution from the refinement of Swedish Grace in the 1920s to the functionalism of the late 1920s and early 1930s.