Francisco Portugal e Gomes

DARQ – Department of Architecture, Coimbra University, Portugal
fpg.arquitecto@gmail.com

Sigurd Lewerentz: the Unity of the Work and Diversities of the Double

The body of work of Sigurd Lewerentz (1885-1975) is unique and disconcerting. Despite being considered today one of the most notable architects of the 20th century, Sigurd Lewerentz was relatively unknown until the 1980s. The article aims to question the meaning of the unity of the work (Alberti’s concinnitas) based on manifestations of the double, considering that this is a recurring issue in his long professional trajectory, which evolved from a romantic classicism, at the beginning of the 20th century, to a nordic brutalism at the end of his career. In which works does the double appear? What manifests the double in the unity of the work? Janne Ahlin (1987) in one of the first publications dedicated to Lewerentz, mentions that “Recurring themes did not have much to do with style; rather they achieved their depth in real situations that he encountered on various occasions. This makes his buildings difficult to imitate, impossible to recreate elsewhere.”1
The attention that the meaning of the double deserves is appealing because the sense of the impossibility of recreation, regarding the impracticality of imitation or reproducibility of his works, especially the final ones, opens up a possibility of approaching the understanding of the unity of the work. In its diversity, the double appears, for example, in the Chapel of the Resurrection (1925), Woodland Cemetery, through the dissociation of the one, with the displacement of the portico from the front of the chapel to its left side, or through side-by-side arrangement which opens the continuity of the space under the front canopies, in the Chapel of St. Knut and the Chapel of Stª Gertruds (1943), Malmö Eastern Cemetery, or by the pairs of square windows that mirror living and light pictures of the
external landscape, offered by the opening in the wall, in St. Petri’s Church, Klippan (1963-66).

Keywords: Sigurd Lewerentz; unity of the work; double; burial mounds; Malmö Eastern Cemetery.