Claesson Koivisto Rune Architects 9783035619096, 9783035618945

Table of contents :
Works
The Architecture of Claesson Koivisto Rune by Kieran Long
The Experience of Space: A conversation between Mårten Claesson, Eero Koivisto, Ola Rune and Zoë Ryan
Architectural Works Solo Exhibitions Awards Monographies Contributors Biography

Citation preview

Claesson Koivisto Rune Architects

Claesson Koivisto Rune Architects Introduction by Kieran Long Interview by Zoë Ryan Photography by Åke E:son Lindman

Birkhäuser Basel

Claesson Koivisto Rune Architects 01. Parquet Patterned Pool and Spa, p. 8 02. Crescent House, p. 22 03. Hidden House, p. 34 04. Boisbuchet Sauna, p. 42 05. Sfera Building, p. 52 06. Landskrona Kulturhus, p. 68 07. Wirum Restaurant, p. 76 08. Administrative Service Centre, p. 86 09. S/Y Susanne af Stockholm, p. 94 10. Sculpture Garden at Malmö Konsthall, p. 102 11. Ingegerd Råman Studio, p. 102 12. Gun Gallery, p. 102 13. Alberto Biani Shop, p. 103 14. Ceramika Showroom, p. 103 15. Sfera Tokyo, p. 103 Introduction. The Architecture of Claesson Koivisto Rune by Kieran Long, p. 104 16. House of Many Courtyards, p. 110 17. Hillside House, p. 122 18. Espina de Cruz, p. 134 19. Tom´s Tower, p. 146 20. Tokyo Townhouse, p. 154 21. Obelisken 29, p. 162 22. The Nordic Watercolour Museum, p. 172 23. Kista Nod, p. 172 24. Stiller Studios, p. 172 25. X-Site, p. 173 26. Therme Bühlerhöhe, p. 173 27. Ängelholm Public Baths, p. 173 28. Hotel Zander K, p. 174 29. Hotel Bergen Børs, p. 188 30. Hotel Skeppsholmen, p. 188 31. Villa Terminus, p. 188 32. Grand Hotel Terminus, p. 189 33. K5 Hotel, p. 189 34. Nobis Hotel, p. 189 35. Öja House, p. 190 36. M's House, p. 200 37. Kråkmora Holmar House, p. 208 38. Villa Widlund, p. 218 39. Fagerström House, p. 230 40. Lindé House, p. 244 41. A Long House, p. 252 42. Lilla Tornö House, p. 262 43. No. 5 House, p. 272 44. Villa Wabi, p. 280 45. Dwell House, p. 280 46. Stern House, p. 280 47. Villa Werner, p. 281 48. Levine House, p. 281 49. Eckerdal House, p. 281 50. Eriksvik House, p. 282 51. Stålberg House, p. 282 52. Hacienda House, p. 282 53. Simonsson House, p. 283 54. Drevviken House, p. 283 55. Hovering House, p. 283 Interview. The Experience of Space: A conversation between Mårten Claesson, Eero Koivisto, Ola Rune and Zoë Ryan, p. 284 56. Lund Cathedral Visitor Centre, p. 294 57. Strängnäs Cathedral Visitor Centre, p. 304 58. Våler Kirke, p. 314

59. Plus House, p. 324 60. Folded Roof House, p. 332 61. Tind House, p. 340 62. Swedish Ambassador's Residence, p. 350 63. One Happy Cloud, p. 350 64. No Picnic, p. 350 65. Liljevalchs Museum Shop, p. 351 66. Sony Music Sweden, p. 351 67. Kylie Minogue Music Video Set, p. 351 68. Inde/Jacobs Gallery, p. 352 69. Tomihiro Art Museum, p. 368 70. Galleri Örsta, p. 378 Architectural Works, p. 392 Solo Exhibitions, p. 393 Awards, p. 394 Monographies, p. 395 Contributors, p. 397 Biography, p. 398

Works

01. Parquet Patterned Pool and Spa

A spa with two pools was added adjacent to a 1796 mansion. The spa has one indoor pool for wintertime and one outdoor for summer. The outdoor pool sits on a podium, which levels the slope on which the mansion sits, creating a platform from which you have an elevated view over the estate towards the back. Yet, it sits discrete as seen from the approach to the main entrance. The indoor pool is hidden inside the podium so that one pool could be said to sit on top of the other. The two spa areas are each other’s mirrors. The outside is protruding while the inside is hollowed out. But both share the same patterned concept. Lending inspiration from the neoclassical mansion in general and parquet floor patterns from the time in particular, the concept is built on the chevron (French parquet). Wood decking and custom laser-cut tiles share the same chevron pattern in different scales. Two archetypically house-shaped structures stand, extrusion-like, on the podium next to the outdoor pool. The larger house makes for a roofed outdoor dining place. The smaller and narrower house conceals the stairwell down to the indoor spa. The oversized (in comparison with normal parquets) tiles are white which allows them to be coloured turquoise by the depth of the water. Each step down into the pool thus is a deeper hue of turquoise. The water itself is not treated as a transparent ”nothing” but as a visible element and one of the materials on the palette. The whole spa palette is complete with only three materials: Wood, tile and water – the chevron pattern from wood is superimposed on tile, amplified and modulated by water.

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Private pool and spa 2016 260 m²

Water is treated as one of the building materials, coloured by its depth. Each step down into the pool is thus a deeper hue of turquoise.

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The house-shaped structure (above) rising up from the pool-end conceals the stairwell down to the indoor spa (left). Both the pools share the same material treatment.

The chevron ‘parquet’ pattern from the original floors of the adjacent 18th century mansion is echoed, in different scales, in the terrace floor and dining pavilion.

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Custom laser-cut tiles cover all hard surfaces seamlessly inside and out.

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Section through dining pavilion, terrace, outdoor pool, indoor spa and mansion.

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02. Crescent House

With its two storeys placed in a steep slope this house has two main entrances. The upper floor entrance is the more formal and on the lower floor is the pool entrance. The house has two functions, either as a guest house or as a house for pool parties. The idea of the half moon – or crescent – as a symbol for the night (whether sleeper or night owl) is repeated in all three dimensions. First crescent. The interior side of the stairway forms a stretched crescent to allow more space and more flow at the top and bottom ends of the stairs. Second crescent. The bedroom of the upper floor cuts through the overhead space in the living room like the belly of a whale swimming above. Being perpendicular to the living-room and stairway, its shape is revealed outside in the shape of the window on the long façade. Third crescent. The panoramic window on the end wall is reflecting the bedroom window with an oversized crescent shape. With its curve at the bottom, it frames the pool outside (as seen from inside) like a bowl of water. And, finally, lap-deep under the pool surface is a crescent-shaped shelf for resting between the water and the view. Yes, this is a house to enjoy the sunny days in life, which it no doubt celebrates. The crescent shapes are not just a symbol of night but, perhaps even more, abstractions of movement, of the fluidity of water, of waves. Its essence perhaps best experienced from the back of the living-room, looking at the pool and view and sky through the panoramic bow-bottomed window – while the belly of the bedroom above is amplifying the flow of light from both directions. But the house is also a very functional space. As a home for the temporary guest (or, plausibly, as a more permanent bachelor pad) it has all the functions you need – a private sleeping space, adjacent bathroom and a full kitchen facing the dining area of the living room.

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Guest/pool house 2016 180 m²

Three crescents in the same view: the underside of upstairs bedroom, panoramic window and stairwell wall.

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The curved stairwell wall hides the stairs from the living room, yet allows the two functions to flow together.

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03. Hidden House

The Hidden House is recessed into a sloping lot. Seen from outside, it is only visible as a formation of low stone walls. The first reason for this approach was to remain unobtrusive in the existing cultural landscape which is an open pasturage criss-crossed by dry stone walls demarking boundaries of fields, some ancient, some recent. The second reason was that the outdoor pool is such an integrated part of this house and that shelter from both the winds and the gaze of passers-by was sought after. Also, the surrounding walls would always offer shade at a corner somewhere throughout the day. The house is a place for leisure and has all the functions and amenities to function for a small family or as a guest house, alternatively. But it is just as much a poolside pavilion for many people to gather and, indeed, for pool parties. The entrance is from the higher ground above and via one side of the house. From there you are led into a walled garden and continue to be led along a repetitive façade of which the entrance door is about mid-way and the pool area is at the end of the projected path. Despite the rectilinearity, the whole movement of the composition and the approach is actually spiral. And despite the open-box layout, the space is clearly divided into pronounced areas with their own scale and ambience. The house with its big windows is facing the garden so that from inside the pool is out of view. The pool and the pool deck are in a cul-de-sac to the end side of the house which make the garden and pool two separated areas. In similar fashion, the house plan is basically open space where each large window partition defines a room function – master bedroom, living-dining-kitchen, entrance and guest room. The façades are natural stone walls, as it is a continuation of the low walls above. The flat roof is grassed to further blend into the landscape.

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Guest house and pool project 2015 110 m²

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04. Boisbuchet Sauna

The Domaine de Boisbuchet estate has been running high-end summer workshops in design for many years, at stages in cooperation with both the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein. International professionals in architecture and design are invited as tutors. For one of these workshops the founder Alexander von Vegesack asked Claesson Koivisto Rune to propose a design of a permanent structure for the estate, for the students to take part in actual construction. A sauna was chosen, partly because there was already a little lake by a small forest on the site, partly because the sauna is such a strong Nordic tradition, yet still somewhat exotic to France and to the rest of the world. The idea of the sauna is to create an oasis for physical and mental recreation. This sauna building was perfectly situated for this, in the open forest immediately adjoining the lake and the bath bridge. The idea was of course to enable quick cooling-down swims after the heat of the sauna. This sauna was – although small – a building in its own right; a piece of architecture. The geometry is a rectangular box with walls and roof at angles inside. Creating a simple, yet intricate, spatiality. The functions are: sauna room with glass wall toward the lake, small closed dressing room, shower under the stars (inside the walls but without roof) and a sun deck to drip-dry. The basic construction was wood clad on wood frame, on a plinth foundation. The amenities were equally simple: Electricity for the heater some lighting and running water (cold, only) for the showers.

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Client: Alexander von Vegesack, Domaine de Boisbuchet/CIRECA Sauna project Lessac, France 2005 46 m²

Like its clearing in the forest, the building geometry allows the structure to be both open and closed.

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A model shows how the angularity of the plan becomes subordinated to the box shape.

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The sharp vertices of the triangular rooms align, creating a diagonal ‘corridor’ passage to the hidden, open to the sky, shower area.

Despite the combined efforts of the international students of the Claesson Koivisto Rune-led summer workshop at Boisbuchet, the construction of the sauna was unable to be completed.

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05. Sfera Building

Sfera Building is a five-storey culture house with art gallery, art book shop, design showroom, café and restaurants. It is situated in Gion, the famous cultural district of Kyoto. The client’s brief was to create an impression in this traditional neighbourhood by interpreting the local aesthetic tradition, yet be completely contemporary. The cherry leaf patterned façade was inspired by traditional Japanese screens of bamboo, wood and paper. Inspiration was also drawn from the Japanese tradition of cultivating nature. Photographing the sun through the tree crowns at the site started the process. Cherry leaves were picked and put in a random pattern. This was in turn photographed and digitally processed into an abstract repeated pattern consisting of four differently sized dots/holes. The pattern was then punched into large titanium sheet panels that were mounted on a structure with a two-metre distance to the actual façade, creating a monolithic appearance from the exterior. The building changes with the day. With sunlight, a distinct leaf pattern is cast on the interior. At night, hidden green light fixtures behind the façade makes the house glow like a giant Japanese lantern. The interior space is like a three-dimensional puzzle. The different departments flow organically into each other. A three storey high space at each entrance connects the floors spatially. A continuous staircase between three floors adds to the flow and sense of direction. The Sfera Building was selected and exhibited both in the international section and the Nordic Pavilion of the Venice Architecture Biennale 2004.

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Client: Shigeo Mashiro, Sfera Co. Ltd. Culture house Kyoto, Japan 2003 1200 m²

Researching by model (above) the effect of shadows from sunlight and leaves. The Sfera Building (right) is a rare piece of modernity in its setting in the historical Gion neighbourhood in Kyoto. However, the ‘lace effect’ of its titanium façades is strongly rooted in the local tradition to ‘veil’ the vision and to ‘soften’ the light.

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The ‘pixelled’ effect of the punched holes of the cherry leaf pattern created the desired blur equivalent of leaves shivering in the breeze.

Sense of direction. The interior with its different departments flowing organically into each other is clearly seen from the entrance. Downstairs left: restaurant. Mezzanine: design showroom. Upstairs right: art gallery.

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06. Landskrona Kulturhus

The city of Landskrona in south Sweden is home to a number of significant architectural landmarks, including a 16th century citadel, the Landskrona Art Gallery by Sten Samuelsson and a sports hall by Arne Jacobsen (both from the 1960’s). The 1901 Landskrona T  heatre, with its setting in the central Theatre Park, is another important building. This was the context when the city of Landskrona organised an invited architectural competition for a new building, expanding the functions of the theatre with a black box stage, three cinemas/ auditoriums and a restaurant. The monumental and neoclassical theatre called for a culture house that would be a contemporary building in its own right, yet be a proper extension. A spiral configuration of black glass boxes adheres to the side/back of the theatre. Each added function, in order of scale, representing the next volume. As one result, the rather abruptly finished composition of the theatre’s backside is stepped down to the park. As another result, the balance of the combined functions and the natural entrance shift towards the street to the north. (Which a hundred years after the inauguration of the theatre had taken over from the street to the west as being the more important street.) A glass-roofed atrium becoming the hub for all communication in the new complex. In its centre, one of the most majestic trees of the park is preserved; a drop in the glass roof creating a glass funnel for the tree to remain outdoor and an effect of glass mirroring glass inside. (Like in the work of artist Dan Graham.) The spiral motion of the hub is amplified by the ‘camera shutter’ partitioned glass as well as steering the view towards the sky and the tree crown above. The new building volumes take their heights and proportions from the theatre building. The black glass façades mirror the park but are also used for back-lit media. The black box theatre does by definition not have any windows. The three cinemas/auditoriums also have the need to be blacked-out, but could partially be opened by curtains to reveal their interior monochrome colour schemes – red, green and blue (RGB). The whole culture house project was abandoned by the city for budget reasons and nothing was built.

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Client: Landskrona City Planning Office Culture house project Landskrona, Sweden 2011 1350 m²

Plan of the glass roof of the atrium. The swirl is generated from the spiral configuration of the surrounding functions. In the centre, the down-turned funnel for a preserved majestic tree. The green glass echoing the tree’s crown as seen from below.

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The sequence of proportions of the added building blocks is visible not just in scale and heights, but also in how the glass façades are divided proportionally.

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01 1. ENTRANCE 2. AUDITORIUM 3. RESTAURANT 4. KITCHEN 5. RECEPTION DESK 6. BLACK BOX

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07. Wirum Restaurant

Driving along national motorway E22 there is very little sense of the natural beauty it is cutting through. In these deep forests of Småland there are also very few options for a for a meal break. A local entrepreneur and farmer of high-quality ecological produce initiated a project for a new roadside restaurant; one that would offer both genuine country food and a stunning view of lake Maren from a forest clearing. An easy stop off the motorway but also worth a visit in its own right. The architectural ambition should match this concept with natural materials and an honest but elaborated design. The architecture would both integrate with the spectacular surrounding nature and, at the same time, stand out. The approach was staged in three steps: 1. The boredom of the road journey is disrupted as soon as you exit the motorway, as you find yourself in a natural forest clearing. Parking is interwoven with trees and growth, diminishing the perceived size of the parking lot. 2. A barn-sized building meets the visitor and delays the view down the slope to the lake. 3. The building is made of two longitudinal halves. The entrance half is solid and closed (with kitchen, toilets, storage) and the other half is a glazed and open dining hall, embracing the outdoor space. (Half of the glazed portion can be opened and, together with overhanging roof, more guests can take full advantage of the countryside setting by dining outdoors.) This outdoor ‘room’ includes the slope and the lake, and ends with the hillside rising up from the shoreline across the water. The pitched roof spans well over the open part of the building and unites roofed outdoor with indoor. The roof is resting on two twinpitched gables, with resulting open rhomboids bringing lightness to the transition between outdoor and indoor. The west gable makes for sun shade and the east makes for a barrier to the last glimpse of the motorway. The architecture is built of four elements: the solid building volume, the glass volume and the two gables. Symmetry prevails (like in a typical country house) while the surprising assemblage of the fundamental house-parts differentiates it (from any typical country house). The local government gave the Wirum Restaurant its support but the state (who owns the motorway) disapproved of the construction of the necessary new motorway exit. The project is therefore shelved for now.

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Client: Wirums Säteri Restaurant project Mörtfors, Sweden 2017 420 m²

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Freed space. A deep corrugation of the ceiling allows the roof construction to bear its own weight without the need for tie-bars. It, in turn, can rest lightly on just the corner points of the gables.

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1 Entrance 2 Terrace 3 Counter 4 Toilet 5 Kitchen 6 Staff area

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08. Administrative Service Centre

Funded by the European Union – under a programme named U-LEAD (Ukraine – Local Empowerment, Accountability and Development) – a prototype for a small town “city hall” that could be easily constructed and rolled out in 400 Ukrainian villages was commissioned. The idea being to facilitate the building-up of transparent democracy (where there has been none) by increasing the physical accessibility and efficiency of citizen service delivery at the local level. The building had to meet certain (sometimes contradictory) criteria: It should be a building with some degree of a solid authoritarian stance, yet be non-imposing (and literally transparent). It should be in humble and humane proportions, yet be the most prominent structure in its village. It should tie to Ukrainian traditional architecture, yet express a new and contemporary era. And it should be of a lasting and trustworthy construction quality, yet be rational and economical to build. The “official” appearance was met by choosing a symmetrical, solid and sculptural approach. The proportions with its prominent high-pitched hip roof related to a tradition of roofs constructed to withstand heavy winter snow but also made the building both highly visible and instantly recognisable. The solid brick walls were only at the four corners, hiding closed use such as toilets and storage. The rest of the façades were glazed. Interior transversal walls made for both roof support and room division – although widely opened along the central axis so that each “room” was in fact a niche in one and the same space. Full visibility was an actual requirement, so that nothing could take place behind closed doors; no corruption could be suspected. The exterior walls were set back from the roof-line and the corners rounded. The resulting geometry enhanced the roof mass, made the building adaptable to juxtaposition in different infrastructural settings and added a kind of iconicity – to make the new administrative service centres easily recognisable around the country. With red brick walls and red roofing tiles the composition was solid, mono-material and mono-chrome, further strengthening the sculptural qualities.

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Client: SIDA (The Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency) through SKR (The Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Regions) Administrative Service Centre project Ukraine 2018 166 m²

Four interior ‘gable walls’ act as the primary structural support. At the same time they define a strong sequential configuration of equal rooms-within-the-room.

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The high-pitched hip roof over the rounded corner walls alludes to traditional building proportions in Ukraine. The symmetry of the composition projects the building’s official status.

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09. S/Y Susanne af Stockholm

This sailing yacht is a 100 ft (30.5 m) single-master. It takes eight guests (“a family of five plus one guest per child”) in one master-cabin and three double-cabins, all equipped with separate bathrooms. The spacious dining room is linked to the living room. The kitchen is fully equipped (for the the restaurateur client). The brief contained all the specifications and amenities of a normal four-bedroom home. (Plus separate crew quarters.) With respect to the naval character, the architectural task for the interior was therefore surprisingly similar to a house. The starting point was the characteristics of the ship itself. Modern, ocean ‘sail-racing’ design, built in France in 1989, with an aluminium hull. It was gutted out and made ready for a completely new interior. From the outset, it was necessary to steer away from both the historic references to the tall ships of olden days (brass, mahogany) – and the ‘luxury-style’ (padded, gaudy) that typically denies any connection to the vessel you’re actually in. Around the exterior hull of a ship is the waterline, defining the border between what is above the surface of the water and what lies beneath. The idea of the waterline also became the concept to unite the interior. Throughout the interior everything below this ‘waterline’ is slightly bleached walnut, everything above is white Corian. This makes for a spatial flow through the four twin-cabins, corridor and the eight metres wide living/dining area – creating a connecting, straight horizon line across the otherwise ever-changing room geometry (due to the curvature of the hull). The naval technology upgrade was carried out by Jongert Shipyard in the Netherlands while the interior carpentry and finishing were completed in Sweden. The upturned edges of the walnut wood steps from the cockpit were made as a safety feature for when the ship is heeling during upwind sailing. The S/Y Susanne af Stockholm makes Atlantic Ocean crossings between the Mediterranean Sea and the Caribbean Sea. Sailing under Swedish flag, it is certified for oceangoing by the Swedish Maritime Administration.

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Sailing yacht Mediterranean Sea/Caribbean Sea 2009 100 ft

The upturned edges of the walnut wood steps from the cockpit were made as a safety feature for when the ship is heeling during upwind sailing (next spread, left).

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The idea of the waterline became the concept to unite the interior. Throughout the interior everything below this ‘waterline’ is finished in slightly bleached walnut.

10. Sculpture Garden at Malmö Konsthall

11. Ingegerd Råman Studio

12. Gun Gallery

Malmö Konsthall is a public art gallery with an iconic brutalist architecture by Klas Anshelm from 1974. Adjacent are older brick buildings typical for the city. On an invitation from the museum director a proposal for a sculpture garden that would delicately gel the buildings together was drawn up. Brick was chosen to not interfere with the integrity of the composition in concrete. And a theme of squares was chosen to not interfere with the pre-modernist existing brick architecture. A collage of differently-sized squares (some elevated as sculpture podiums) formed pathways, seating and gathering areas. The theme was complemented by broken-up brick walls defining the perimeter of the garden, yet leaving it transparent and open for the public. The proposed new public sculpture garden promised an added quality to both the museum and the city, but was left in the drawer following the change of museum director.

This studio for master Swedish glass and ceramics designer Ingegerd Råman is a one-room space with a single pitch roof. The studio is contained within massive walls to create a secluded atmosphere. Natural light enters from a slit window in the roof and two grand windows (with doors), placed diagonally in plan at one end of each long wall. The lack of ‘normallysized’ doors or windows plays with the perception of the scale of things, creating a strong sense of stepping into a much larger space than expected. The two grand windows are placed on a precise sightline from the entrance of the residential house nearby. When Ms. Råman is working she can see who enters the residence without being disturbed by the people passing by in the courtyard. At each grand window there is a recess, or a ’fold’, in the wall to define the solidity of the wall next to it.

A gallery for contemporary photographic art. The essentially square single-room space had a structural column in its centre. The column was used as a pivotal point in a space-changing device when it was hidden inside a sliding and revolving wall. The wedge-shaped wall could be positioned in any direction to create a changed space/division to suit the particular exhibition best. For instance, different zones could be created to accommodate for thematic or scale difference of the hanged photo art. This simple space-changing instrument actually altered the gallery space to the point where you experienced entering into a completely new gallery at each new exhibition. Piping and electrics were hidden behind angular walls creating a clean wall perimeter for the hanging of the art. The mezzanine back office was entirely coloured the same brown colour found on old Kodak photo paper boxes.

Client: Malmö Konsthall Museum sculpture garden extension project Malmö, Sweden 2012 1000 m²

Client: Ingegerd Råman Ceramicist’s studio building Baldringe, Sweden 2002 67 m²

Client: Greger Ulf Nilsson, Gun Gallery AB Photographic art gallery Stockholm, Sweden 2008 70 m²

13. Alberto Biani Shop

14. Ceramika Showroom

15. Sfera Tokyo

The starting point for this high-fashion shop is the traditional dressmaker artisan; the tailor’s shop. But with a personal angle. The walls are panelled with a hidden shelf support system behind. The panels are divided in a slightly irregular and angular way to hide the repetition of the shelf support rails (vertical gap lines). The dark wood is a reference to the classic tailor’s interior. (As another reference to tailoring, one wall in the room is covered in dress fabric where each panel is covered in a different fabric than its neighbours. Like fabric rolls or garments stored in a tailor’s studio.) The hidden display support makes re-composing the walls possible. Changed for every season or whenever called for. A central, long tailor’s table in the front room forms a display surface for accessories and clothes. The table top has a glossy accent colour that is mirrored in the ceiling. With the exception of this colour (turquoise in Paris, yellow in Rome) the fixed surfaces are in a pared-down, classic palette. Other furniture, rugs and interior accessories are each of a different design, from mid-century modern to contemporary pieces.

The Ceramika showroom is located in the city centre in a former City Hall building by the Matsumoto river. The new interior is deliberately simple but with meticulously refined details. The layout is on a strict, repetitive grid. The interior fixtures were designed by Claesson Koivisto Rune and manufactured by a local master carpenter. This made it possible to use smaller proportions and have a much higher degree of accuracy than usually in a project like this. The aim was to create a space which was strict, yet humble. As an enhancing frame for the ceramic objects on display, for an odd section of illustrated children's books, and for the small cafe with both indoors and outdoors seating. Many architectural details in the project  were designed especially by the architects and several manufactured locally in Japan. Such as the chairs, tables and clothes hangers. In 2015, the Ceramika showroom was honoured with the German Design Award (Special Mention). The production version of the Matsumoto table for Skandiform was given the same award in 2018 as well as the Good Design Award (US) in 2016.

Following the opening of the Sfera Building in Kyoto in 2003 [see Ch. 05], the company wanted to expand to Tokyo and decided to open a smaller shop space in the recently opened Tokyo Midtown Galleria in Roppongi, known for its upscale restaurants and shops for Japanese fashion and handicraft. Into the square room two angular and broken up structures of solid bamboo-wood were introduced. In dialogue with the perimeter walls these small ‘buildings’ created the sense of shifting scale, like when walking the high and modern parts of a city and suddenly entering into a small and meandering traditional neighbourhood. All parts of the interior were of traditional Japanese materials, manufactured by Sfera’s own network of artisans and craftsmen. The custom designed shop shelving and storage units thus became part of the Sfera collection so that a customer essentially could buy the shop itself. In 2010, another Sfera shop was designed by Claesson Koivisto Rune in Milan, Italy.

Client: Alberto Biani Fashion shop Paris, France/Rome, Italy 2009 110 m²/70 m²

Client: Hiroshi Arai, Yamato Co., Ltd. Ceramic tableware showroom, shop and café Matsumoto, Japan 2013 460 m²

Client: Shigeo Mashiro, Sfera Co., Ltd. Design and crafts shop Tokyo, Japan 2007 65 m²

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The Architecture of Claesson Koivisto Rune by Kieran Long

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Claesson Koivisto Rune are architects who can be quite disarming to spend time with. They are pure enthusiasts for their field. They love architecture, design and buildings and cities. They travel just to see great architecture, and they talk passionately about it without envy or competitiveness. They work in the field of design, because they love design. When I visited them in their office to speak about this article, we spent a lot of our time talking about other architects and buildings, from Sweden to Japan. We lingered in their library (of which they are very proud) and had a discussion about architectural culture that was a rare pleasure. At that time, they had just returned from one of their regular trips to Japan, and were deeply moved by having seen the Teshima Art Museum, designed by artist Rei Naito and architect Ryue Nishizawa. Ola Rune gave an almost disbelieving account of how powerful the experience of visiting the building had been. “After I was there, I had such a strong reaction,” he said, “I even felt I might as well give up architecture, because I will never design anything this powerful.” It is part of the charm of Claesson Koivisto Rune that they are extremely accomplished, confident designers at every scale, but they know good design when they see it and are unafraid to show their admiration. If Claesson Koivisto Rune are generous to their peers and respectful of architectural history, they have found a way to immerse themselves in great work from the past and present without being dogmatic or slaves to a style. They have a very high level of first-hand experience of works of architecture, but when they sit down to their own work, they use almost no historical references or quotation. There are influences working on them, of course, but they are integrated into an approach that they have developed themselves, and that is their own. In fact, their work can feel a little bit “out of time”. By that, I mean not exactly timeless, because the buildings and environments they create are clearly so well-adapted to contemporary life. But that it isn’t immediately obvious how their work relates to any tradition. Their work is certainly minimal and elegant in a way that one might associate with 20th century modern Swedish architecture. But while there is something strongly Swedish in their shaping of light and space, the results are more part of an international tradition, a cool, elegant, minimalism that has echoes of Tadao Ando, John Pawson or Rick Joy. It is not easy to think of a Swedish architect today who can do what Claesson Koivisto Rune does at their level. Having said all that, Claesson Koivisto Rune’s work needs to be seen in the context of practicing in a country where it is often difficult for architects to keep control of details through the construction process, especially at a larger scale. Swedish construction standards are relatively low for such an advanced country. Claesson Koivisto Rune’s work overcomes this in various ways, which, I believe contributes to the distinctiveness of their work. For instance, many of their buildings are relatively undetailed, and find their character by commitment not to the junctions between one material and another, but by making homogenous material statements that suppress junctions altogether. For instance, the Parquet Patterned Pool and Spa [see Ch. 01], which is such a signature project. The largescale parquet continues over every surface of the small structures around the pool: walls, roof, floor. It is the same inside and outside.

The whole composition sits on a plinth, also with timber parquet on the surface, which juts out into the landscape. It is pure geometry, very abstract, and there is an attempt to suppress junctions between wall and roof, or wall and floor, rather than celebrate or elaborate them. The same is true of the all-concrete Lindé House [see Ch. 40], where the lack of eaves, gutters, string courses, overhangs and so on give the building an elemental appearance, with only the pitched roof suggesting any sense of architectural history or typicality. The relative lack of detail in their architecture is of course a posture, a position they take consciously. It takes a lot of effort to design details that do not appear to be details at all. That approach seems to be visible at every level of detail. Claesson Koivisto Rune talk about eliminating windows, wanting to alternate walls with voids in walls that extend the full height of their buildings, and de-emphasise the junction between glass and masonry in various creative ways. It is obvious in so many projects, but perhaps the most beautiful in this vein is their design for the Hillside House [see Ch. 17] in Uruguay, which takes the characteristic Claesson Koivisto Rune mode of alternating walls of glass and masonry, but uses the opportunity of the pleasant climate to add a series of outdoor spaces under a concrete roof plane that rhythmically rises and falls. Its base is a series of retaining walls that ascend the steep hillside. This project is an interesting balance, between the monumental modernism of a Californian Case Study House, the openness of a Niemeyer house, and a kind of landscape urbanism that turns the hillside into territories to dwell in. It is the perfect expression of what Claesson Koivisto Rune are capable of, simultaneously contextual and international. These stylistic comparisons are not sufficient, though, to understand what is going on in the work. It is vital to experience it. The Galleri Örsta [see Ch. 70], for instance, is more or less impossible to understand if you have not been there. In a small building, basically a single room, it creates sensory and perspectival effects that are spectacular for such a small work. It is strikingly simple. An orthogonal building (but not square), is raised up on a small mound, situated in the centre of a field, between the house that the client lives in and a high embankment with a road on it. The building is part of a settlement of farm buildings with pitched roofs, but the gallery makes no attempt to mimic the vernacular architecture around it. There is nothing of the farm about Galleri Örsta. The building stands alone in the middle of a field, seemingly unaware of its context, aligned to the outline of the field. Its façades appear concave, an optical trick created by the downward curving roof line and the upward curve at the bottom of the façades created by the earth mound around the base of the building. Each façade has a differently sized slot cut out of it, which creates four full length windows that allow views into and through the building. Inside, the gallery is a single volume, divided by two ‘L’ -shaped (in plan) walls that divide the room loosely into four. The walls are not perpendicular to the external walls, but rather follow lines established by the openings in the walls. Walls subtly fan out from a narrow opening towards a wider one. This geometric shift is almost invisible in photographs, but the geometries set up by it are beautiful. The resulting spaces are domestic in scale (there is even a fireplace), and

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the geometry non-orthogonal. There are two atmospheres working simultaneously here, one beautifully scaled, domestic and informal. The other is the international art gallery minimalist vernacular of concrete floors and white gallery walls. The piece de resistance of the gallery (a building that depends on your sensory engagement with it), is the optical effect of the its façades. The building has millions of tiny glass beads embedded in the white render, a reflective technology usually used for road markings. On such a large, vertical surface, these beads create an extraordinary effect, an eerie glow that appears almost three dimensional, as if it is being emitted from the building, rather than reflected by it. When I was there, especially as the sun fell lower in the sky near to sunset, the trees and greenery around the building darkened, but the building began to glow, especially clearly from certain angles. It made you want to look and move and look again. Even on our way home, we stopped the car in the middle of the street (causing a minor, rural traffic incident) to take just one more picture from one final angle. Galleri Örsta is a building that happens to your senses, rather than to your mind, and it gives the abstraction you might see in their work another meaning. Claesson Koivisto Rune are very focused on qualities of light, and on an idea of space that is created by walls, openings, volumes and distortions. The influence of minimalist art is obvious here. All of the Claesson Koivisto Rune partners love Donald Judd, enough that a conversation with them often returns to his work, and in particular his homes and installations in and around Marfa, Texas. Marfa is irretrievably connected with Judd, and Claesson Koivisto Rune have designed an art gallery there [see Ch. 68]. Many architects admire Judd because of his discipline: a kind of clear-eyed, if misanthropic view of the history of design. Judd hates almost all design, he objects to decoration of any kind in the most dismissive terms. This is an artist who even objects to comfortable chairs (Judd seems to suggest that if you don’t like his chairs’ design, then you should just stand up instead). But where Judd on design tends towards discipline and grumpy dismissiveness, Claesson Koivisto Rune go to Marfa, you feel, to experience it and what it does to the body. For them, Marfa is an experience of landscape, the highway, the light, the artwork, the buildings and so on and so forth. It is not about going there to experience minimalism in its natural environment, more about an opportunity to see clearly how form makes spaces, how light can be mediated and affect the human body. Claesson Koivisto Rune are hugely important architects in a Swedish context, but they wear that lightly. When they describe what is behind their architectural language, they describe it with abstraction notions, a sculpting of ‘space’ using various geometric and conceptual tools. For those who experience the buildings, we are unlikely to even have a sense of that. Subtle shifts of perspective, a strange glow that catches the eye, a piece of furniture that echoes geometries of the building. I think Claesson Koivisto Rune’s work is in the business of heightening your awareness of your body, your senses, your scale. They play with your sense of yourself and your perceptions. And they do it sparingly, minimally, but just enough to

make you feel you are experiencing the work of three very special designers. It is not easy to photograph, I would imagine, and the expert work of Åke E:son Lindman in this book can only come close to what it is like to spend time in a Claesson Koivisto Rune building. For that reason, and for all of us, it is a shame that so many of their works are private houses. We can only hope that they find more opportunities to deploy their sensory, beautiful and, I think, potentially popular architecture in major public commissions.

Kieran Long, Director of ArkDes, the Swedish National Museum of Architecture and Design.

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16. House of Many Courtyards

Hidden just on the tree-line, behind a sandy ocean beach, the building allowance was a mere 140 m² (plus a 30 m² guesthouse) but the wish was for a 340 m² house. How to double the area while still adhering to the regulations? Besides the size of the house, another requirement in the brief was for maximum privacy with maintained contact with the beach and the horizon. Or, in other words, great views from inside but little visibility from outside. And the house itself should blend in with its setting as best possible. The solution came with an imaginary slicing of an elongated box and dislocating of the parts in alternating, parallel order. Thus, ending up with a number of outwardly open courtyard terraces – one in each gap. In principle, like the camshaft in a multiple-piston engine. In the façade, each protruding box is a closed wall while full glazing is inside the courtyards – sometimes at their deep end, sometimes sideways facing. Besides framing each view, the outlooks become very private. The house has the appearance of a series of individual boxes that in reality is one interior connected via a 40-metre-long central communication axis – from end to end functioning like a corridor, but in each space a part of the room. The internally glazed courtyards are perceived as a continuation of each indoor space, doubling the experience. Weather permitting, they can be opened up to a very large extent to actually become continuations of the rooms. Each box was given a unique ceiling height in accordance with the function and proportion of the room, like a strand of beads of various sizes. This makes moving through the house an ever-changing spatial experience. The materials are Petersen Kolumba brick walls, hardwood ceilings and limestone floors and terraces. The same long and flat proportion of the bricks was used in the floor-laying pattern as well as in the ceilings. The colour of the handmade bricks was matched with the local colour of the sand of the beach. The house is not camouflaged but both colour and geometry form an abstraction very true to the surrounding nature and topography.

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Beach house 2015 170 m²/340 m²

The topography is characterised by soft undulation (sometimes rather steep) as it is formed by sand dunes conquered by vegetation. Stairs, plinths and levelled terraces were necessary for the approaches to the house. The resulting geometry set the foundation for the architectural expression.

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NORTH ELEVATION AND SECTION

NORTH ELEVATION AND SECTION

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17. Hillside House

In the rugged landscape of Mataojo, about ten kilometres north of Punta del Este, Uruguay, the scenery is magnificent. An unbroken panorama of grassy hills and almost no sign of human civilisation, apart from some scattered groups of livestock. The client, a Londonbased architecture aficionado, purchased a 20 hectare lot that spans some 450 metres between a barren private hill and a picturesque stream set in lush greenery. The drop down from the hill is 100 metres. What seem like little green splashes on the hill, when viewed from a distance, are in fact clumps of 100-year old trees. It is a truly dramatic vista. The programme for this building included a main house with private quarters and a communal dining, living and kitchen area. Outdoor barbecue and dining, a generously-sized pool, a gym and a guest wing. And lots of terraces. As the presence of the topography is so strong, the house was designed to take part. Like a slice set into the contour lines on a topographical map, the house stretches around a wide sector of the hill, following the terrain. Although the floor surface stops at about 270 m² the house measures some 100 metres long, including many terraces. The main house and the guest wing are actually two houses linked by a terrace with a pool in between, a partially continuous roof and elaborated retaining walls. The theme is angled and horizontal. The materials are concrete, Uruguayan Negro Assoluto granite, glass and steel. From every part of the house there is a different view. From the master bedroom to the northeast. From the guest rooms to the northwest. Both to ensure privacy and in order to provide a changing architectural experience when moving through the house. The Hillside House concept was abandoned for geotechnical concerns with the unstable nature of the local rock. A new concept named Espina de Cruz [see Ch. 18] was instead developed for the flat plateau of the same site.

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Private house project Mataojo, Uruguay 2007 265 m²

An early sketch describing how the house was imagined as a slice set into the rugged hill contour.

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A large number of study models was made to turn the abstract idea into a functioning programme.

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The continuous folding roof is clearly seen in the final model.

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18. Espina de Cruz

At first glance, the modernist ideals of simple forms and open plan seem to be at full play in this South American second home to a client otherwise living in Europe. The house may be interpreted as a ‘simple box’, especially in contrast to the rocky wilderness around. But the concept is in fact much more intricate than that, in both geometry and plan. The house plan is sheared in half into one communal part (kitchen, dining, living) and one private part (bedroom, spa, gym) that become separated without losing the spatial flow between. The flow is extended to the outdoors by retracting the full-wall living-room window partitioning behind the load-bearing corner wall. This wall is instead defining the border of the roofed part of the main terrace from its open part. And – as the pool occupies this corner of the terrace – the same wall is also dividing the pool into roofed and open, when it rises from the water. The terrace and pool effectively become the third (and final) part of the house’s composition. The added house corners that are a result of the shear are connected by a roofline precisely touching the corners and which, extended, make for a perfect rectangle, albeit twisted at a 12-degree angle to the house plan. The same principle of obscuring certain viewing angles is used to create privacy for functions such as bedroom and sauna, again without losing spatial flow. The roof is pitched, but in a negative angle. Thus, creating sloping ceilings that always open up towards the light and panorama outside. The materials are site cast concrete and thin-stuccoed brick masonry, traditional and readily available locally. The inside of the pool and the bathroom wall and tub are of Uruguayan black granite. The house sits on top of a hill with the approach from behind. As its laid out, the magnificent view is obscured directly from the entrance and only opens up after you move further into the rooms. A smaller guest house, with the same architecural concept, is sited nearby. The Espina de Cruz house is named after a local wild plant with a peculiar and exact geometrically angled growth pattern. This house replaced a previous concept for the same site named Hillside House [see Ch. 17].

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Vacation house Maldonado, Uruguay 2020 180 m² (+ guest house 58 m²)

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Espina de Cruz (Colletia paradoxa).

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The roof is pitched, but in a negative angle. Thus creating sloping ceilings that open up to the outside.

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19. Tom’s Tower

Tom Dixon is one of the world’s most well-known furniture designers, gifted with a keen eye for the odd project. He’s also a good friend of Claesson Koivisto Rune. So it was with great joy that the challenge was accepted when he asked for help with the conversion of a decommisioned water tower in central London he had just bought, just off Notting Hill. The idea was to keep the concrete water tower as a structure for the new building. Because of the former function it can take a lot of structural load. So, the floors could hang around the structure and a skin of exterior walls would cover it all. The feet of the four legs of the water tower limited the footprint.  However, the building could expand upwards to create more floor space. The water tower structure itself, but also the geometry of the lot, adjacent buildings and views, set the limitations for the volumetric expanse of the building. These limitations “designed” the building. The programme from Dixon included his own design studio at street level, commercial space at the higher ground level facing the Grand Union Canal, and his home on the three upper levels. Bedrooms and bathroom were put just below, and “carved out” of, the old water tank. The living room and kitchen were on the open level, on top of the tank. On the roof an extra level was created as a roof terrace with a beautiful view of the surrounding London cityscape. The volume is rather complex, with a combination of triangular and four-sided planes, to create the expanding geometry. Because most walls are leaning outwards a viable solution for the windows had to be found. The decision was made to have normal, vertical windows so that they could be operable in a simple way. Because of this, the window niches become angled cuts in the façade’s surface. This became a design feature. The proposal, in its sketch stage, was selected and exhibited in the London Architecture Biannual 2006. The next year it was denied planning permission by the Royal Kensington and Chelsea Borough Council of London.

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Client: Tom Dixon Townhouse project London, UK 2006 360 m²

Structural timber – prefabricated, solid glued walls – includes ecological and energy conservation parameters.

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The all-concrete water tower is kept as a structure for the new building. The floor levels correspond to the positions of the horizontal beams and the tank itself.

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20. Tokyo Townhouse

Conceived as a prototype for an affordable prefabricated family house in a dense, mixed residential and small businesses district of central Tokyo. Here, the city fabric has been incrementally subdivided through a process of family and household regeneration. In other words, the typically tightly squeezed-together houses on meandering lots is a factor of property inheritance over a long time. The key to this house is its super-efficient plan. A living area of 46+46 m², fits a kitchen, dining and living area (in open-plan), and master bedroom, two single bedrooms and a full bathroom. Losing virtually no space to unnecessary corridors or halls, the actual rooms can be both functional and of agreeable dimensions. A centrally placed core containing wardrobe, toilet, staircase and kitchen leaves the outer walls untouched. This configuration of the communal entrance floor results in free-flow circulation of vision and movement, and enhanced perception of space. The floor by the entrance is sunken by one step. (This is common in Japan as a place to change shoes to slippers.) But the spatial flow remains open. All window niches are turned ‘inside-out’. Besides lending a strong characteristic to the façades, they keep their respective room’s internal dimensions clear. As they are above ground they are also not expanding the footprint area of the house, despite their protrusion. Most importantly, the window niches stretch from wall to wall to further expand the sense of space in their rooms. The single pitch roof is also a factor of specific Japanese circumstances. It falls towards the north to comply with roof-line regulations to minimize the shadow on adjacent houses or streets.

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Client: Ryutaro Yoshida Prefab private house project Tokyo, Japan 2010 90 m²

On a typical Tokyo street, with houses tightly squeezed together.

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Window niches turned ‘inside-out’ keep their respective room’s internal dimensions clear. Above ground they are also not expanding the footprint area of the house.

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The window niches (above) stretch from wall to wall to further expand the sense of space in their rooms. The super-efficient plan (left) loses virtually no space to unnecessary corridors or halls. 0

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21. Obelisken 29

Obelisken 29, is located on Södermalm in central Stockholm. The project consists of 20 penthouse apartments – some of them two-storey – with terraces and balconies, added on top of the old roof of an existing 1960’s dull stucco building which also received a revamped façade. Four key components of the project stand out: The reverse plan. When two-storey penthouses are built the bedrooms are often upstairs and kitchen and living room areas are downstairs, a remnant of housing at ground level where it feels natural to sleep upstairs. For Obelisken 29, this has been reversed and the entrance is on the upper level. The lower ”box” is more closed than the upper, which is filled with light that enters through its large glass partitions. The details. The penthouses were given, among other things, specially-designed door handles, railings, parapets, kitchen doorknobs, wallpapers, windowsills and sliding glass doors. The overall result of this level of attention gives the building and its apartments a quality that was more commonplace a hundred years ago. The division of the façade. The 1960’s monochrome, block-like building has been divided along its length into four, where each part is given its own colour: terracotta, two shades of grey and a black. This way the building harmonizes better with the other buildings along the street and the smaller scale which is typical for Stockholm. The black façade was given a complete new window layout and, behind, lies 15 re-planned apartments (as part of the same commission). The bricks. A solid quality material, full of expression, that only becomes more beautiful with time. Handmade in Denmark by Petersen. They are used at the revamped street level (glazed) along the full length of the 1960’s building, as well as across the penthouse level (unglazed). Corresponding with the colours of brick, the stucco floors are ‘sandwiched’ between, resulting in a new building volume that is balanced as to not become ‘top heavy’.

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Client: Fastighets AB Stockholmia Penthouse apartments Stockholm, Sweden 2016 1860 m²

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The formerly brown, monochrome block was divided along its length into four, where each part was given its own colour corresponding to a standard natural colour of brick.

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The added two floors are set back to provide sunlight to the street (above). The new building harmonizes with other buildings and the smaller scale which is typical for Stockholm (next spread).

22. The Nordic Watercolour Museum

23. Kista Nod

24. Stiller Studios

A competition entry for a museum to house watercolour art on the island of Tjörn, off the Swedish west coast. At first glance the architecture may appear overly angular and complex. But just like how the surrounding natural granite reveals its inner logic when you look a little closer – veins, cracks, erosion – these sharp geometrical forms follow a strict logic. The geometry perfectly echoes the barren granite landscape and the grey, weathered, larch wood panelling and zinc roofing harmonise with the natural colours of the island, the sea and the sky. The scattered angular shapes just appear random while they are in fact meticulously organised for a continuity within the interior spaces; an un-broken art promenade. Each unit corresponds to a specific function within the museum, then intersects with the next to provide a link forward.

Kista is a suburb of Stockholm also known for being a centre for IT technology – a northern European ‘Silicon Valley’. This project included spaces for offices as well as open-to-the-public cultural activities related to IT. The building would occupy a full central city block creating a node for local communication. After a careful study of the surrounding fabric of communication, the building was broken into a complex of lamellas to open it up and to reduce the density of the site. A generous public passage runs through the interior length of the complex at the ground and lower levels. To function as a true node – or hub – in its city, the architecture is a sculpted void as much as it is solid volumes of building. The un-built Kista Nod project was conceived in a collaboration between Claesson Koivisto Rune Architects and Nyréns on an initiative by the developer Atrium Ljungberg and the Stockholm City Planning Office.

Stiller Studios is a film studio building of prefabricated concrete. It is industrial in size, but its scale is manipulated. Only three windows – two opposing squares supporting a rectilinear long rectangle – with over-sized frames make the scale of this rather large building appear smaller from a distance, almost like a modern villa despite its actual ten-plus metre tall façades. The material is also manipulated. With an analogy to photographic film, which invention relied on metal dust on a flat surface, the prefab forms were prepared with iron particles before pouring, with the result that the outer concrete surface bleed rust and make it appear like the house is one monolith of weathered steel.

Client: The Nordic Watercolour Museum Watercolour museum project Tjörn, Sweden 1997 1000 m²

Client: Atrium Ljungberg AB and Stockholm City Planning Office Mixed use building complex project Stockholm, Sweden 2009 24500 m²

Client: Patrik Forsberg, Stiller Studios AB Film studio building Lidingö, Sweden 2008 1300 m²

25. X-Site

26. Therme Bühlerhöhe

27. Ängelholm Public Baths

Venice is of course a city but also a concept, etched in the minds of all people for its omni-present waters. The starting point for this proposal for a building, containing restaurants, bowling alleys and a gaming arcade, was to not just make a building that would defy the sea but actually be ‘made’ of water; to create a ‘liquid building’. The roof extends over the building volume. Around the extending roof edge is a ”curtain” of dripping water creating a liquid outer façade. This curtain creates loggias around the building. The water is pumped from the adjacent canal. (Solar panels on the roof provide energy to the pumps.) The falling water actually lands directly into the canal, making the building visually integrated with it. (A filtration/cleaning system is also connected to this circuit.) Besides creating a liquid volumetric definition of the building, the water also carries positive emotions through its soothing sound and its cooling effect.

The Bühlerhöhe Schlosshotel, in Schwarzwald, near Baden-Baden, overlooks a picturesque forested valley from its 770 m height. The original castle has expanded in several phases over the time. Today, it is an eclectic collage of varying architectural styles. The commission was for the addition of a Therme (wellness spa) on a tall ground floor and a number of new guest rooms on two floors above. Planned as a new, but detached, wing to the castle the Therme is completely contemporary but lends proportions and some characteristics from the adjacent castle. The Therme is planned as a transition from outdoor to indoor and to outdoor again. From dry to wet; from cool to hot; from confined and subdued to open and light. And from entrance, through spa, to the breathtaking view. Structural columns are spread out, seemingly at random, as a continuation of the majestic tree trunks of the surrounding pine forest. Like the columns, the floor slabs are exposed. In this open structural framework, the rooms and functions are then freely inserted. A wooded, open courtyard completes the integration of nature and construction.

In the architectural competition programme for a new public baths complex for the Swedish coastal city of Ängelholm, a number of functions – swimming, practice and adventure pools, relax, spa, gym – were to be integrated in to one contained complex. An inspiration was found in the chaotic, yet physically ordered, wake and ripple seen in the shallow waters of a cove or a port. The building strives outwards, upwards, towards the light in each direction; the space always in tension – flowing, swooping. Each window-wall partition was divided in the exact same number of panes, independently of the size of the wall. The internal planning was made to both separate the different areas and allow them to open up toward each other with the shortest distance of communication and a minimum of corridors. The visitor would be led from an articulated entrance directly to a nave containing reception and direct access to the changing rooms. From there, immediate access radiates to each of the different areas of the baths.

Client: City of Entertainment project, Xsite S.r.l. Recreational building project Jesolo Lido, Venice, Italy 2008 1925 m²

Client: Bühlerhöhe Schlosshotel Spa and hotel project Baden-Baden, Germany 2014 3000 m²

Client: City of Ängelholm Public baths project Ängelholm, Sweden 2008 4780 m²

28. Hotel Zander K

Zander K Hotel houses 249 rooms across almost one whole city block at the end of Bergen’s Zander Kaaes gate (street) that originally included two historic buildings. The whole interior is one, but to diminish the scale of the hotel (in respect of Bergen’s existing urban fabric, the two old façades were restored and painted in different colours contrasting to the dark blue of the new infill. The unifying element between all three structures is the window grid, the dimensions of which are replicated from those found on one of the two old buildings. The entrance to the hotel is through a green glass windcatcher. Inside lies a surprisingly large room with an overview of the entire space. Straight ahead is the bar; to the left is the restaurant (punctuated by an eight-metre long dining table); to the right is the lounge and the reception is at the far end. These various functions appear to overlap, creating fluidity to a space that ebbs and flows throughout the day. The space is punctuated by irregularly placed pillars, dark green curtains arranged in circular formations (allowing for Chambres Séparées) and an array of ‘raw’ and tactile materials: solid woods, exposed concrete, polished marble, leaf-patterned cement tiles, velvet curtains, dark, reflective glass and a zinc bar. The bedrooms on the five floors above are accessed along dark blue corridors that reference the colour of the hotel’s façade. The guest rooms are visually enlarged with generously-sized windows enhanced by the reflective properties of a mirror positioned behind the bed. Some windows are covered in blue glass which, during the day, barely registers from the outside, but is enjoyed from the inside. At night, the effect is reversed with the windows glowing blue when backlit by the room lights. Claesson Koivisto Rune designed most of the furnishings, some especially for the hotel. The corridor carpets, two-tone wooden bedside tables, metal desks, steel handles, aluminium hooks, lamps, the grid of thin line wallpaper, the semi-transparent ‘Summer Rain’ curtain, the ceramic toilets and basins in the bathrooms – as well as many customized designs, such as the eight meter long ‘Edi’ dining table by Nikari. Graphic design (for all De Bergenske hotels) by Henrik Nygren Design.

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Client: Kjetil Smørås, De Bergenske Hotel Bergen, Norway 2017 8000 m²

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The guest rooms are visually enlarged by a mirror positioned behind the bed. Blue referencing the colour of the façade. Claesson Koivisto Rune designed most of the furnishings. Including the two-tone wooden bedside tables, ‘Stardust’ carpet, ‘Io’ bedside lamp, ‘Frans’ blanket and the grid of thin line wallpaper (above); the ‘Fluid’ lamp and the semi-transparent ‘Summer Rain’ curtain (left).

In Bergen it rains 266 days of the year. (This statistic was conceptualised for Hotel Zander K.) Original artwork for guest rooms by Jesper Waldersten.

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The window grid dimensions for the new building were replicated from those found on the adjacent old building.

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Some windows are covered in blue glass which, during the day, barely registers from the outside. At night, the effect is reversed when backlit by the room lights.

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29. Hotel Bergen Børs

30. Hotel Skeppsholmen

31. Villa Terminus

Hotel Bergen Børs is comprised of three adjacent buildings that take up an entire city block in central Bergen. (The oldest structure is the former stock exchange, Børshuset, dating from 1862.) Along the corridors, the character of the guest rooms change significantly in relation to the character and age of the original building it occupies. The development and introduction of a common colour and materials palette and furnishings program has a strong, unifying effect. The overarching concept for the hotel is one of ‘quiet’ luxury. The reception is reached via a grand staircase at the gable end of Børshuset. Inside, there is no neoclassical reference except in the materials. The walls have received new walnut panelling and the floors relaid with giant, chequer-patterned Italian marble tiles. Reception and concierge desks appear to have risen out of the chequer-patterned floor like massive, stone monoliths. The third floor bar is located in the former Chamber of Commerce, a centrepiece of the hotel with its juxtaposition between preserved ornamentations and the addition of tiled mirror walls and marble bar.

From the mid 1600s and the subsequent 300 years, the island of Skeppsholmen, in the middle of the Swedish capital, was a naval military island. On the island are two long buildings from 1699 which last served as naval officers’ living quarters. Approved for conversion for hotel use, but retaining their status as government listed historic buildings, meant that most changes must be reversible. For instance, the new bathrooms were designed as boxes behind which the old panels and surfaces remain untouched. As a natural and enchanting phenomenon that relates to the surrounding waters and Hotel Skeppsholmen’s marine historical past, ‘fog’ was chosen as the concept for the hotel. The hotel interiors were then realised using a restricted palette of greys and very light colours. All new installations were completed in a contemporary way while in other respects the original details such as staircases and wooden floors were preserved. One lost feature that was restored was an uninterrupted sightline along the 100 meters long hallway.

The U-shaped villa with surrounding garden was built in Bergen in the 1760s as a house for the elderly. When the wooden building was inaugurated, it would have had an impressive size and modernity. Now, 250 years on, the garden has been engulfed by the modern city fabric and finds itself surrounded by much larger buildings. Being the first building in the city of Bergen to receive listed status, its external appearance could not be altered. The hotel wings contain just eighteen rooms on the two floors combined, with a series of communal spaces in the central section of the building. With the limited number of guest rooms and the private villa scale, the mid succession of open halls function as open kitchen, dining and living rooms for every guest at any time. The interior is not simply restoring the antiquarian nor building a contemporary statement. By choosing elements of Scandinavian furniture, fittings and chalklike colours (correct, but from different eras) – the concept of historical dating vanished. The natural material palette is sympathetic for the finely-crafted and the handmade quality inherent in the building itself.

Client: Kjetil Smørås, De Bergenske Hotel Bergen, Norway 2017 6500 m²

Client: Sandro Catenacci, Nobis Hospitality Group Hotel Stockholm, Sweden 2009 4800 m²

Client: Kjetil Smørås, De Bergenske Hotel Bergen, Norway 2017 800 m²

32. Grand Hotel Terminus

33. K5 Hotel

34. Nobis Hotel

Sometime during the 90 years since the Grand Hotel Terminus opened in 1928, the hotel became known in Bergen as the ‘Grand Old Lady’. With a status such as this, subtle interventions and a gentle hand were required in order to bring out the best in its classical interior spaces. The exterior remains unchanged. From the reception, internal windows lead to Bar Amundsen. (The famous Norwegian explorer spent his last evening here before disappearing on an Arctic rescue mission in 1928.) Amber accent colours on the new furnishings match the bar’s whisky theme. Behind the reception, the expansive breakfast room opens up. Wide, angled mirrors have been hung on the walls and new opaline and red chandeliers act as focal points throughout the space. In the guest rooms, pale, chalky-green walls, that matches that of the façade, create a backdrop for the natural tones in the furniture; selected from different design eras. Black and white chequered bathrooms contribute graphic contrast. The inclusion of new artworks completes the eclectic assemblage, along with a diverse collection of modernist paintings.

In a converted 1920s bank building, K5 Hotel (with just 20 rooms) exists in a sprawl of concrete, asphalt and overpasses next to the Tokyo Stock Exchange. The Japanese word ‘Aimai’ guides K5 Hotel’s concept. It means vague, obscure or ambiguous, which in Japan is often used in a positive, poetic sense. The hotel’s functions intentionally intermingle: The library is the bar. The lounge is a flower shop, which is also the café, which is the wine bar, which is also the restaurant. The local lack of greenery inspired the creation of a ‘green oasis’ in K5. A multitude of potted plants spread out, aimai fashion, throughout. The hotel has a gardener but no traditional garden. The palette consists of traditional materials such as concrete, cedar and Japanese stucco. Complemented by a wide range of furniture and accessories, custom designed by the architects. The guest rooms are characterised by the inclusion of a central, translucent fabric ‘column’ rising to the high ceiling. It envelops a freestanding bed with integrated shelf and desk. Other furnishings are placed like ‘satellites’ while the walls are kept free.

Towards the end of the 19th century, every self-respecting European city erected what it considered to be its ‘grand hotel’. The two buildings making up the entire south face of the famous Norrmalmstorg square were from that same era (although not originally hotels). The concept to make a contemporary grand hotel therefore became the leading concept. After some major rearranging of the original internal structure and layout, the interior spaces were made to follow each other in a conscious succession. A lobby, a bar, a bistro, a trattoria, a relax area, a conference section, the corridors, the guest rooms and two grand atriums (one open and one – the lounge – with glass roof) were each given a distinctly different character. Despite this, each space flows into the next so that the spatial concept is contained. In addition to fixed interior features like, for example, the reception desk in rusted shipping steel, a large number of new furniture designs, textiles and lamps were developed specifically by Claesson Koivisto Rune for the hotel, with twenty uniquely designed for this hotel and seventy more variations of earlier designs.

Client: Kjetil Smørås, De Bergenske Hotel Bergen, Norway 2019 11000 m²

Client: Ferment Inc. Hotel Tokyo, Japan 2020 2200 m²

Client: Sandro Catenacci, Nobis Hospitality Group Hotel Stockholm, Sweden 2010 10400 m²

35. Öja House

The function of this house was for summer vacation living. The programme was uncompromising: housing two people, accommodating six dinner guests, closed street view, open nature view and lots of outdoor space. Although Sweden is known for cold climate, summers can be very temperate and in this location being particularly mild. Outdoor dining – if possible for breakfast, lunch and dinner – is typically favoured. Conceptually, the house is a fragmented box placed in open nature. The concrete wall and roof planes are then partially, and very lightly, connected and closed-in by glass membranes to create indoor shelter from the elements. The ambience in and around the house is reminiscent of a garden pavilion. Two folds, one in the free-standing wall-block towards the street, the other in the roof at the open corner, open up the strict geometry and serve as a spatial lead to the entrance. The roof fold also opens for the morning sunlight for outdoor breakfasts. The concept of openness is best imagined in how the large combined dining and living room actually ends with an outdoor wall and ceiling. It is not one indoor space and one outdoor, but rather half of the space is indoor and half is outdoor. Likewise, the kitchen and entrance hall spatially extend to the wall outside of the actual windows. The outside free-standing wall towards the street makes the house private despite its transparency. The open side faces the garden and, beyond, a natural beach and the sea.

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Vacation house project Gotland, Sweden 2003 110 m²

Two folds, one in the free-standing wall-block, the other in the roof at the open corner, open up the strict geometry and serve as a spatial lead to the entrance.

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36. M’s House

Starting from the principle of a simple box, subtle geometrical distortions makes this house all about framing the views. The entrance is from the rear and from here there are no windows and there is no actual presence of the seashore on the front, but rather a clearing in lush greenery. Upon entering, there is first a narrow, but brightlyframed, glimpse of the sea beyond the end of a short corridor. On either side are compact bedroom and bathroom facilities. A shallow roofed terrace adjoining the master bedroom, with a sharply-angled view towards the sea, is the result of ‘cutting’ in to the ‘box’ of the house, removing a trapezoidal volume from the façade. This way a sea view is achieved from the bedroom, although it is facing sideways. In the adjacent bathroom, the shower room is open to the sky, yet imperceptibly sheltered from the elements. The kitchen, dining and living areas all share the same big room. The front of the room is fully glazed and the terrace (with a trapdoor and staircase to the garden) is perceived as a continuation of the room. Here again, a similar cutaway intervention is apparent and what first appears as a symmetrical aperture in the façade is actually geometrically manipulated, making the best of the sea view. Boards are used for both the exterior (vertical) and the interior (horizontal). The visual principle could be said to be akin to a coconut where the dark outer shell (weathered grey) contrasts with the bright white interior exposed by every cut. The parting-lines between the white painted boards are carefully matched around all walls to lead your vision towards the sea. The baluster placement continues the parting-lines present in the terrace floor.

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Vacation house 2008 90 m²

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Boards are used for both the exterior (vertical, weathered) and the interior (horizontal, white). The galvanized railing’s balusters are carefully matched with the parting-lines between the white painted boards.

The shower room is open to the sky, yet imperceptibly sheltered from the elements.

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37. Kråkmora Holmar House

A vacation retreat for a young family with two small children on an island in the archipelago outside Stockholm. The whole family has to fit into 45 m², which was the limit allowed by local building regulations – because the house is officially a guest house to the main house. This main house is only eight metres uphill, leading to the decision for a completely closed façade in that direction – for privacy. However, all the other façades facing the waterline, just four metres away, are open and invite an unobstructed view of the Baltic Sea. The house follows the topography and folds slightly in plan where a little ravine runs perpendicular to the house. This fold’s geometrical result is a ‘hybrid’ roof. The living room/kitchen wing, which has the highest ceiling height, has a normal single-pitch roof whose peak is continued in plan over the longer bedroom wing. The continuation being a pitched roof with its peak running – somewhat unusually – diagonally across. A complex relationship is formed between the site, the plan and the roof. A strong geometrical concept, but one that had to be “guarded” closely to remain strong. If you pulled at one corner, all the rest would follow. The house is a wood-frame construction. The façade is treated and protected with iron vitriol that, with the help of the sun, becomes a silver-grey weathered colour over time. This is a traditional method of treating buildings located in the archipelago and the coastal regions around Sweden. A feature detail lies in the design and construction of the windows, which visually appear to rise from the floor all the way up to the roof line. By ‘facetting’ the top of the window-opening in the façade, the illusion of a roof with very little thickness is created.

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Client: Sanna and Fredrik Claesson Vacation house Stockholm Archipelago, Sweden 2003 45 m²

The entrance side is facing the neighbouring old main building and was therefore completely closed for mutual privacy.

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38. Villa Widlund

“First of all, there is the sea and the view. Secondly, the house is in dialogue with our art.” (Jan Widlund, house owner.) This house for an art collector was conceived as a funnel of light, space and sea views. The location is the west coast of the Baltic island of Öland, overlooking the sea with mainland Sweden on the horizon. The white concrete box is ‘corseted’ in the middle, creating slightly sheared wall and roof angles. This gives the house both its direction and character. It also marks the division between the private, two-storey bedroom, rear portion and the communal, double ceiling height, front portion. The view through the living room’s glazed partition is framed on three sides by the building’s walls and ceiling and completed by the low terrace wall positioned four metres beyond of the glass. The inside space is organised as volumes. The kitchen, the stairwell and the double-sided fireplace – clad in laser-cut, glossy white tiles – form a space-defining composition. White precast concrete was chosen as a background to both art and the view. Precast concrete is perhaps not the most common choice for a private house at this scale, but was ideal for achieving precision in manufacturing tolerance, colour and finish. The concrete is not painted or surface-pigmented but solid white, which gives it a wonderful glow. The joints between the concrete elements are deliberately highlighted and positioned so that – instead of interfering with – they become part of the building’s geometry and expression. The sealant in between is grey to enhance the graphic effect rather than matching the concrete surface, creating a pattern that ‘turns corners’. Weather resistant Siberian larchwood is used for exterior decks, while all interior floors are of the local Öland limestone – quarried literally next door. The remains of centuries of limestone quarrying is visible as it is the actual material that forms the short but steep slope down to the narrow beach. The shoreline is just a few metres from the house.

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Client: Karin Meidner and Jan Widlund Vacation house Öland, Sweden 2011 220 m²

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The interior is organised with space-defining volumes. View from the home office on the second floor, with stairwell wall (front) and fireplace wall clad in laser-cut, glossy white tiles (behind).

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The joints between the precast concrete elements are positioned so that they become part of the building’s geometry and expression. The section shows how the house is divided in double ceiling-height front (communal) and a two-storey rear (private).

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39. Fagerström House

The local gross building allowance had to be fully exploited in order to create a large enough home for a growing family. The stipulated distance to the property line also limited the positioning from the sides, while the desire to preserve the old oak tree blocked the middle. The answer was the curved L -shaped plan which in turn gave the house interior its strong spatial flow. The resulting curved façade to the garden, together with the tree canopy, created a defined ‘roofed’ outdoor room. Another distinctive feature is the façade colour, painted in different Falun red shades. An irregular transition from ochre to dark red occurs from one end to the other. The curving and colour combined make for a sculptural and iconic exterior – something that was specifically requested by the client. The house has two floors in its tall bedroom end. In the other lower end, the upper floor terminates with an interior balcony facing the high-ceilinged living room. The roof has a diagonal pitch from one end to the other and also backwards (visible from the house's skewed elevations), making for the constant changing of room geometry as one moves through the house. The house's waistline contains the open kitchen and, behind a bookcase, stairs. With its slow climb, the stairs give a feeling of ‘proceeding’ rather than walking between levels. All openings/glazing are carefully placed so that visibility from neighbours is avoided. This also creates a feeling that the house is located in a place far more sparsely populated than the area is in reality. As if it was just the house and the outdoors. Instead of a larger number of conventional windows, the remaining placements are generously glazed. For example, the living room is completely glazed toward a roofed terrace, as an outside extension of the living room. The entrance floor is made of Carrara marble. The tiles are laid perpendicular to the main façade, (fanning where the room curves). An integrated burgundy-red bookcase and staircase flows into an equally burgundy-red wood floor upstairs. The bathrooms are tiled (floor, walls and ceiling) with different patterns from Marrakech Design’s collection by Claesson Koivisto Rune.

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Client: Sara and Jerker Fagerström Private house Edsviken, Sweden 2012 270 m²

The exterior was painted in five different Falun red shades. In an irregular transition from ochre to dark red, from one end to the other.

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An early model showing the relationship of the curved house and the existing oak tree (above). The second floor bathroom with its ‘Dandelion’ tiles, designed by Claesson Koivisto Rune (right).

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40. Lindé House

A house on a sloping lot by the sea, for a married couple where the brief stated that their lifestyle required a clear division in living spaces to accommodate their differing time schedules. The house was therefore divided along its central axis, creating two separate houses in one. One half being reserved for bathroom and bedrooms, the other for kitchen, dining and living rooms. So, while one may be up preparing a meal in the night, the other would sleep undisturbed. But there is also an emotional aspect to the division which is about existing alongside nature, the weather and the passing of the seasons. Although the division is only a little over one metre, the sense of outside is significant when moving between the two parts of the house. Nature is experienced within this ‘in-between’ space, even if just for the few seconds it takes to close one door and open the next. Contained by terraces and walls, the house is as sculpted from one solid block. The imagined continuation of the slightly lower peak of the bedroom-half clearly meets the peak of the living-half, as if the slit between was literally cut out. Similarly, all windows are as if punched-out using a tool-set of differently gauged square punches. The slightly oversized window panes were then ‘glued’ over the openings from the outside so that from inside there are no window frames and all glazing would be virtually invisible. The house then cast entirely in concrete to enhance the monolithic, mono-block, mono-material, monochrome theme. The Lindé house was conceived in the formative years of Claesson Koivisto Rune Architects and, although this house was never built, many aspects of the concept have served as inspiration for later projects. For example, the management of sightlines, framed views and division/integration of room functions.

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Client: Pia and Staffan Lindé Private house project Tyresö, Sweden 1997 84 m²

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Contained by terraces and walls, the house is sculpted from one solid block. The house was then divided along its central axis, creating two separate houses in one.

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41. A Long House

Following a strict grid, repetitive blocks, with the proportions 4.5 × 3.5 alternated by 2.5 × 3.5 windows/gaps, form a rectilinear volume. The façade is made up of identical, standardised brick wall elements, emphasizing a sense of solid and void. Offset wall elements are placed behind some of the voids and, effectively, ‘close’ the back side of the house without interrupting the rhythm of the façade and still allowing indirect light into the space. Intended as a vacation house for a small family, the requested indoor area for living was accordingly modest; more compact than appears by the long elevation. The space within the house is made up of one long passage running lengthwise through the house and alongside a series of both interior and exterior rooms. The stretched plan makes each function more defined than would have been possible with a more squarish plan. The entrance is retracted from one of the short ends, integrating a carport. The master bedroom is at the very other end of the house – separating the most public from the most private with the longest possible distance. The stretch between forms a mostly open plan with kitchen, dining area, living room and an integrated small courtyard. This courtyard substitutes one of the large windows along the house and faces internally the living room from one side and the bathroom from the other, demarking the internal boundary between communal and private. The bathroom can be curtained off for additional privacy. The architecture appears to be very orderly but is surprisingly intricate inside. In addition to the small courtyard, some of the large openings are not glazed frontally, but instead fitted with retracted, view-blocking walls with side glazing for raking, indirect light. Another wall divides the actual doorway from the carport. All together, the interior experience is much lighter than expected; a set of layers rather than a solid volume.

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Vacation house project Gotland, Sweden 2001 150 m²

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Offset wall elements are placed behind some of the openings/windows and, in effect, ‘close’ the back side of the house without interrupting the rhythm of the façade.

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The interior experience is of a ‘set of layers’ – in contrast to the ‘solid volume’ exterior appearance.

42. Lilla Tornö House

A relatively complex programme, paired with strict land regulations, led to a simple architectural principle of binding proportions to contain the character of this relatively large, single-family vacation home. The site is on an island in the Stockholm Archipelago. This island is completely private to the client, but with the unique Swedish “Outdoor Access Rights”, anyone is given the right to go ashore or anchor on any ground not in direct vicinity of buildings. In defence of these public rights, building permits are scrutinised to minimise the ‘privatisation’ impact of any new construction. Therefore, the local urban planning office demanded a low visual impact. The client’s programme was for a large house with plenty of personal space for parents and children alike. As well as the possibility to accommodate a number of guests. All to be able to gather, but also to be able to live side by side, independently, in a kind of multigenerational home. The solution was to break down the project in increments. The smallest unit being the handmade brick Kolumba, by Petersen, measuring circa 55 × 5 cm (w × h). When the bricks (colour-matched to the granite of the island) are laid in stacks it creates a wall segment with the width of circa 60 cm. These segments are then added to each other as either solid wall (bricks) or full height openings (windows), but always 60 cm. when a larger glazing is called for, several window units are just added together. Then the house itself was broken into three houses. Configured on the site in a diminishing spiral formation, resulting in an openended courtyard. The largest building is the parents’ private quarters and a living room, dining and kitchen area large enough for both family and guests. The second, middle-sized, house is for the (teenage) children and/ or guests. This house also contains a multi-purpose room; a private living room. The smallest house has a secondary kitchen and dining room for guests. It also holds a spa, gym and office. Beside the diminishing size of the three houses, their height is sequentially lowered, but only by the standing height of the next house’s roof slab. These (flat) roofs are then extended lengthwise so that their overhangs barely touch the adjacent house, providing roofed entrances/passages – and making the three parts one ‘whole’ house again.

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Client: Lena and Peter Johnzon Vacation house Stockholm Archipelago, Sweden 2020 490 m²

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An architectural principle of binding proportions, based on a brick measuring 55 × 5 cm as its smallest increment.

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The height of the three houses is sequentially lowered by the standing height of the next house’s roof slab. The roofs are then extended lengthwise so that their overhangs barely touch the adjacent house – making the three parts one ‘whole’ house.

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43. No. 5 House

The starting point for this house for a graphic designer (he designed the No. 5 sign) and his family was a geometric volume where the inside was as important as the outside. It could be seen as an inverted volume, a space with a series of closures. A grid was established that was based on standardised dimensions for building materials. The grid was then superimposed on a ‘box’ shape. From this grid the basic room structure was derived. Each room then had one of its four sides completely glazed. The result contained three bedrooms and one larger living/dining space with kitchen. The bedrooms are basically open towards one cardinal point each, leaving one opening in each façade. So even though the bedrooms are small the surrounding landscape is always a part of the space, making the sense vast rather than small. The bathroom, which has no wall opening for a window, has a roof window instead. There is a glazed doorway from the living area leading on to a partially-walled terrace, creating an outdoor room that is open to the sky at one end and open to the view at the other. A low, cast concrete bench spans the length of the living room and seamlessly continues out on to the terrace in a clear, spatial gesture, linking the inside with the outside.

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Client: Kajsa and Markus Moström Private house Nacka, Sweden 2003 150 m²

The low, cast concrete bench spans the length of the living room and seamlessly continues out on to the terrace, linking the inside with the outside (previous spread).

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44. Villa Wabi

45. Dwell House

46. Stern House

Wabi is Japanese for ‘simple quietude’. In the word lies a concept for the perception of beauty. The opposite of ‘gorgeous splendor’, it suggests a modest beauty striving for something closer to nature than nature itself. Wabi finds beauty in non-materialistic, spiritual freedom. The Villa Wabi was an experimental urban one-family house of approximately 60 m². It was (temporarily) placed on Sergels Torg, the central square of modern Stockholm, chosen because it was possibly the harshest urban spot that Sweden had to offer. The placement emphasized the possibility of building a sanctuary even in a super-urban context. Inspired by travelling to Japan while still students and there, amongst other things, admiring the Japanese ability to create ‘microcosms’ within dense urban situations, Villa Wabi was the joint master degree project for Mårten Claesson, Eero Koivisto and Ola Rune and therefore marks the beginning of Claesson Koivisto Rune Architects.

Two elongated U-shapes are drawn back to back. One opens to private bedrooms and bathrooms. The other opens to home office/studio and gym. Between the two U’s is a space for communal gathering; entry, kitchen, dining and living. Passages lead between these three defined areas creating strong lines of vision. Private, living and working spaces are clearly within the same house, yet separated. The double ‘U’ figure, as seen in plan, is the defining structure. Inside deep walls are storage, mechanical equipment, bookshelves, closets etc. On top of the walls is the roof, a flat sloping plane. The higher end rises towards the south to gain the most natural light. The plane is not a perfect square but sheared into a rhomboid. The resulting wedges created on each side form outdoor terraces with morning sun outside the bedrooms and evening sun outside the studios. The terraces and an inset porch together form an outdoor room area. This un-built project was conceived for an invited competition by American Dwell Magazine.

Entering from the top of a densely wooded hill you look down on a ‘basin’ of grass flanked on either side by hillsides and the coastline at the bottom, some 100 metres ahead. The house was positioned across the basin, parallel to the water. This way you would enter the house from its back. The entrance wall was made solid, to delay the sensation of the view upon your approach. The house was divided into three concrete boxes that were displaced vertically and horizontally. As the ground is still slightly sloping, the entrance is on the mid-level. This is the heart of the building where all physical and visual communication merge. From every room of the house there is direct outdoor access, important because this was for a family with five children, all with their own demand for independency. The whole of the sea-facing façades was completely glazed with folding glass doors that would allow you to open the wall partially or even completely on hot summer days.

Experimental urban villa Stockholm, Sweden 1994 60 m²

Client: Dwell Magazine Prefab house project 2003 220 m²

Client: Ann and Ulf Stern Private house project Saint Anna’s Archipelago, Sweden 2001 400 m²

47. Villa Werner

48. Levine House

49. Eckerdal House

A vacation house for a family of three, located on a flat lot, on Gotland, Sweden’s largest island in the Baltic Sea. The plan is straightforward modern planning: A box. Inside, a grouping of bathroom and kitchen forms the core, which is then surrounded by two bedrooms and a large open living/dining space. The distinguishing concept is instead the pinwheel configuration. The four walls of the box were pulled apart, the gaps between becoming sliding glass partitions. The roof was expanded and twisted to align with the ends of the four walls. The result is a house with a torqued roof affording each of the four façades their own patio, its own entry access and its own integrity: Main entrance, living room, master bedroom and the teenage daughter’s bedroom. In line with local building tradition the masonry walls were plastered white and all floors, inside and patios, were laid with locally quarried limestone.

The street façade is a closed wall integrating the garage and entrance doors and hiding a twin courtyard. On top of the garage is a home office, accessed via an open stairway over the pool. At the back is another two-storey volume that contains bedroom and bathroom with an additional bedroom suite above. These two main house volumes are tied together by a roof, cut and folded like two interconnecting strips. The roof defines a third volume inbetween: The transparent (glazed) hub of the house, where the living room, dining and kitchen is located. Via the door in the street wall, the entrance to the house is at the living room end. The kitchen at the other end form a background to the open space. The kitchen also makes a natural, solid division to the private areas behind. With floor-to-ceiling glass the courtyards become one with the inside. The intersecting roofs creates a ceiling height varying from single to double. The resulting slit lets natural light enter from the centre of the roof. And direct light to be reflected from the one-lane swimming pool and back at walls and ceilings.

The starting point is the typical house. However, the roof overhang has been extended and the box that is the house beneath also has its length extended, exposing either end to the sky above. As a result, the house is now rather atypical, with its roof extending “too far” in one direction and walls in the other. But what appears to be house-ends that lack roof cover are in fact two upper floor terraces. The lot is right on the waterfront overlooking the Öresund sound between Sweden and Denmark. The house orientation can only be lengthwise in relation to the narrow plot, meaning that one end points towards the sea view while the other has a more intimate garden view. The property is entered from the garden end, through tall hedges. From the glazed side entrance of the house bedrooms lie to the left and entertain a garden view while the living room, to the right, opens toward the sea. The opposing long side of the house has a corresponding glazed aperture facing toward an outdoor pool. The top floor is a master suite, with study and bathroom facing one terrace and the master bedroom facing the other.

Client: Hans Werner Vacation house Gotland, Sweden 2003 80 m²

Client: Steve Levine Private house project Dallas, USA 2006 390 m²

Client: Catrine and Karl Eckerdal Private house Lomma, Sweden 2020 300 m²

50. Eriksvik House

51. Stålberg House

52. Hacienda House

Sometimes the limitations of local zoning regulations become the source of inspiration. How to adhere to the word, but not necessarily to the intention, of the regulation when the regulation doesn’t seem to allow the better solution? In this particular case any flat roofs that would allow much sought-after roof terrace area seemed impossible. But the regulations are such that they only determine the outline shape as represented in a two-dimensional drawing for planning permission. The Eriksvik house near Stockholm is a semi-detached house, containing two living spaces, each with two storeys. Because of local building regulations stipulating exact roof angles of a singlepitched roof, the gable elevations show a perfectly traditional house with such a roof. But a geometrical cut-away creates a triangular roof terrace on each side, one for each living space. The internal stairwells are perpendicular relative to the longest side of the terrace triangles making the upper living rooms perfectly rectangular.

The island in Valdemaren lake is characterised by traditional cottages set among old trees and natural meadows. At the centre of the island the sense is of inland 19th century rural ‘village’. Lakeside it is different. The large, meandering lake gives a sense of open archipelago. The lakeside lot is reached from the village, so the approach has a character markedly different from the one experienced from the lake. This gave birth to the concept of a house with two interfaces. The entrance side shows a traditional pitched roof. (Although elongated and without windows.) Facing the lake it is more like a modern ‘glass box’. But this is not two different houses put together, the merge between its two characters is purely geometrical. Instead of a rectilinear ridge, the roof is angled diagonally from apex to opposing corners – resulting in a ‘flat roof’ appearance towards lakeside. The house is wood clad and painted with the traditional Falun paint prevalent in the village. In this case, a black hue has been applied instead of the typical red. In contrast, the whole of the interior is clad in warm, untreated Swedish pine.

On a site with a spectacular sea view to the west and surrounding farmland to the north, east and south, this private multigenerational house both closes in and opens up. In line with local farm building tradition, four buildings are placed in a square to form an inner courtyard. The entrance side houses partly guest quarters and partly garage and storage. This building serves as a visual block to both the private areas and the view. The two opposing side buildings are private quarters divided so that the parents have the one house and the young adult children have the other. The main building faces the sea and serves as the communal and social building for all with kitchen, dining and living rooms. The four buildings are offset in a pin-wheel formation so that the entry to the courtyard is from the one side of the entrance house. From the front door you enter into an outdoor, but fully roof covered, gallery loop surrounding the large courtyard and binding the functions of the four houses together like they were one.

Client: Niklas Stålberg Vacation house Valdemarsö, Sweden 2020 95 m²

Private house project 2015 875 m²

Client: Arkitekthus AB Semi-detached private house Nacka, Sweden 2008 270 m²

53. Simonsson House

54. Drevviken House

55. Hovering House

Unusually strict zoning regulations ‘designed’ this private house. The site, positioned next to the major river Lule Älv, lies in the north of Sweden, just south of the Arctic Circle. The local regulations stipulated a house with a maximum building height of just 4.2 metres. It also stipulated that the house must have a red roof. The best way to realise a proper second floor, working within these restrictions and, at the same time, making the most of the views towards the river, was to use a single pitch roof construction. Since the building height for a single pitch roof is a calculated mean value around the house, the resulting building height could be kept within the regulations. The house composed of two trapezoidal volumes, facing in opposite directions. The larger volume forms the living space, orientated toward the river. The smaller contains a garage with a sauna and a roof terrace on top. To emphasize the building’s sculptural qualities, the entire house was finished in red paint, fulfilling at the same time the stipulation for a red roof.

This piece of un-touched natural landscape lies only ten minutes from Stockholm centre. The lot is sited directly on the Drevviken lake, with its own little cove. The crescent of the cove follows the slightly bowl-shaped topography that also informs the shape of the house. The house is itself a kind of up-turned crescent with foundation and rooflines in parallel curves. With three different floor levels inside, the land could be left un-excavated for the building. So the sculptural quality of the house follows the nature of the site rather than being a gesture. The direction is broadside toward the lake and the view. The entrance is mid-ship from the street behind, via a central terrace. From here, one side of the building contains the main house, whereas the other side contains the guest wing with home office and garage. From the central dining and kitchen area, as well as from the home office and bedrooms at either ends of the house, the windows are individually-angled toward their best views of the lake.

The house is situated on top of a small hill on the shore of an island in the Stockholm Archipelago. Viewed from an angle below the hilltop, the shape of the house is like a barn, which are traditional to the area. On closer inspection, all the house’s ground floor walls are absent, replaced entirely by glass. The ‘barn-walls’ are in fact part of the roof. As the glass ‘enclosure’ is setback from, and shadowed by, the roof volume, the all-around glass walls are not immediately apparent. The mass of the house appears to hover above the ground. The vacation house is for a bachelor; its interior is completely open plan, except for a bathroom core that doubles as structural support for the roof construction. A series of curving draperies provide for partial or full privacy. The roof mass is hollow inside, making the interior space much taller than suggested by the ‘full-height’ glass perimeter walls. Furthermore, the four inside ‘corners’ are rounded and follow the curvature of the draperies.

Client: Alexandra and Robin Simonsson Private house Boden, Sweden 2020 220 m²

Client: Tor Nielsen Private house Farsta, Sweden 2010 230 m²

Vacation house project Stockholm Archipelago, Sweden 2014 150 m²

The Experience of Space: A conversation between Mårten Claesson, Eero Koivisto, Ola Rune and Zoë Ryan

Zoë Ryan: One of the things that I’ve always been interested in with your work is your interest in art, especially modern and contemporary artists like Donald Judd, Ellsworth Kelly, Frank Stella, and how those influences play out in your projects. You’ve created a number of projects for artists, museums, galleries, etc. I’m curious about how you feel about the term minimalism, which has often been used to describe your work. I’m less interested in the moniker but how your work relates to someone like Donald Judd, for example, who was intent on creating art using minimal, yet exacting forms to train the eye and the mind in issues of shape, composition, and relationships in space. Mårten Claesson: Absolutely. It's a lot to do with mathematical systems that make up his proportions. ZR: To me, Judd’s work is also about order. I don't know if you're creating order through your projects in as much as you are creating a frame for living in which the users of your spaces can participate. MC: That's true, we understand the power of order, repetition, specific proportions and we use that but we nearly always break our own rules in some sort of subtle way. One way of describing what we do is that we like to create a kind of distorted perfection. Ola Rune: Whatever project we are working on, we try to focus on an idea and that idea needs to come through all the way to the end. That could be called minimalist. We try to keep only one or maybe two ideas in a project and that's it. Eero Koivisto: When we started out in 1995 after graduating from the University College of Art, Crafts and Design in Stockholm, we did a hundred interiors before we had a chance to do a house. Mainly it was because of the economic situation. When we left university there was 40% unemployment among Swedish architects. So we did a lot of interiors and I think that created a certain desire in us for clarity. I personally really like clarity in plans, and clarity in ideas, and clarity in proportion and composition. We continue to look for clarity in a project, to skip the fluff. At the beginning we very much looked at the work of John Pawson and at the work of artists like Judd. We also looked at the work of Luis Barragán, for example. Their work is all about clarity. MC: One of my favorite stories about Le Corbusier is that after he rendered the Modulor, his anthropometric system of proportions and dimensions, he was traveling back to his Paris office after having been on a trip, and he saw what his employees had done in the studio the previous couple of weeks when he was gone, and apparently forbade anyone to use the Modulor method for a few weeks because he felt the system had become too rigid. I think it’s this tension that we are interested in. We seek perfection but at the same time realize it cannot be achieved.

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ZR: How do you work together? What is your working process? Do you riff off of one another?

EK: Our projects definitely evolve in the endless conversations we have around models, physical models. We make a lot of models. Computers are really useful but sometimes physical models are so much faster. When we do a project and we are really happy with it, we might think that it is really good, but then we start a new project and always try to see if there is a more interesting way. MC: That's true. We have never wanted to create projects with the same expression the whole time. We have always said, we have done this once, we have to change. By involving the client in the project, by looking closely at the brief, we determine new outcomes for our work. I think our work has changed quite a lot since we started our studio. EK: We are Scandinavians and we were born into this aesthetical universe. Whether we like it or not, this is where we come from. For some time we were trying to get away from this but after a while we just stopped discussing it and just tried to evolve and do the best projects we could. ZR: Your projects are very refined and yet I don't see a fixation on the details or you wanting to flex your muscles in that way. Neither do I see you wanting to emphasize your methods of construction in a project, for example, in the modernist tradition. I see a greater interest in creating projects that emphasize spatial experience, what it means and feels like to be in the space. Would you agree? MC: I think that’s true, especially about not wanting to flex our muscles as architects in an overt way. If you look at the spaces we do for art, which is a strong interest for all three of us, we realized early on that the space and the building must never overpower the art that is displayed inside. We never really got into deconstructivism perhaps for that reason because that kind of method of making architecture is about showing off how powerful you can be as an architect instead of going the other direction and trying to create great spatiality. As you say, what's perhaps most important to us is the spatial experience of our projects, and the different relationship you have to these spaces whether you are inside or outside of them. EK: When you look at Judd’s 100 Untitled Works in Mill Aluminum from 1986 [see p. 355] for example, which is shown in two hangar-like buildings that contain seemingly identical large aluminium ‘boxes’, people look at them, how perfectly they are made, but how each one is different. We were always interested in how the boxes make the space, but also how the desert sort of flows right through the building. That is what we discussed, not if the aluminium was one inch thick or not. We discussed how the boxes made myriad reflections and how the spatiality of the windows on both sides allows for this flow right the way through the building. Especially at sunset… OR: Another one of our projects that is interesting in this way is Galleri Örsta (2010) [see Ch. 70]. It has an interesting façade but the main thing is the space itself, you're not really sure what you're experiencing.

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MC: Again, it's the flow between spaces, which interests us. EK: I think details are super important but I don't like architecture which is all about the details. I think it's like coming into a room where everybody is talking and nobody is listening. I think it's much nicer to get into a space or a room where you feel the smell of a room and you notice it becomes wider here and narrower there. And as you walk around you notice and think, that's weird, where does that wall go? ZR: I’d like to go back to this idea of the sequence you create or flow between spaces, which I think is a really interesting aspect of your work. I am especially intrigued by the transition between spaces, which becomes as important, I think, in experiencing your projects as the spaces themselves. I’m also interested in how you work at different scales within one project and the deliberate movement of line and form in your built work. The artists who influence you, such as Kelly and especially Judd, for example, pursued formal and compositional experiments sequentially, for example, as a way to explore the relationship between object, viewer, and environment. What draws you to these artists’ work? OR: For me, with Kelly, for example, especially his work made in the 1960's and 70's, when you study it you understand that his circles and the shapes in his works are always made from accelerating or decelerating curves. You look at one of his paintings in a book, for example, and you turn it upside down and it looks completely different, and that was a big point of reference for us. MC: Kelly’s work is never static. It changes constantly as you move around it. OR: I agree. His work has a really strong spatial quality that changes how you experience the space in which his work is placed. Like most architects we are obsessed with details, like handrails, and how they feel in your hand. But we like that details only get noticed as you use them. They should never overwhelm a space. MC: When you move around Galleri Örsta, the walls basically form a cross inside the gallery to make four differently-sized exhibition rooms but they are placed at such a slight angle that you don’t see this. Only when you move around those four walls (because they don't touch the outer wall) do you feel how the rooms change in size by a couple of metres from one space to another. That's similar to the experience of a Kelly painting. EK: You feel that there’s something going on in the space but it’s a subtle shift. Once you realize that the windows on the outer walls are different sizes, you also realize that the walls are not truly rectilinear.

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ZR: Another interesting aspect of your work is how you play with traditional and vernacular elements in your work, whether a design for a gallery or a yacht which you’ve also worked on, for example. How does the materiality of a project come into play when you are thinking about this idea of spatial experience?

EK: We’ve been asked to rethink a lot of interiors spaces and there are really two approaches to this type of work. Either you gut everything out and you do a new space, or if it's a really nice space and it's nicely made, maybe the best solution is not to destroy it but to add something instead. Perhaps it's more interesting to add something which creates a certain tension with the existing space. There are many examples of great architects who have done this successfully, such as David Chipperfield, for example. OR: Yeah, the Neues Museum in Berlin is amazingly well done. MC: Another aspect is the times you are in. Look at Gunnar Asplund who designed the Stockholm Public Library in the late 1920s. He was very much an architect of the transition period between the late neoclassical period and the early modernist period in Sweden. And sometimes these in-between periods when shifts happen produce the most interesting work. When we started we felt that we were in such a transition. We started our studio in the post post-modernism period. If you did something that took some chords from the modernist jingle you no longer had to be ironic about it nor did you have to follow the modernist dogma of form shall follow function or always reveal the construction methods, etc. OR: I think that we’ve always been into fine-tuning our designs, rather than playing architecture loudly. MC: We are currently working on a hotel in Tokyo. The Japanese have an expression we learned recently, that is aimai. It relates to the relationship between spaces: the feeling that you bring with you from one space to another space. Aimai is an expression of vagueness but in a positive way. EK: Yes, I love that. OR: Like in our work where the borders between spaces are not clearly defined. EK: And that's the beauty and poetry of aimai. OR: We have always been inspired by Japan. ZR: You have travelled a lot for work. I recall you telling me at some point that you’d been to Japan more than 50 times, yet you also mentioned that the influence of Scandinavia is imbedded in your work and who you are as architects coming from this part of the world. Could you elaborate on what you think are Nordic qualities or values that are reflected in your practice? EK: Firstly, I think the idea of light is incredibly important, as is this idea of borders, transitions. If you look at our buildings, we seldom use conventional windows. It's always about creating openings, which somehow are attached to the floor or the ceiling or the wall. In this part of the world it's pitch black during the winter. In the spring

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people stand on the street just looking up at the sun. So light is important. We often play with light. MC: In the Inde/Jacobs Gallery [see Ch. 68] in Marfa there's a skylight in the centre of the gallery which doesn't touch the floor, it's a volume that comes down from the ceiling but just stops short of the ground by thirty centimetres [see pp. 360–361]. ZR: There’s a tension to this space that is really interesting. MC: The in-between spaces and distances between walls become as important as the actual volumes. ZR: Was the skylight a way to deal with the light, to bring it into the space in a controlled way while creating a space that has the right conditions to display works of art that might be light sensitive? MC: Yes, absolutely. We are essentially painting the space with light through the skylight. EK: And the light moves during the day. It travels like a centimetre a minute changing the perception of the space. We like to sculpt how the light is carried on walls and ceilings and materials and reflections. I think this is a very Nordic way of looking at things. ZR: The transitions between and through spaces, inside and out, are carefully articulated in your work through how light enters a space but also between physical elements of the building, the walls, the windows, the circulation, often on the periphery, the geometries of space. There is also a distinct relationship in your work between the building and the landscape in which it is sited. How do you think about those sets of relationships? OR: We like to make buildings which you can almost pass without noticing them. EK: We’re interested also in the idea of an organic architecture as Frank Lloyd Wright envisioned this term, in which different spaces are connected to each other like the organs of the body. MC: There is a fantastic sculpture Figurine between Two Houses (1950) by Alberto Giacometti. The figure is walking from one box to another. I think it has a lot to do with how we think about architecture. EK: In Stockholm the nicest apartment you can own is one of those apartments that is about 100 years old where they aligned the doorways close to the window side and they put all the rooms in a row so you could see through the entire house on one side. It's like in our studio. We did the same thing here. When you are in one space you could clearly see parts of the next space and the next space and the next, and so you understand the whole. There's an openness which binds these spaces together but they are still single spaces in a row. 289.

OR: And there's a rhythm to that as well, a spatial rhythm.

EK: Asplund created projects in this way. You really feel that you are part of a bigger space, but made up of smaller, more intimate spaces. OR: We’ve used this idea on a number of projects including institutional work. The Landskrona Kulturhus (2011) [see Ch. 06] is an example of this. ZR: How else do you think your Nordic roots inform your work? EK: We live in a part of the world, which is very sparsely populated which means that we tend to like isolation. My dad, for example, used to get really cross if a boat passed by our island when we had a summer place out on the lake. It would ruin his day somehow. We also have this Scandinavian or Nordic feeling that it's really nice to be alone. I think it carries over into our architecture. A lot of our buildings, which are facing the road, are completely closed off by a wall, and I think this has to do with this idea of private space. When we design houses, there are often clear divisions between private spaces, the bedrooms, for example, and the public living spaces. MC: For us, we realized that the dogmatic open plan doesn't really work in real life. ZR: The transition between spaces and between the private and the public areas of your projects are always highly expressed. You are physically and psychologically aware that you are transitioning from one space to another, whether in the way you frame light, inside/ outside relationships, or restrict or open up spaces. EK: Absolutely. You should feel that you are moving through different parts of a building. MC: We’re interested in those transitions. It's not opening and closing a door. In fact we try to avoid doors as much as possible. It's not about creating abrupt separations between spaces. You have to walk through and experience that transition, even if it's a very short walk. OR: Just like in the Giacometti sculpture. EK: Usually when you look at private houses or semi-private spaces, there's usually just a wall dividing those spaces. We often add an extra space. It’s not always clear which space this belongs to, but it creates a transition…or vagueness…like aimai. MC: Another interest for us is in dividing larger volumes into smaller volumes to form a coherent whole. EK: We did this with House of Many Courtyards (2015) [see Ch. 16]. I think it has one of the best plans that we have ever made. It’s a house made up of smaller units. OR: The project is also about manipulating local building regulations. We are interested in working with rules but making them work for the project. We turned a very small building into a large house because the courtyards are not factored into the calculations.

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ZR: So was the idea to create a building made up of parts that would nestle into the landscape? MC: Not really actually. It was more out of a necessity to create enough space for the requirements of the specific client with a very small building allowance. EK: The client comes to us and he has a building allowance of 140 square metres but he wants 340 square metres of programme. How do you solve that? It's a summer house so we realized that we could use the inside and the outside of the house to gain a larger useable footprint. MC: That resulted in a number of units with private courtyards that function as extra space for the home. There’s a 40-metre-long spine, a corridor that the different units are connected to either on the right or the left. Some of these rooms are really very small, just enough to fit a bed and a little bedside table but because one of the entire walls looks out onto and has access to a courtyard it expands the footprint greatly, both visually and physically. EK: You can see from one end of the house to the other. As it’s a summer house you always have the doors open, so the living room and the dining room have their own courtyard, the kitchen has its own courtyard, the master bedroom has its own courtyard, so with all these spaces combined we are at 340 square metres, but the built space is only 140 square metres. After about two months of discussing the project together we finally came up with this plan and got it to work. ZR: Are there other projects in which you’ve had to be creative given zoning regulations? OR: The Villa Widlund (2011) [see Ch. 38] is another good example. There was a height limit for the house and in order to make the brief from the client possible and create enough space, we had to sink the whole house underground by half a metre so that we could accommodate a second floor. This was something that the authorities didn't even think about. They were a bit surprised when they realized what we were proposing, but they were okay with it. MC: Another example is the Eriksvik House (2008) [see Ch. 50]. The local authorities stipulated that the house must have a pitched roof, but for the building permit you only need to file two-dimensional elevations and plans. If you look at this house in elevation, it has a pitched roof, but if you see it in reality, the roof is cut diagonally from each side creating a roof of two triangular, flat terraces. EK: But the drawings look totally normal. MC: It's in compliance with the regulations but it doesn't look at all like what they wanted. But they gave us a permit.

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ZR: You have briefly touched on your working process. Is it always the same?

OR: I think it's very similar for each project. We start by talking a lot. Not always drawing, but talking. We discuss ideas with each other to see which path to take. We ask ourselves, Who is this person, or this client? What do they really want? What is the location? MC: It's a lot of talking and then a lot of ideas. EK: When we have a sense of an idea, then we start making models and fast sketching and drawing, often on our own. And then we all get together again and discuss ideas around the models and more drawing happens to develop ideas together. It's very sort of… OR: Organic. EK: It's very organic and after a while we stop and say, Okay, what's the problem, how do we fix the problem with this? MC: At the beginning we are searching for an idea that breathes life into each project. The brief is of course in the back of your mind. If we're doing a private house, for example, we must accommodate a certain family but that’s not our primary concern at the beginning. We search for the idea. And sometimes the idea comes quickly, but more often it doesn't come that quickly. Sometimes we have to leave a project for a week or so, clear the air around it and then you come back and suddenly an idea, often something very simple surfaces. We try to start each project as open minded as possible. OR: Everything is possible. EK: Recently, a friend of ours who is an artist wrote that, "I have such difficulty starting a project and I really hate starting a project". We found this so funny, because we are the exact opposite. We think it's really fun at the beginning. ZR: So what attracts you to a project? MC: I think if it's something challenging that we haven't done before, that’s exciting and attracts us to a project. The idea of repeating yourself is the worst fear. OR: The project should keep us a little bit on our toes. EK: Yeah, a little bit uncertain of what to expect when it's finished. MC: We are also looking for good clients, of course. We bring the client into the process, almost as a member of the creative team. We do not distance ourselves from the client. So if it means that we are going to spend a year or two with this person or this group of people, the chemistry has to be good. OR: We have a lot of clients that we have done two, three, four, five projects with, that we continue to work with. ZR: Now you’ve had a chance to go back and revisit projects from

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over 25 years of your studio for this book, did you come to any realizations about the potential of architecture and what it can do? EK: I think architecture affects everyone. And I think it can be used as a way of showing power. There are buildings, which are obviously made to make a person feel very small from an ideological point of view. And we don't really like that. But that's maybe because we were brought up in this society. I think that we would like architectural spaces to be inclusive. MC: If you want to create more than shelter for people you need an architect. It's a little bit like music. Why do we need music? It's not a finite science, it's to elevate our imagination or emotions. We see architecture like this. We want to encourage an emotional experience with space. I also think that we can't fool ourselves to think that architects have a very big impact on the course of society because most architecture happens not because of humanistic ambitions but because of the economy. OR: But architecture at its best is poetry.

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Zoë Ryan, Curator of Architecture and Design at the Art Institute of Chicago.

56. Lund Cathedral Visitor Centre

The medieval cathedral of Lund had long needed a visitor centre – a service building with reception areas, café, conference space etcetera – and an open architectural competition was organised. The character of the city around the cathedral is medieval with narrow, winding streets and low, brick houses. In this proposal, the new visitor centre is positioned in a space between existing buildings adjacent to the cathedral. The proportions are taken from the surrounding and its lines are direct extensions of the neighbouring old houses. The two façades facing streets are somewhat set back and angled in, respectively, to create clear entrance piazzas. The other characteristic feature of the site is the park with tall trees scattered across sprawling lawns. An abstract, translucent tree-trunk pattern on the glass façades serves as a mirror of these century-old trees spread out around the cathedral grounds. Each pixel of the frosted tree trunk image is the size of the single bricks found in the buildings nearby – and subsequently chosen material for the walls and floors of the visitor centre. The experience of the pattern changes throughout the day. During the daytime, the pattern doubles as its own shadows are cast upon the interior. The geometry of the site plan with the two slightly off parallel streets formed the natural starting point to create a grid. This imaginary grid served as an organising device when creating the overall geometry of the entire building. The open and rational exterior contrasts with the more complex interior. The interior is laid out as a small hamlet, analogous to the surrounding city fabric. Three main volumes – freely placed within the grid – create interstices, like small streets or city squares, for different communal functions. Inside the volumes are located service functions that require more seclusion and/or privacy. A continuous theme is the opening up of volumes and space by folding. By partially “pulling the lid” off walls or roofs, light is directed inside and an organic spatial flow is created. This project was awarded joint second prize of 351 competition entries, but later the only one selected and exhibited in the international section of the Venice Architecture Biennale 2004.

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Client: Lunds domkyrkoförsamling Visitor centre project Lund, Sweden 2003 750 m²

By the opening up of volumes and walls, by folding, a spatial flow is created with raking light sculpting the interior.

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57. Strängnäs Cathedral Visitor Centre

The 12th century cathedral of Strängnäs dominates the skyline of its small city from its location on a hill. From up close it is actually humbler in size, with its warm red bricks and its softly pointed gothic vaults. Inside, the nave is the strong spatial feature with its obtuse high-point. The void that it constitutes was inverted into a solid shape that became the concept for a new entrance building. In strict terms, this shape only has walls and no roof. The programme for this open architectural competition stipulated reception, visitor centre, exhibition areas, gathering spaces, café and offices. All-in-all, it would have produced a building of a size that would have competed with the cathedral itself. So, the decision was taken to split the functions between two buildings. This way the difficult task of creating a true portal to the site, which in reality has two main points of approach from opposing directions, also found its solution. The larger of the two new entrance buildings is placed at the base of the hill (“below” the apse) and the smaller building at the hilltop (near the main entrance). This way they both reach to approximately the same peak height, corresponding to the eaves of the cathedral roof. From either end of the cathedral site the entrance buildings also adhere to the scale of the nearby city buildings, thus becoming interfaces between the mundane and the sacred. In both buildings, the entrance is through a high, centred door in an otherwise closed gable. In the opposing gable is, adversely, a low and wide glass partition. The effect is hinting a churchly atmosphere through symmetry and austerity. The material is red brick, like the cathedral, to signal the connection. The curving walls are asymmetrically punctuated with windows in a very light tint of either green or violet which is found in the original glass of the cathedral. Like the cathedral, the entrance buildings emanate an interior spatiality as important as the exterior position. The smaller of the two entrance buildings is basically one room open all the way up to the roof curves. The larger building has a dramatic, full height space at either ends (with closed multiple office-floors in the central core).

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Client: Strängnäs domkyrkoförsamling Entrance building project Strängnäs, Sweden 2017 180 m²/1725 m²

One new entrance building was split into two – corresponding to the two main points of approach from the city to the cathedral.

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The core idea. The 12th century nave of the cathedral is a strong spatial feature with its obtuse high-point. The void that it constitutes was inverted into a solid shape that became the concept for the new entry buildings.

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The smaller of the two new entrance buildings. Its peak height corresponds to the eaves of the cathedral roof while its scale adheres to the scale of the nearby, non-descript buildings.

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The larger of the two new entrance buildings is also in the scale of its (more city-central) surrounding buildings.

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58. Våler Kirke

The former church in Våler, Norway, which was 204 years old, had burnt to the ground in 2009. An architectural competition to replace it was announced.  Wooden churches – in particular medieval stave churches – are almost exclusively found in Norway, and is somewhat of a national trademark. Tying to this tradition, yet allowing a wholly contemporary structure, was the starting point for a shingled wood church to replace the burnt down church. The proposed church has a clear mass rather than other typical attributes. Instead of a church-tower at the west entrance the whole church rises to a peak above the choir at the east. Its geometry is not a compromise between symmetry and asymmetry, between earthly and ethereal, between big and small or between closed and transparent – it is in these respects always inclusive of both. The more intimate entrance leads into a church room which expands forward and upward. Your attention is drawn in the direction of the altar. At the same time the floor plan first expands but then contracts again to gather at the choir. Midship sits a more intimate baptismal chapel. This smaller chapel, off to one side – with its full roof aperture – intentionally disrupts the symmetry of the larger church room. Light is another feature, soft and dramatic. The whole west entrance wall, the whole of the sharp triangular east altar background and the slit along the north roofline – are glazed. They are the sources of raking light on the interior that continuously changes with the sun’s path. The slit in the roof gives an even light from north while the small chapel’s roof aperture lights up at midday with indirect southern sun. At night, raking electric light is thrown on the indented façade above the chapel.

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Client: Våler kirke Church project Våler, Norway 2011 775 m²

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Glazed slits are the sources of raking light on the interior that continuously changes with the sun’s path.

Scale model for space and light studies.

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Instead of a church-tower at the west entrance the whole church rises to a peak above the choir at the east.

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59. Plus House

The Plus House is a prefab one-family house and the first house designed by Claesson Koivisto Rune for prefab manufacturer Arkitekthus, in their catalogue named AH#001. The two-storey wooden building is a modern variation developed on the basis of the generic proportions of the classic Swedish barn. In this case, the house has no windows in the usual sense – instead, some of the walls are entirely glazed: the two long sides on the ground floor, and the gable ends on the upper storey under the pitched roof. The two visual axes that result intersect each other, forming an imaginary plus sign on the drawing, thus the name of the house. The glass walls are slightly retracted and divided into smaller fields by mullions and transoms. This retraction makes the glass shaded and less reflective (therefore better defined as transparent openings) as well as sheltered from rain. The other external walls are clad in wooden boards. The pitched roof is clad with zinc sheeting. The glass walls not only allow ample daylight into the house, they also integrate it into the natural surroundings – an effect that is enhanced by the terraces located in front of it. The roof and wall edges are thinned to reflect the lightness of the interior. The result is a house with both familiar proportions and an unusual appearance. The ground floor is a continuum of space – with the two opposing walls entirely glazed, the whole of the adjacent garden on both sides becomes an included part of the perceived room. Only two small rooms, the toilet and a utility room, are separated from the open space. They are located in the middle of the house next to the stairway, and thus divide the remaining space into a living room and a dining room with a kitchen. On the upper floor three separate bedrooms and one bathroom are foreseen. The angles between the pitched roof and floor are utilized for long rows of wardrobes. The images shown here are of the prefab reference model built in Tyresö, southeast of Stockholm.

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Client: Arkitekthus AB Prefab private house Tyresö, Sweden 2007 162 m²

The proportions of a barn. The upper room by the gable is retracted behind a narrow, concealed terrace.

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The name. The two visual axes that are the result of the parallel glazed openings form an imaginary plus sign.

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1 Entrance 2 Living room 3 Kitchen 4 Master bedroom 5 Bedroom

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60. Folded Roof House

In Sweden much of the market for new private houses is provided for by prefab house manufacturers. In their catalogues you can pick your house from a selection of styles and sizes to put on your lot. The advantage is that the price is more or less fixed and that the construction process is handled by the company. Unfortunately, these houses typically carry little or no architectural ambition. Folded Roof house is the second house by Claesson Koivisto Rune for Swedish prefab house manufacturer Arkitekthus. It is a onestorey house with an asymmetrically folded roof plane. The floor plan provides for separation between private bedrooms and a communal kitchen and living room. The bedrooms are positioned at the short ends of the house and the living room is in between, with an open main façade. The openings are fully glazed and inset into the house volume so that roof-covered terrace spaces serve as continuations of the interior. Another important visual feature is the framing of these insets by the thin wall and roof edges. This was possible because no insulation is needed in the sections located outside of the actual house. For the site on Muskö island, shown in the images here, all façades are clad in wooden boards treated with iron vitriol and the roof is clad with stainless steel sheeting.

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Client: Arkitekthus AB Prefab private house Muskö, Sweden 2008 140 m²

A closed façade to the street. The private bedrooms are positioned at the short ends of the house…

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...with the communal living room in between.

The folded roof plane allows rain water to drain without gutters or drain-pipes.

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61. Tind House

A kit house needs to be flexible in size and configuration to accommodate individual families’ needs and individual locations. So, in order to maintain the architectural integrity of these houses, the design places importance on some strong features rather than any particular dimensions. The first feature is the roof. The traditional Scandinavian single-family house has a single pitch roof. The Tind house’s roof starts with this typical Swedish pitch. But then the peak is cut off. The resulting roof becomes somewhat of a hybrid between a flat roof and a hip roof. The second feature is the window niches. Firstly, windows are few, but big, and allocated to the most important walls, rather than many, small and on every wall. Additionally, every opening, window or door, is flush with the interior. Furthermore, the thicknesses of the joists are disguised by beveling the niche. This allows the house to become a rhythmic composition of wall and void rather than a volume with punched holes. The third feature is alignment. The division between roof and walls is clear and sharp; like a waistline. The windows or doors on overlying floors have a one-sided alignment. Every line and every cut aligns with another, in a shifting of volumes and openings. The interior layout is generous in spatial flow. The entrance and staircase are at the core. Directly onward lies the communal living, dining and kitchen areas. A secondary side entranceway goes through a combined storage and utility room, for brushing off your shoes from a muddy walk in the forest. Bedrooms and bathrooms are either upstairs or downstairs and to the side end of the house. The general ambience is that of outdoor and indoor being connected. Three house configurations – single storey, one-and-a-half storey and two-and-a-half storey (souterrain) – form the basis from which client adaptation and variation can be made. The name chosen for the house was ‘Tind’. In Norwegian this is the word for ‘Mountain Peak’. A feature of the Scandinavian mountain range is the general lack of sharp, pointed peaks. This stems from the ice age, during which they were worn away by the passage of the retreating glacier. And Scandinavians find their mountains particularly beautiful because of this feature. In 2014  Tind earned  The International Architecture Award by The Chicago Athenaeum Museum of Architecture and Design.

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Client: Fiskarhedenvillan AB Kit house Sweden 2013 135 m²/181 m²/289 m²

The windows or doors on overlying floors have a one-sided alignment. Every line and every cut align with another, in a shifting of volumes and openings.

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62. Swedish Ambassador's Residence

63. One Happy Cloud

64. No Picnic

When Berlin was once again the capital of Germany foreign embassies had to move from the former capital of Bonn. The Swedish ambassador’s residence came to be located in a part of Berlin with many private houses of significant size. The residence is traditionally used for representational parties with personal invitation from the ambassador. Less formal than meetings at the embassy, but perhaps more important. Claesson Koivisto Rune was assigned to design the interior after winning an invited competition. The parameters set by the Foreign Office were: “An expectance for something new. A modern (but not trendy) design. A Swedish design.” A succession of three living rooms was established. Each with different character but open to each other on a strict axis. Adjacent to the living rooms are a small library and a grand dining room. All furniture in wood is in walnut, as a contrast to the notion of all Scandinavian furniture as blond. The soft colour scheme is matched from Swedish rock minerals, including an iron-ore red background wall in the dining room.

Light and simple interiors are an age-old Japanese tradition. Meditative qualities and spatial calmness expresses a Japanese sensibility. But this philosophy also aligns closely with Scandinavian tradition. The Japanese references are subtle. The restaurant was just as much Scandinavian or international. The simple palette being white, black, concrete, translucent glass and wood. The lack of ornamentation and detail meant that verticality and horizontality as such became the actual theme. A clear sense of order was established by means of two intersecting axes. One lies parallel to the street through the main space; the other runs perpendicular to the inner seating area. Reinforcing this order are two long fluorescent tube light armatures.

In a complete conversion of a 1930's industrial building, for the offices of an industrial design agency, the main feature was a centrally-placed new staircase strengthening the building's length-axis. The staircase narrows slightly as you walk up creating a forced perspective and the illusion that the stairs reach further and higher – from the lower level workshop, via the mid-level entrance and up to the upper level offices – than they actually do. The industrial design business as well as other creative businesses pose specific demands on the architecture. It should be an open creative work space and at the same time preserve the secrecy of projects in front of visitors. But the level of secrecy varies. The space has to be flexible: public-open, private-closed. The interior was therefore intentionally made somewhat labyrinthine. A relatively narrow entrance opens up to larger public areas – meeting rooms, library, kitchen, bathroom facilities etc. The public spaces in their turn open up to the very large studio space, which some visitors might never see.

Client: Swedish Foreign Office Ambassador's residence Berlin, Germany 1999 300 m²

Client: Masao Mochizuki Japanese restaurant Stockholm, Sweden 1997 150 m²

Client: No Picnic AB Industrial design agency Stockholm, Sweden 1997 450 m²

65. Liljevalchs Museum Shop

66. Sony Music Sweden

67. Kylie Minogue Music Video Set

Liljevalchs konsthall (art gallery) is a wellknown art institution in Stockholm. During an overall renovation of the entire building in 1997–98 one of the original exhibition halls was reopened as the new museum shop. The instructions were brief: “We need to display a collection of 10 posters, 180 small postcards and 42 large ones. We also need 9 metres of bookshelf and 1 counter. You may make changes to the newly renovated hall if necessary, but preferably not.” The surrounding neoclassical architecture is strong and any attempt to hide new additions by copying would have been vain. The new shop interior was therefore conceived as a freestanding volume – a cube – that left the hall untouched. A series of openings were made in the cube to allow for each of the functions of the shop, to admit natural light from the glass roof above and to make room for existing light fixtures. To link the new shop with the old building surrounding it, all measurements, correspond to the existing window heights, door widths etcetera. The material is standard birch plywood.

Moving into an entire old building, previously used as a city church, the key to the interior architecture lied in an articulated staircase. The plan was a hybrid between an open and a closed. The big open space (the former church nave) with its two mezzanines created the necessary conditions to build an intricate spatial composition working both horizontally and vertically. Two longitudinal staircases were suspended between the floors. When moving around the floors or descending/ascending the stairs the space is in constant change. Lines of vision open and close again. The existing old architecture was generally left untouched. The spatial composition is complex but the materials and detailing are very simple – to create a contrast to the inevitable chaos around workstations. The Sony Music Sweden office earned in 2000 the ‘Golden Chair’, the bi-annual award for the best interior, by the Swedish Association of Architects.

The director Johan Renck had been contracted by Sony Music to direct the video for the song ”Love at First Sight” by Australian pop superstar Kylie Minogue. Renck, in turn, asked Claesson Koivisto Rune to conceive a physical set design. The idea was a central, revolving circular stage. A camera was fixed on one edge and the popstar positioned on the opposite edge. In a sort of ‘inversion’ of the usual set up, the actual set was wrapped around the stage. Abstract architectural scenes were imagined, which would create different backgrounds as the camera and stage revolved around. The video could then be filmed in one single shot. The opening scene is a ‘stairway to heaven’ which the popstar descends, singing. The stairway appears unusually long because the walls angle out and the actual length of each step increases proportionally. It is a play of perspective possible because of the camera’s single eye. Every subsequent scene is a variation on this theme of forced perspective. When the set is seen in plan or as a model it is strange, spiky, angled. But in the eye of the camera, all lines fall into place as right-angled spaces.

Client: Liljevalchs Museum shop Stockholm, Sweden 1998 70 m²

Client: Sony Music Sweden AB Record company headquarters Stockholm, Sweden 1999 1500 m²

Client: Kylie Minogue/Johan Renck Music video set Pinewood Studios, UK 2002 900 m²

68. Inde/Jacobs Gallery

The high desert West Texas town of Marfa is famous for the artist Donald Judd who bought up many buildings and turned them into spaces for permanent installations of minimalist art. Since Judd’s passing in 1994, Marfa has transformed itself into a destination for abstract art. In Marfa, the soul of the landscape lies in its vastness, scale and relative lack of vegetation. Flat and open, almost like being on the open sea, the sky is always big and the horizon long. The lot is typical small-town American. Fairly deep and narrow, positioned between a main street and a back alley. The decision was made to orient the house perpendicular to the street. This way advantage could be taken of the full stretch of the lot to create a powerful perspective. The street front is actually the end of the house, making it less imposing. The entrance is on the long wall. The idea is the long sightlines. The internal planning is focused on maximum circulation flow. There are no dead ends. The building is actually two, the gallery and a private house, separated by a shared courtyard. By connecting the long façade walls, the two buildings are perceived as one long structure. Opposite is a long, freestanding wall to define the space alongside the house. By erecting the wall slightly off angle, a forced perspective was created, making the space seem longer when seen from the street. Also, to further stress the perspective, the long façade has a very slight drop towards the back alley. The one large gallery window and the one large house window change size proportionally. As do the doors. These “distortions” are very subtle; they border on the unnoticeable unless you’re watching out for them. The idea is the perspective. The gallery is one large space and at the same time a series of smaller spaces. A storage room and a counter-piece skylight punctuate the space. The three walls around the skylight do not touch the floor. The walls around the storage do not touch the ceiling. Defining different spaces for different exhibition needs, but at the same time leaving the spatiality free to flow. The two parts open to a secluded, inner courtyard. This place serves equally well as a garden to the private house or as a sculpture garden extension to the gallery. Two flanking windows in the gallery and one central in the residence extend the room perception to include the courtyard from both directions, but blocks the view between the two interior spaces.

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Client: Vilis Inde and Tom Jacobs Art gallery and residence Marfa, USA 2015 230 m²

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Donald Judd (1928–1994), 100 Untitled Works in Mill Aluminum, 1986.

The forced perspective. The garden wall is set at an off-angle and the long façade has a very slight drop towards the back alley. (The doors and windows change size proportionally.)

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The high desert location can produce extreme differences in temperature between night and day, calling for building material expansion management. The inevitable façade joints were elaborated into a vertically-angled ‘pattern’.

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69. Tomihiro Art Museum

Set in a spectacular landscape of lakes and forested hills, a museum was planned dedicated to the well-known local poet and watercolour artist Tomihiro Hoshino. An international architectural competition was announced, of which Claesson Koivisto Rune’s proposal was one out of 1211 entries. The proposed museum consisted of a series of ‘L’ -shapes. The first ‘L’ formed the major structural back-bone turned like a shelter against the mountain side, parking and road. This allowed the whole building to open up towards the view and the water in south-east. Through controlled landscaping the visitor is lead around and down to the entrance at the side of the building. The second ‘L’ divided the interior into two basic spaces – one for the exhibitions and one (more open) for library, café etc. The planning was strongly based on the idea of an organic flow where ‘L’ -shapes (and sometimes ‘U’s) of different sizes create a continuous three-dimensional chain of interlocking spaces; where one space leads in to the next. Closed space is always contrasted with open. Large scale is contrasted with small. Horizontal with vertical. The complex flow is directed so that the architecture unfolds towards the open, public spaces and ultimately the view. The maze of exposed concrete, complemented by raking light from skylights partially hidden behind hanging walls, would isolate the experience of art from distraction. Shortlisted as one of the 18 best entries.

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Art museum project Gunma, Japan 2001 3000 m²

Natural light from a skylight partially hidden behind hanging walls.

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A maze of concrete ‘L’-shapes (and sometimes ‘U’s) creates a continuous three-dimensional chain of interlocking spaces.

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70. Galleri Örsta

This gallery building is both a stand-alone placed in a field and part of a small ‘hamlet’ with the adjacent old farmhouses and the owners’ house, together representing three centuries of building tradition. Positioned on top of an artificial hill, as a buffer to the site’s moist soil, the base of the building follows the hill’s topology. The resulting series of curves at the building’s base, combined with mirroring curves in the rooflines, makes the planar façades seem curved – a bit like ‘cinemascope’ screens. The façades have been painted white and, while still wet, three tons of special reflective glass beads were applied. The glass bead treatment, developed and installed by artist Mikael Pauli, works in a similar way to the reflective component in zebra crossings. If viewed from the same angle as the incident light source, it glows as if lit from within. So, when driving by the building, it appears to flash brightly for a moment. This effect can also be recreated during night. If the building falls into the path of car headlights or, for instance, caught in the moonlight. The relatively narrow door and window openings, stretching from ground to roofline, make the building’s scale difficult to judge. Appearing smaller at a distance, yet up close it rises to a height of 6.7 metres. The positions of the doors and windows correlate to interior wall positions as well as windows on the opposite side of the building, creating sight lines from one side to the other. The elevated position of the gallery building raises the floor level to the same height as the tops of the surrounding crop growth. The interior is divided in to four differently-sized rooms connected with both central cross access and complete side circulation. The central walls are slightly off-angle, creating an ever-so-subtle distortion of the scale which can only be experienced while moving around.

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Client: Birgitta and Anders Fasth Art gallery Kumla, Sweden 2009 350 m²

Through a clearing, the gallery building is revealed. Both a stand-alone and an actual part of its small ‘hamlet’ behind.

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A total of three tons of tiny glass beads (sprayed onto the wet paint) turned the entire building reflective.

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The spatial distortion created by the slightly off-angled walls can only be experienced while moving around. The fire place (right) is an unusual feature in an art gallery, but is true to the local notion of any house being incomplete without.

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The different widths of the door/windows correlate to interior wall positions.

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Architectural Works Solo Exhibitions Awards Monographies Contributors Biography

Architectural Works 2020 Espina de Cruz, private house; Mataojo, Uruguay K5 Hotel; Tokyo, Japan Stålberg House, vacation house; Valdemarsö, Sweden Simonsson House, private house; Boden, Sweden Lilla Tornö House; Stockholm Archipelago, Sweden Eckerdal House, private house; Lomma, Sweden 2019 Grand Hotel Terminus; Bergen, Norway Portal Bar, restaurant; Stockholm, Sweden Villa S+E, by Todd Saunders, private house interior; Bergen, Norway NK Access, fashion shop; Gothenburg, Sweden Sophie by Sophie, jewellery shop, NK; Stockholm, Sweden NK Access, fashion shop; Stockholm, Sweden 2018 Strängnäs Cathedral Visitor Centre, project; Strängnäs, Sweden Wirum Restaurant, restaurant project; Mörtfors, Sweden 2017 Xiang Jiang House, private house interior; Beijing, China Hotel Zander K; Bergen, Norway Hotel Bergen Børs; Bergen, Norway Villa Terminus, hotel; Bergen, Norway 2016 Parquet Patterned Pool and Spa, private pool and spa Ceramika Showroom, ceramic tableware showroom and shop; Tokyo, Japan Bloomberg, office interior; Stockholm, Sweden Blueair, company headquarters, Stockholm, Sweden 2015 Inde/Jacobs Gallery, art gallery; Marfa, USA House of Many Courtyards, beach house Bluewater, company headquarters; Stockholm, Sweden 2014 Apartment with Brass Cube; Stockholm, Sweden 2013 Fagerström House, private house; Sollentuna, Sweden Tind, kit house; Fiskarhedenvillan, Sweden Ceramika Showroom, ceramic tableware showroom, shop and café; Matsumoto, Japan City Apartment; Stockholm, Sweden Ingólfstorg Kvosin, urban redevelopment project; Reykjavik, Iceland Office with Smart Glass Wall; Stockholm, Sweden Apartment Chardon; Stockholm, Sweden 2012 Hotel Solheimsviken, project; Bergen, Norway Blue, company headquarters; Stockholm, Sweden Offecct, furniture showroom; Stockholm, Sweden 2011 Villa Widlund, vacation house; Öland, Sweden Nobis Hotel; Stockholm, Sweden Landskrona Kulturhus, culture house project; Landskrona, Sweden Våler Kirke, church project; Våler, Norway Vinge, law firm office; Stockholm, Sweden San Gregorio Palace, cultural centre project with Luca Nichetto; Venice, Italy Audi Center, car showroom project; Smista, Sweden

2010 Galleri Örsta, art gallery; Kumla, Sweden Sfera Milan, showroom, shop and gallery; Milan, Italy NK Access, fashion shop; Stockholm, Sweden 2009 Kista Nod, mixed use building complex project with Nyréns; Kista, Sweden Alberto Biani Shop, fashion shop; Rome, Italy Täby Centrum, mixed use building complex project; Täby, Sweden Apartment for an Art Dealer; Stockholm, Sweden Offecct, showroom and shop; Stockholm, Sweden Visby Börsen 2, walkway bridge project; Visby, Sweden 2008 Stiller Studios, film studio building; Lidingö, Sweden Folded Roof House, prefab house; Sweden M’s House, vacation house Eriksvik house, semi-detached private house; Eriksvik, Sweden Alberto Biani Shop, fashion shop; Paris, France Gun Gallery, photographic art gallery; Stockholm, Sweden Ängelholm Public Baths, project; Ängelholm, Sweden Fraser Place Howff Shinjuku, hotel lobby and lounge; Tokyo, Japan X-Site, recreational building project; Venice, Italy Abiko Apartment Complex, urban development project; Tokyo, Japan 2007 Sfera Tokyo, showroom and shop; Tokyo, Japan Nasdaq OMX, stock exchange business suite; Stockholm, Sweden Plus House, prefab house; Sweden Hillside House, private house project; Mataojo, Uruguay Oaxen House, vacation house project; Stockholm Archipelago, Sweden Claesson Koivisto Rune, architecture studio; Stockholm, Sweden Norrporten, property owner’s headquarters; Sundsvall, Sweden Englund House, private house project; Hjo, Sweden Villa Strömsten, vacation house project; Åre, Sweden 2006 Tom’s Tower, townhouse project; London, UK High School Campus, project; Sickla, Sweden Balance, gym; Stockholm, Sweden Private Apartment with Spa; Stockholm, Sweden Solidaritet, nightclub; Stockholm, Sweden Swedese, shop and showroom; Stockholm, Sweden Åke E:son Lindman Studio, photographer’s studio, Stockholm, Sweden Gåshaga Houses, housing development project, Lidingö, Sweden Lännbohöjden, apartment building project; Fisksätra, Sweden Folkets Hus, conference hall; Östersund, Sweden Arcadia Hotel, project; Stockholm, Sweden 2005 Operakällaren, restaurant; Stockholm, Sweden Boisbuchet Sauna, project; Lessac, France Offecct, factory, showroom and office; Tibro, Sweden Shuffle House, prefab house project; Finland Urwitz Garden Pavillion, project; Lidingö, Sweden Talk Hotel, project; Älvsjö, Sweden 2004 Louis Vuitton, fashion shop; Stockholm, Sweden Piggvaren 2, hotel; Visby, Sweden 2003 Sfera Building, culture house; Kyoto, Japan No. 5 House, private house; Nacka, Sweden

Kråkmora Holmar House, vacation house; Stockholm Archipelago, Sweden Werner house, vacation house, Gotland, Sweden Dwell Home, prefab house project; Chapel Hill, USA Lund Cathedral Visitor Centre, project; Lund, Sweden Öja House, vacation house project; Gotland, Sweden Arcadia, hotel project; Stockholm, Sweden 2002 Ingegerd Råman Studio, ceramicist’s studio; Baldringe, Sweden Kylie Minogue, Love at First Sight, music video set; London, UK Asplund, furniture showroom; Stockholm, Sweden Hotel Birger Jarl, bespoke guest rooms project; Stockholm, Sweden 2001 Tomihiro Art Museum, project; Gunma, Japan SAS Euroshop, airport stores; Scandinavia QBKL, private house project; Malmö, Sweden Stern House, private house project, Vikbolandet, Sweden Hotel Diplomat, project; Stockholm, Sweden 2000 Audumbla, media agency; Stockholm, Sweden Garbergs, advertising agency; Stockholm, Sweden Louis Vuitton, fashion store; Stockholm, Sweden Ingegerd Råman House, private house; Baldringe, Sweden Stockholm University Entrance Building, project; Stockholm, Sweden Apartment with Sauna; Stockholm, Sweden TKTS, ticket kiosk project; New York, USA Malia Mills, fashion shop project; Miami Beach, USA Polfeldt House, private house interior, Hjärup, Sweden 1999 Swedish Ambassador’s Residence, interior; Berlin, Germany A Long House, vacation house project; Gotland, Sweden Sony Music, record company headquarters; Stockholm, Sweden Kjell A Nordström Townhouse; Stockholm, Sweden Wallinder Apartment; Stockholm, Sweden 1998 Liljevalchs, museum shop; Stockholm, Sweden Gucci, fashion store; Stockholm, Sweden House for a Textile Designer, exhibition house interior; Nybodahöjden, Sweden McDonald’s, flagship restaurant; Stockholm, Sweden Engquist Apartment; Stockholm, Sweden 1997 Lindé House, private house project; Tyresö, Sweden Nordic Watercolour Museum, project with Love Arbén; Tjörn, Sweden No Picnic, industrial design studio; Stockholm, Sweden One Happy Cloud, restaurant; Stockholm, Sweden Centre for Advanced Studies in Leadership, Stockholm School of Economics; Stockholm, Sweden JC, fashion stores with Jonas Bohlin; Sweden Scandinavia Online, office; Stockholm, Sweden Dunkers Kulturhus, project with Love Arbén; Helsingborg, Sweden Claesson Koivisto Rune, architecture studio; Stockholm, Sweden Geelmuyden Kiese, office; Stockholm, Sweden F.R.I., advertising agency; Stockholm, Sweden 1996 AssiDomän AB, corporate headquarters; Stockholm, Sweden AssiDomän KPS Österreich GmbH, showroom; Vienna, Austria Lennáard Apartment; Stockholm, Sweden

Alm & Co, advertising agency with Love Arbén; Stockholm, Sweden Hera, advertising agency project; Uppsala, Sweden Fredsgatan 12, restaurant project; Stockholm, Sweden 1995 A3, advertising agency; Stockholm, Sweden AssiDomän KPS Ltd., showroom; London, UK AssiDomän KPS A/S, showroom; Copenhagen, Denmark AssiDomän Dynäs, paper mill office, Kramfors, Sweden 1994 Villa Wabi, experimental urban villa; Stockholm, Sweden AssiDomän Iberica S.A., showroom; Barcelona, Spain Restaurant Scen; Stockholm, Sweden Lagerkvist & Partners; office, Stockholm, Sweden 1993 Restaurant Salt; Stockholm, Sweden Kabi/Pharmacia, medical company lobby; Solna, Sweden 1992 Riviera, cinema with Helena von Dewall and Thomas Johnson; Stockholm, Sweden Solo Exhibitions 2019 Faciem, Galleri Fagerstedt; Stockholm, Sweden House Art View, Konst-ig; Stockholm, Sweden 2018 House Art View, Time & Style Midtown; Tokyo, Japan Faciem, Inde/Jacobs Gallery; Marfa, USA Faciem, Sfera Exhibition; Kyoto, Japan Stitches and Embroidery, Marrakech at A.W. Bauer & Co; Stockholm, Sweden Elements by Claesson Koivisto Rune, Widala at Älvsjömässan; Stockholm, Sweden 2017 Faciem, Gallery 360°; Tokyo, Japan @10yfeatclaessonkoivistorune, Arflex at Domo Milano Interior; Milan, Italy Claesson Koivisto Rune Collection, Dux at Nobis Hotel; Stockholm, Sweden 2016 Bruno Mathsson Award 2015, Rian Designmuseum; Falkenberg, Sweden A Sense of Place, Ogeborg at Nitty Gritty; Stockholm, Sweden Claesson Koivisto Rune in Marfa, the Inde/Jacobs Gallery, Summit at Älvsjömässan; Stockholm, Sweden 2015 Bruno Mathsson Award 2015, Form Design Center; Malmö, Sweden Bruno Mathsson Award 2015, Vandalorum; Värnamo, Sweden Claesson Koivisto Rune in Marfa, the Inde/Jacobs Gallery, Javits Center; New York, USA Offecct + Claesson Koivisto Rune 15 years, Offecct Showroom; Stockholm, Sweden 2014 Claesson Koivisto Rune, Engblad & Co at Superstudio Più; Milan, Italy Claesson Koivisto Rune, Engblad & Co at Designjunction; London, UK

2013 Made in Mimbre, The Andes House at Designjunction; London, UK Tind. A Prefab House Design by Claesson Koivisto Rune, Globo; Milan, Italy Ceremony, Mjölk; Toronto, Canada 2012 Claesson Koivisto Rune for Marrakech Design, Crystal Gallery; Stockholm, Sweden Sense, Blueair at Luminaire; Chicago, USA 2011 On Yellow, Skandium; London, UK Kin Urushi, Sfera Tokyo; Tokyo, Japan Folded Leaf, Superstudio Più; Milan, Italy Vindobona, Åmells; Stockholm, Sweden Anemone, Galerie Pascale; Stockholm, Sweden 2010 Claesson Koivisto Rune Illuminated by Wästberg, ArkDes; Stockholm, Sweden Claesson Koivisto Rune Designs for Sfera, Sfera Milan; Milan, Italy Claesson Koivisto Rune Smaller Objects, Sfera Tokyo; Tokyo, Japan Vindobona, Lichtenstein Museum; Vienna, Austria Claesson Koivisto Rune Smaller Objects, Hotel Skeppsholmen; Stockholm, Sweden 2009 Claesson Koivisto Rune Illuminated by Wästberg, Claska; Tokyo, Japan Claesson Koivisto Rune Illuminated by Wästberg, Designeast 00; Osaka, Japan Claesson Koivisto Rune Illuminated by Wästberg, Design Within Reach; New York, USA Claesson Koivisto Rune Selected Works, Myran; Athens, Greece Parupu the Paper Pulp Chair, Superstudio Più; Milan, Italy Tokyo Takushi, Designgalleriet, Stockholm, Sweden Stadsmissionen by Claesson Koivisto Rune, Designgalleriet; Stockholm, Sweden

2001 Angles Suédois/Claesson Koivisto Rune, Château de Bourlingster; Luxemburg Angles Suédois/Claesson Koivisto Rune, Melina Mercouri Cultural Center; Athens, Greece Angles Suédois/Claesson Koivisto Rune, Galerie Sainte Reparate; Nice, France Angles Suédois/Claesson Koivisto Rune, Musée des Beaux Arts; Caen, France 2000 Angles Suédois/Claesson Koivisto Rune, Centre Culturel Suédois; Paris, France Angles Suédois/Claesson Koivisto Rune, Biennale du Design; Saint-Etienne, France 1999 Mårten Claesson Eero Koivisto Ola Rune, Formbar; Stockholm, Sweden 1998 House for a Textile Designer, Nybodahöjden; Stockholm, Sweden 1994 Villa Wabi, Sergels Torg; Stockholm, Sweden Möbler, Galleri 1; Stockholm, Sweden 1993 Möbler, Galleri 1, Stockholm, Sweden Awards 2019 Best of Year Award, Interior Design Magazine; USA Pop Restaurant & Bar Design Award, Shortlist; UK

2008 La Création d’Eve, Galerie Pascale; Stockholm, Sweden

2018 Bo Bedre Design of the Year; Denmark Architect’s We’d Hire, Monocle Travel Top 50; UK Best of Year Finalist, Interior Design Magazine; USA German Design Award; Germany Elle Decoration Swedish Design Award; Sweden

2006 Rand, Asplund; Stockholm, Sweden

2017 Wallpaper Design Award; UK

2005 Claesson Koivisto Rune The Models, ArkDes; Stockholm, Sweden Claesson Koivisto Rune The Models, Röhsska Museum of Design and Craft; Gothenburg, Sweden The Luna Project, Dune at Ace Gallery; New York, USA Blue Hotel, Replus + Offecct; Tokyo, Japan Sfera Furniture, Sfera at 100% Design; Tokyo, Japan

2016 Good Design Award, (two awards); USA Red Dot Award; Germany German Design Award, Special Mention; Germany

2004 Brush rush, Claesson Koivisto Rune; Stockholm, Sweden 2003 Nine Houses, Sfera Exhibition; Kyoto, Japan Nine Houses, Time & Style House Storage; Tokyo, Japan Claesson Koivisto Rune + Franc franc, 100% Design; Tokyo, Japan 2002 Family Tree Claesson Koivisto Rune, Axis Gallery; Tokyo, Japan Mårten Claesson Eero Koivisto Ola Rune Furniture, Totem; New York, USA

2015 Bruno Mathsson Award, Karin and Bruno Mathsson’s Fund; Sweden Elle Deco Japan Edition International Design Award; Japan German Design Award, Special Mention (two awards); Germany Wallpaper Design Award; UK Good Design Award; USA Red Dot Award; Germany Trip Advisor Hall of Fame Award; USA Trip Advisor’s Traveler’s Choice Award; USA 2014 Designer of the Year, Elle Décor Italia; Italy Seating of the Year, Elle Décor Italia; Italy The International Architecture Award, The Chicago Athenaeum Museum of Architecture and Design; USA Red Dot Award Best of the Best; Germany

German Design Award, Special Mention; Germany Red Dot Award; Germany Design S, Swedish Design Award, Honorable Mention Architecture; Sweden Residence Stora Formpris; Sweden 2013 Red Dot Award Best of the Best; Germany IF Design Award; Germany Green Good Design Award; USA Elle Decoration Swedish Design Award; Sweden EDIDA, Elle Decoration International Design Award Good Design Award, (two awards); USA ICFF Editors Award; USA Design S, Swedish Design Award, Nominee; Sweden 2012 AZ Awards, Azure Magazine; Canada Svensk Betongs Arkitekturpris, Nominee; Sweden Design S, Swedish Design Award, Nominee (two awards); Sweden Good Design Award; USA Good Design Award; Japan Elle Decoration Swedish Design Award, Furniture of the Year; Sweden Residence Stora Formpris; Sweden 2011 Designer of the Year, Elle Décor Italia; Italy Designer of the Year, Elle Decoration; Sweden Wallpaper 150, Famous for 15 Years; UK German Design Award, Gold; Germany The 12 Best Products of the Year, Fast Company; USA Traveler´s Hot List, Condé Nast; USA The IT List, Travel + Leisure; USA Wallpaper’s Best Business Hotel, Shortlist; UK The Gulddraken Award, Reviver of the Year, Dagens Nyheter; Sweden Bar of the Year, White Guide; Sweden 2010 German Design Award, Nominee; Germany Wallpaper Design Award; UK Kumla City Council Building Award; Sweden Children’s Furniture of the Year, Family Living; Sweden Design S, Swedish Design Award; Sweden Design S, Swedish Design Award, Nominee; Sweden 2009 Red Dot Award, Honorable Mention; Germany Pulp and Paper International Award, Research Achievement of the Year; Germany

Residence Stora Formpris, (two awards); Sweden +1, Best Interior Object, Forum; Sweden 2004 Green Dot Award, Honorable Mention; Germany Premio Catas, Catas; Italy 2003 Silver Diploma, Forum; Sweden 2002 Utmärkt Svensk Form, Excellent Swedish Design Award; Sweden +1, Best Interior Object, Forum; Sweden 2000 Guldstolen, Best Interior; Architects Sweden; Sweden The Future of Wood in our Homes, Jury’s Special Award, Bo 01; Sweden Utmärkt Svensk Form, Excellent Swedish Design Award, (two awards); Sweden 1999 Utmärkt Svensk Form, Excellent Swedish Design Award; Sweden 1998 Utmärkt Svensk Form, Excellent Swedish Design Award; Sweden Formex Grand Prix, Best Stand All Categories; Sweden Ung Svensk Form, Young Swedish Design Award; Sweden 1996 Guldstolen, Best Interior, Honorary Mention, Architects Sweden; Sweden Utmärkt Svensk Form, Excellent Swedish Design Award, (two awards); Sweden 1995 Forsnäspriset, Möbelinstitutet; Sweden Utmärkt Svensk Form, Excellent Swedish Design Award; Sweden Utmärkt Svensk Form, Excellent Swedish Design Award, Honorary Mention; Sweden 1994 Interieur 94/Design for Europe, First Prize; Belgium Forsnäspriset, Möbelinstitutet; Sweden Utmärkt Svensk Form, Excellent Swedish Design Award; Sweden 1993 International Furniture Design Competition, Selected; Japan Utmärkt Svensk Form, Excellent Swedish Design Award; Sweden

2008 Design S, Swedish Design Award; Sweden

1992 HSB Apartment Design Competition, First Prize, Bo 92; Sweden

2007 Designer of the Year, Konstvärlden & Desajn; Sweden Formex Formidable Award; Sweden

Monographies

2006 Lund Cathedral Visitor Centre Competition, Joint Second Prize; Sweden Environment of the Year, White Guide; Sweden Residence Stora Formpris; Sweden Elle Decoration Swedish Design Award; Sweden 2005 Designer of the Year, Residence; Sweden

2019 Grand Hotel Terminus – A Truly Unique Hotel In Bergen. Architects: Claesson Koivisto Rune, Max Fraser, Lars Forsberg; De Bergenske, Bergen Portal Bar Claesson Koivisto Rune, Jesper Waldersten, Claes Britton, Klas Lindberg; Stockholm 2018 House Art View Villa Widlund by Claesson Koivisto Rune, Jan Widlund; Tokyo

2017 Hotel Bergen Børs – A Truly Unique Hotel In Bergen. Architects: Claesson Koivisto Rune, Max Fraser, Lars Forsberg; De Bergenske, Bergen Hotel Zander K – A Truly Unique Hotel In Bergen. Architects: Claesson Koivisto Rune, Max Fraser, Lars Forsberg; De Bergenske, Bergen Villa Terminus – A Truly Unique Hotel In Bergen. Architects: Claesson Koivisto Rune, Max Fraser, Lars Forsberg; De Bergenske, Bergen Claesson Koivisto Rune Faciem, Gallery 360; Tokyo 2015 Bruno Mathsson Award 2015 Claesson Koivisto Rune, Hedvig Hedqvist; Vandalorum, Värnamo Claesson Koivisto Rune In Marfa The Inde/Jacobs Gallery, Daniel Golling; Summit, Stockholm 2013 Claesson Koivisto Rune + Mjölk Ceremony, John and Juli Baker; Mjölk, Toronto 2011 Claesson Koivisto Rune On Yellow, Max Fraser, Magnus Englund, Skandium, London Nobis Hotel, Architecture and Design, Claes Britton; Stockholm Folded Leaf/Claesson Koivisto Rune, Max Fraser; Huawei, Stockholm 2010 Gallery Örsta, Mark Isitt, Håkan Nesser; Galleri Örsta, Kumla Claesson Koivisto Rune Smaller Objects, Claes Britton; Gabor Palotai Publisher, Stockholm 2009 Claesson Koivisto Rune Illuminated By Wästberg, Mikael Bergquist; Wästberg, Helsingborg Parupu The Paper Pulp Chair; Södra Book Publishing Company, Växjö 2007 Architecture/Design Claesson Koivisto Rune, Paola Antonelli, Mark Isitt; Birkhäuser Verlag AG, Basel 2005 Claesson Koivisto Rune The Models, Peder Alton; Röhsska Museum Of Design and Craft, Gothenburg 2003 Nine Houses Claesson Koivisto Rune, Waro Kishi, Italo Lupi, Rasmus Waern, Vicente Diez Faixat; Sfera Publishing, Kyoto 2002 Mårten Claesson Eero Koivisto Ola Rune Furniture, Giulio Cappellini, Mark Isitt, James Irvine, David Shearer; Markus Moström Design, Stockholm 2001 Claesson Koivisto Rune, Terence Riley, Alberto Campo Baeza, Piero Lissoni; Editorial Gustavo Gili, Barcelona 1994 Wabi Mårten Claesson Eero Koivisto Ola Rune, Mårten Claesson Eero Koivisto Ola Rune; Konstfack, Stockholm

Contributors Kieran Long is Director of ArkDes, the Swedish National Museum of Architecture and Design. He was previously Keeper of the Design, Architecture and Digital Department at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, and before that led the curatorial team for David Chipperfield at the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale. He has an international reputation as a writer, critic, broadcaster, teacher and curator. Zoë Ryan is the John H. Bryan Chair and Curator of Architecture and Design at the Art Institute of Chicago. A curator and author, her projects focus on exploring the impact of architecture and design on society. Ryan has taught graduate seminars on design history and theory at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is a member of the Design Trust International Advisory Council, Hong Kong. Åke E:son Lindman is a graduate of the University College of Arts, Crafts and Design (Konstfack) in Stockholm in 1975. E:son Lindman has since the mid 1980’s been the most sought after and renowned architectural photographer in Sweden. His work has been featured in international publications such as Wallpaper, Monocle, Architectural Digest, Mark, Frame and Interior Design. A monograph on E:son Lindman, Pure Architecture, was published by Arena in 2010. He has been the main photographer of 50+ books, among them a book about the United Nations building in New York, published in 2015.

Biography

Former staff (since 1995)

Claesson Koivisto Rune Architects is a Swedish architectural partnership, founded in Stockholm in 1995, by Mårten Claesson, Eero Koivisto and Ola Rune. Begun as an architectural firm, it has since become an internationally-acclaimed, multi-disciplinary office with an equal emphasis on both architecture and design. Claesson Koivisto Rune was the first Swedish office to have exhibited in the international section at the Venice Architecture Biennale, in 2004. The office has received an array of awards and recognitions, amongst them the German Design Award (Gold and Silver) 2011 by the Federal Republic of Germany, Designer of the Year 2010 by Elle Décor Italia, Designer of the Year 2011 and Furniture of the Year 2012 by Elle Deco Sweden, both Designer of the Year and Best Seating 2014 by Elle Décor Italia, and the Red Dot Design Award – Best of the Best 2013 and 2014, making it the first office to hold the prestigious Red Dot in five different product design categories, architecture included. Designs by Claesson Koivisto Rune are held in the permanent collections of Art Institute of Chicago, USA, Indianapolis Museum of Art, USA and Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, Sweden. This book focuses on the architecture of Claesson Koivisto Rune.

Britta Ader, Rita Alton, Henrik Andersson, Johan Ansander, Eva-Lotta Axelsson, Louise Bahrton, Sofia Bjurman, Hanna-Thea Björö, Alexis Blanchard, Wojciech Błaszczyk, Anna Maria Boddin, Bojan Boric, Christiane Bosse, Louise Brandt-Löwenstierna, Wibke Braunlich, Brady Burroughs, Hedvig Carlin, Alan Clarke, Ida Draiby, Anja Egebakken, Åsa Ekwall, Nina Elfving, Kristina Engelmayr, Farnaz Fazeli, Flóra Farkas, Fredrika Feldt, Joel Fjällström, Fredrik Forsman, Linnea Frej, Anna Graglia, Tom Grieves, Andrea Gross, Sara Gutarra-Stjernen, Sandrine Haeberli, Charlotta Hellichius, Olivia Herms, Motoko Hirose, Hampus Incitis, Maria Isaksson, Geertje Jacob, Mateˇj Janský, Linda Johansson, Sascha Jung, Seung Jun, Jacob Kalinowski, Ines Kapplinghaus, Elisabeth Keil, Nao Kimura, Yvonne Kirchner, Axel Kårfors, Kia Larsdotter, Clément Le Maou, Clara Lindencrona, Stina Moraeus, Agneta Mallenberg, Mathilde Mellini, Jaime Montes, Julia Müller, Lisa Munerato, Ulrika Mårtensson, Kumi Nakagaki, Andres Nilsson, Palle Nilstein, Pia Nixholm, Joakim Nygren, Rasmus Palmgren, Pere Parera, Johan Ridderstråle, Agustín Sebastian Rivera, Stephanie Sacher, Sofie Schelin Kärras, Sévérine Schrumpf, Marleen Schönfelder, Johan Sjöstedt, Julia Sthillert, Daniel Sturaeus, Carmen Sturm, Mattias Ståhlbom, Lars Svensson, Nils Thamm, Lotti Viking, Nicole Vollstädt, Corinna Voss, Otto Wagner, Eeva Ines Wartiainen, Natalie Waters, Catherina Wegener, Jan Nicolas Woitzel, Hanna Åkerström

Claesson Koivisto Rune (2020) Mårten Claesson, Eero Koivisto, Ola Rune, Deta Koivisto Gemzell, Patrick Coan, Oliver Cap, Tove Miliccia, Linda Jonsson, Jakob Fältskog, Katarina Horn Jardemark

Texts: Kieran Long, Zoë Ryan, Claesson Koivisto Rune Editor: Alexander Felix (Birkhäuser) Photography: Åke E:son Lindman Additional photography: Claesson Koivisto Rune p. 16, 36–39, 46, 50, 56, 59, 78–79, 82, 84–85, 92, 112–113, 115–119, 124–125, 128, 129, 137, 141, 150, 173 (Ch. 25, 26, 27), 194–195, 234, 238, 256–257, 276, 278, 281, 282, 283, 298, 308, 320–321, 336, 381, 383, 386, 396; Louise Billgert p. 102 (Ch. 11), 103 (Ch. 13), 172 (Ch.24), 214; Patrik Engquist p. 172 (Ch. 22), 246–247, 280, 350 (Ch. 63, 64), 351 (Ch. 65); Johan Eriksson p. 140,142–145; Johan Fowelin p. 57, 67; Katarina Gossow p. 350 (Ch. 62); Anthony Hill p. 388–389; Historic archive image p. 189 (Ch. 33); Patrik Lindell p. 384–385; Lindman Photography p. 152, 280, 296–297, 300–302, 338; Nacasa & Partners p. 54–55, 61, 103 (Ch. 15); Greger Ulf Nilson p. 102 (Ch. 12); Rasmus Norlander p. 97–99; Nyréns p. 172 (Ch. 23); Takumi Ota p. 103 (Ch. 14); Gösta Reiland p. 351 (Ch. 67); Anja Ullberg p. 170–171 Renderings: Claesson Koivisto Rune p. 80–81, 88–89, 90, 102 (Ch. 10), 157, 158–159, 266–267, 281, 307, 309, 310, 312, 363; Peter Guthrie p. 342–343, 344–345; Tobias Ter Laag p. 45, 48, 51, 70–71, 132–133, 149, 151, 260–261, 192–193, 196–197, 248–249, 250, 254–255, 266–267, 280, 317, 318, 322, 371–373, 375 Scale drawings: Flóra Farkas and Jacob Kalinowski Production: Henrik Nygren Design Printing: TMG Sthlm, 2020 Library of Congress Control Number: 2019957238 Bibliographic information published by the German National Library. The German National Library lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, re-use of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in other ways, and storage in databases. For any kind of use, permission of the copyright owner must be obtained. ISBN 978-3-0356-1894-5 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-0356-1909-6 © 2020 Birkhäuser Verlag GmbH, Basel P.O. Box 44, 4009 Basel, Switzerland Part of Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston 987654321 www.birkhauser.com