Gert Wingårdh: Thirty Years of Architecture 9783034610582

Table of contents :
Preface
Some introductory words about Gert Wingardh
2000-2007 Sensualism articulate
Projects:
Hyllie Centre
SMOT
The Karolinska Institute Auditorium
Citadellbadet
Kallis
Glaskasten
Housing at Arabia Beach
Ease
Müritzeum
House of Sweden
VillAnn
K:fem
Björntand
Sign
Villa Astrid
Dalsland Lodge
Aranäs Upper Secondary School
Culture house
Polarportal
Mimers House
Mölndalsbro
An architectural chameleon
1990-1999 “Fight”
Projects:
Sergels Tower
Kajplats 01
Universeum
House at Amundön
Ericsson St James
The Mill House
Auditorium and Student Union at Chalmers
Scandinavian TWR
Sweden’s embassy in Berlin
Victoria Olympia Stadium
Arlanda TWR
Ale Upper Secondary School and Culture Centre
A flaneur, but a romantic withal
1980-1989 Success and maturity
Projects:
Villa Nilsson
AstraZeneca
Scandic Crown Hotel
Öijared Country Club
Laura Ashley
Vasa Museum
Yoko Yap
Peking
The experience
1970-1979 Becoming an architect
Projects:
Marmite
Villa Nordh
Leonis
Villa Hansson
A time of change
List of works
CV, Awards, Exhibitions, Selected bibliograpy
Collaborators,

Citation preview

Gert Wingårdh Thirty years of architecture through four decades Edited by Mikael Nanfeldt Birkhäuser Basel · Boston · Berlin

Preface

The Röhsska Museum takes great pleasure in being able, for the winter 2008, to present a retrospective exhibition showing parts of Gert Wingårdh’s copious repertoire. Wingårdh the architect is in many ways associated with the city of Gothenburg, and his distinctive vocabulary has added exciting landmarks to our cityscape. The Wingårdh practice has been working in its innovative idiom for 30 years, and from his base in Gothenburg Wingårdh has come to dominate the architectural scene in all Sweden. Over the years his practice has also achieved great international successes and garnered several distinctions. Wingårdh’s architectural idiom is a blend of intentional influences and local traditions, always with a special feeling for the genius loci. Starting with private houses and interiors, Wingårdh has come to work very successfully in public environments, creating buildings which impart character and feeling to whole districts. His inventiveness and technical solutions bear witness to an awareness and modernity which are also reflected by his vocabulary and a unique sense of the special qualities and conditions of every location. Through his choice of materials and positioning, Wingårdh employs natural elements to heighten the expressive impact of his work. Through this exhibition, the Röhsska Museum wishes to highlight the architect who, through several key buildings, has contributed more than most to a renewal of Swedish architecture. The aim is to give a thorough presentation of a unique architect and his activity. To demonstrate the breadth and diversity of Wingårdh’s architecture, the exhibition features more than a hundred different projects. The Röhsska Museum is both honoured and excited to have been tasked with depicting the journey which Gert Wingårdh’s practice has made from the 1970s down to the present day. It is highly gratifying to see how the personal and unique mode of expression has been refined and developed with the passing years. Wingårdh’s architecture oscillates between the great monumental composition and the delicate small details which elevate the experience of it to a new level. I am delighted that the Röhsska Museum in Gothenburg should be the chosen setting for this presentation of Wingårdh’s 30-year exposé.

Ted Hesselbom Museum Director, The Röhsska Museum of Design, Fashion and Decorative Arts

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Some introductory words about Gert Wingårdh Mikael Nanfeldt Curator, The Röhsska Museum of Design, Fashion and Decorative Arts

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It is now 30 years since Gert Wingårdh started his own architectural practice. The journey that began unassumingly in 1977 can in hindsight certainly be described as exceptional. Today Gert Wingårdh can look back over one of the most successful architectural careers ever in Sweden. A number of major, prestigious projects adorn his cv: AstraZeneca, the Swedish embassies in Berlin and Washington, offices and constructions for the major companies and institutions in Sweden. A quick glance at the office’s list of projects shows its impressive extent and variety. Today no project is either too large or too complicated for Wingårdhs. Everything is possible and he has an almost tangible desire to be drawing all the time. Gert Wingårdh was born in 1951 in Skövde, about 180 kilometres from Gothenburg. He comes from a solid background; his father was production manager for a cement factory founded by his grandfather. When he was ten, his father sold his share of the factory and the family moved to Gothenburg. This turned out to be a great change for the young boy. He says himself that he did not have an easy time initially in the new city. He couldn’t adapt and felt himself an “outsider”. Today one would say that he was bullied. Does an experience like that affect one’s adult life? The simple answer is yes, naturally. In response to a question in a tv interview about whether it is possible to stop bullying in school through the way one builds, he answered in the affirmative. Would the answer have been as decisive and unequivocal without personal experience? I don’t think so. After a negative experience such as this, one can naturally search for different ways to interpret the choices Wingårdh made later in life; why he chooses to work under his own name without partners and why some of his buildings are designed as they are. For example, in spite of the office employing 124 people, he authorises all the invoices personally. Why? It seems that absolute control over his own business is of paramount importance. It is obviously not so simple to try and interpret the relationship between his architecture and his childhood memories. Here one immediately enters unfamiliar territory. The answers do not appear as simple interpretable signs, but must be based on probable solutions. What it is possible to say is that, to a great degree, the memories we amass during our lives influence the way we act and the choices we make. And it is possible that we are influenced by our childhood memories more than anything else, even though we may not understand why. The Swiss architect Peter Zumthor begins his book Thinking Architecture by describing

a childhood memory. He writes about how, as a child, he experienced his aunt’s kitchen as an exciting, almost exotic world. As an adult, and with years of experience as an architect behind him, he turns his aunt’s kitchen into the archetypal kitchen. He particularly remembers the door handle into this world and how it felt to grasp it. Childhood memories are so strongly imbedded in him that they form a reference point for all the other door handles he has designed later in life. Zumthor is aware of the relationship existing between memory and action and that it is impossible to totally liberate oneself from one’s own history. For me, as an observer, the question of how these well-hidden memories are reflected in his architecture is naturally open to a number of different interpretations. Similar conditions apply when grappling with Gert Wingårdh’s buildings and, if venturing into a psychoanalytically inspired interpretation, you can imagine that the schools he has designed have been stamped by his own experiences. Recollections of the insecurity and the sense of alienation he felt as a child possibly acted as a sounding board against which problems have sought solutions. It is obvious that he has chosen designs that eliminate areas that cannot be overlooked. Instead, he has chosen to create open spaces where everyone sees what is going on. Not necessarily to make it possible to survey everything but in order to bring about visual proximity. But it is not only in the schools Gert Wingårdh has designed that you notice his interest in facilitating encounters and closeness. In the long connecting corridor at AstraZeneca he consciously aims to stimulate informal contacts. Sometimes you are “forced” to greet those you meet as this corridor becomes extremely narrow, but then it broadens out more into the shape of a room where you can stop to talk. Naturally such interpretations can lead the focus far from the building itself, but it cannot be denied that it is interesting, exciting and often relevant to find possible solutions within the architect’s own person. The routes to an interpretation can, and sometimes should, be many. In his book Natural History (published in connection with the exhibition Herzog & de Meuron: Archeology of the Mind) Philip Ursprung writes:

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The attempt to understand the phenomenon of Herzog & de Meuron virtually compels interpreters to enter new territory. There is a temptation to pour over their biographies like an archeologist, searching the topography and the history of their native city of Basel. (p.15)

Ursprung emphasises that the will to understand a phenomenon entices interpreters to enter new territory. A new way of viewing things can bring about a new understanding. Simultaneously he highlights the danger of drawing obvious conclusions. In the book, as an example, he presents a video in which Jacques Herzog wanders around among working-class housing built in the 1950s when Herzog was a child himself. The façades of the houses are very similar to the façades of a building his firm designed for an art collector in the mid-eighties. Ursprung concludes his argument by writing: But there is no proof that this link is intended or that it has anything to do with social mobility or repressed memories. In other words there is no definitive way of knowing. Gert Wingårdh is without any doubt a similar phenomenon who, just like Herzog & de Meuron, evades the definitive answer. Therein lies the challenge, and probably also the main reason as to why there are so many points of view regarding him as a person and his architecture, too. In the catalogue to the exhibition Aspekter (Aspects) Gert Wingårdh writes in an article about his childhood in Skövde under the heading Lövverk (Foliage), and the following line appears in the text: “Every summer rest after play with head turned upwards towards the foliage, towards the light.” The sentence is simple, and simultaneously encompasses the mystery and beauty of existence. The child’s gaze, full of wonder, turned towards the leaves quivering in the wind, the sunlight and the sky. Recurring in the same piece, he compares some buildings to foliage. The foliage becomes a symbol representing security, wonder and happiness. You can read the following about the sun shelter (which doubles as a shelter from rain and snow) at Öijareds Country Club: A layer follows the folds of the façade in solid meanderings of 15 degrees. As regular as the branching of a tree. As chaotic as the circumstantial pressure on the foliage.

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And he compares the plan for the shape of the summer house for Svanborg on Dyngön to an umbrella of foliage. The free associations that Wingårdh makes in his text between memory and the present, between his own self and a building are not absolutely clear to me as I read his texts and contemplate the buildings he has designed. I can-

not ascertain a truth where the relevance has a universal dimension in time and place. There is always an inherent danger present when making reconstructions after the event. But what I do understand is that the contextual web building involved in every construction has many layers and many ramifications and that the person can never be totally separated from the work. Apart from the above-named foliage, Wingårdh also writes small prose poems that link the same upbringing with his parents and natural materials. Gert Wingårdh became interested early as a child in drawing and painting and, with time, a career as an artist was not totally inconceivable. While still young he developed skills and precision in his work by testing different techniques. One favourite motif was the aeroplane, which he drew with great accuracy in every detail. In a similar manner, a leap in time can be made from the child to the grown man, from the child’s play drawings to the professional architect’s work with presentation pictures. If one studies the hand-drawn presentations Gert Wingårdh produced before computers took over, one is struck by the conviction, the exactitude and the occasional distinct expressiveness. In the catalogue to the exhibition 20, Wingårdh writes: I enjoy sketching precisely. Layer upon layer of precise lines on soft, light, short sketching paper rolls. Made clearer with chalk. Let the drifts grow. Small changes. Plans and sections at the same time. Never perspective. That is for holiday time or Christmas. Generally it is just scribbles on fax paper. Directions and rough strokes. In reality not at all my style.

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Pictures and sketches are basic tools in the work of an architect. The architect conveys his ideas about the proposed building through carefully carried out picture presentations. The path to the final presentation is full of quickly jotted down sketches, personal reflections, notes, calculations and carefully considered presentation pictures. This description of the process leading to the proposal is naturally simplified. Today Wingårdhs is a large architecture firm that brings a range of disparate skills to each project, thereby ensuring that everything is well thought through. I am not going to develop the whole process from the first sketch to the completed building here, but instead I will content myself with some thoughts about Gert Wingårdh’s sketches and some of the office’s presentation pictures seen from an aesthetic

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angle. Even if this does not include all the stages involved in the creation of a building and, no doubt, does the process a great injustice, I have chosen to see them simply as the result of an artistic process. Gert Wingårdh doesn’t sit at his desk and produce sketches leading up to the final solution for each ongoing project. If you run an architecture firm with 124 employees, there is naturally not enough time for that. Nonetheless, it is Wingårdh who has the final word. It is his viewpoint that is influential. When you visit Wingårdhs architecture firm you also notice the proximity between him and his colleagues. There is a continuous flow to his office; colleagues come in for quick points of view, for a yes or a no. Or you might see him wandering amongst the desks. But even if his time for sketching is heavily curtailed nowadays owing to the time needed to run the company, the presence of his sketching is apparent. Gert Wingårdh always has the same type of sketching block/notebook, an a4, black linen-clad one. Leaf through these and you will see pages filled with notes and small sketches. Even though computers have taken over and every presentation is produced digitally, it is apparent that his own sketching has not totally disappeared. It is also apparent from the quotation above that he enjoys sketching. As was mentioned earlier, the picture is important for several reasons. It acts as a conveyor of ideas, but it is simultaneously something more, something beyond the rational explanation of the building. The well-considered picture possesses the power of communicating with the viewer’s imagination. It is there, in one’s fantasy, that the dream of possibilities is born. Even if there is a building programme that the picture relates to when it is produced, possibilities are at their most unrestricted in the picture. Once the planning and building processes are in full swing, then all the limitations and compromises are realised one after another. Winning an architecture competition is not just a matter of being able to accomplish the most functional/rational solution, but it is equally important, as Wingårdh himself says, to give the client what he/she didn’t know they were looking for. What they didn’t know they were looking for can naturally be something rational, such as, for example, a functioning and cost-effective use of the resources. Equally important, perhaps even more so, is the feeling that the presentation – the picture – awakens in the client. If this were not the case then there would be no reason for buildings to have such very different styles. All the emotive words used to describe architecture would fall flat, and become meaningless. Nor would there be any discussion

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about the iconic building’s right to be or not to be. In other words, there would be no reason to consider the architectural professional as a profession with artistic dimensions. Gert Wingårdh has been skilful in understanding the importance of the picture, which is clear even when you see the digital presentations the practice produces. Going back in time and looking carefully at the previous hand-drawn presentations, one’s thoughts wander to the Italian artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi. One of these sketches is a view from the connecting passageway at Astra Hässle (later AstraZeneca, parallel commission 1989). What characterises the sketch above all else is its dramatic perspective. The viewer’s gaze is drawn through the passageway towards the light square at its end. The distinct perspective contrasts with the more vehement, but controlled, shadowing. The suggestive feeling of the picture is built up partly through perspective, but at the same time is equally dependent on the contrast between the dark and the light. The perspective, the vaulted ceiling, the solid and the fluid, and the chiaroscuro create an exciting sense of space. Piranesi is naturally in a class of his own that Wingårdh cannot attain, but, on the other hand, who can? At the same time it is in Wingårdh’s way of designing the treatment of space and light that you sense a similarity to Piranesi. In a sketch from 1979, a proposal for using the roof of a restaurant in the large covered market of Gothenburg, this striking space and the contrast between light and darkness recurs. You note the intricate space even in a rough sketch showing the main entrance to Astra Hässle’s administrative building. Wingårdh’s architecture offers many examples of this fascination for space. However, Wingårdh differs from Piranesi in one obvious way, namely in the feeling the picture imparts. Wingårdh has none of the melancholia, and the occasionally palpable feelings of extinction that exist in many of Piranesi’s pictures. What happens when the presentation is handled digitally by the computer? Is it still possible to inject a personal element into the picture? It is not hard to believe that there is greater proximity between the architect and the picture when he/she is holding the pen personally. However, , in spite of everything, the computer supplies an intermediate link between the architect and the picture, particularly when the office becomes as large as Wingårdhs is today and professional monitors are used. Looking at digital presentations from Wingårdhs it is obvious that they are working with those details that will convey feelings rather than reason. For example, the choice of colour

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and perspective is relevant. When you see the presentation pictures of the House of Sweden, it is obvious that they have been looking for a feeling that could be called Nordic National Romantic. The obvious inspiration for the proximity to water and the black colour stems from the idea of a Nordic summer evening. Björntand and Dalsland Lodge can also be included in this category of Swedish nature romanticism. Even though Gert Wingårdh’s hand no longer produces the presentations, he is extremely aware of the picture’s role in producing a feeling and, not least, helping the client to visualise the possibilities. Great importance is attached to the representation of the pictures, to the way they convey the possibilities of the space. In the examples of hand-drawn sketches mentioned above, you could say that Wingårdh’s awareness has been transferred to digital visualisation. Even though his interest in art grew steadily over the years, Wingårdh’s first career choice did not follow an artistic path. Instead he saw his future as a gallery owner, preferably with the world as his sphere of activity. He chose to study history of art at the University of Gothenburg, combined with economics at the School of Business, Economics and Law. The combination of economics and art shows a clear insight that knowledge of art would not be sufficient to run a business. This awareness, or rather purposefulness, has probably been a contributing factor to the success of his own office. He came into contact with architecture in connection with his art studies. A study trip to Italy proved a pivotal influence; he discovered the architecture of the Baroque and the architects Borromini and Bernini. The drama, wealth and expression typical of the Baroque was a fundamental experience for the young art student. Gert Wingårdh became interested in the play between forces, how reality intervenes and becomes a part of the artificial, how different materials meet in intricate interactions, and how almost theatrical effects are created in the well-designed space. In 1971 he began his architectural studies at Chalmers University of Technology and graduated in 1975. One obvious result of his artistic studies is that Wingårdh has acquired a mental picture bank of impressive magnitude which he can always refer to. Few people attain his level of knowledge of individual buildings and architects. He is a veritable walking encyclopaedia. Visiting Wingårdhs today you see that he values the importance of an extensive reference library. Part of that library includes almost 80 magazine subscriptions. In common with few other people I have ever met, Gert Wingårdh is astonishingly up to date with what is going on in architecture.

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How can one characterise Wingårdh’s architecture? Can one identify recurring details that stand out? One criticism that has sometimes been levelled at Wingårdh is that he is constantly designing totally new buildings. The critics mean that the buildings differ so much from each other that they might have been designed by different architects. According to the critics this is because there is no central theory around which his architecture revolves. One need only compare them to see that many of his buildings clearly diverge from one another. But to see this immediately as a weakness is not quite so simple. Even if there is a constant variation regarding why some of Wingårdh’s buildings look as they do, it is equally simple to say there are certain constantly recurring elements in his architecture. These include the experience, the space, the details and the materials. Even if divergences exist between the different buildings in their exteriors, likenesses can also be seen. However, only a very few critics have shown interest in the similarities. When you meet Gert Wingårdh and talk architecture with him, you are aware of his enormous enthusiasm for his work, although I sometimes get the feeling that he doesn’t think it is only positive running his own office. He is obviously proud of his accomplishments. Over the last 30 years he has managed, under his own name, to build up one of Sweden’s largest architecture offices. Even though the large office means that they can take on any type of project today, it also means that he personally cannot spend a large amount of time on any individual project. The large office demands constant input of new commissions – in order to satisfy the monthly wage demands of the 124 people working there. Gert Wingårdh did not become an artist, but architecture became his artistic form of expression. It is the artistic aspect of architecture that interests him. And this does not in any way need to be in conflict with function, economy, construction and ecology. Wingårdh has been particularly skilful in managing to combine great sensitivity for the client’s desires/demands with an artistic form of expression. Even though the debate today is not as lively as a couple of years ago, there is still tension between those who feel that the city should have its iconic architecture and those who feel this is totally unnecessary. On the international scene one sees so-called iconic architecture in certain places, although, in Sweden, Santiago Calatrava’s Turning Torso in Malmö was experienced as something of a break with the unspoken rules of continuity. It is hardly necessary to state where Gert Wingårdh stands in this discussion. Attention

is being paid to architecture today in a way that was not done previously and this same relationship is noted in other areas too, particularly design and fashion. In Victor Hugo’s famous novel Nôtre-Dame de Paris (1831) architecture plays a major role. Hugo inserts chapters discussing architecture and says that at that time (before Gutenberg and the art of book-printing) whoever was born a poet became an architect. The architects were the workmen of the great work. The architect, the poet, the master, summed up in his person the sculpture which carved his façades, painting which illuminated his windows, music which set his bells to pealing and breathed into his organs.

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According to Hugo it was the possibility of printing books in large editions that killed the role of architecture as the chief art form, but the question is whether it is not seeking its former role once again? When I read Hugo’s text I think of a building by Gert Wingårdh in the construction stage – the sculpture museum in Marl. Naturally, I want to make it clear that I am not comparing the sculpture museum with Nôtre-Dame, but what makes me compare them is the ambition, or rather the fact of the architecture as an artistic field linking various artistic manifestations. The texts that follow in this book will treat Gert Wingårdh’s architecture in a more concrete fashion. This will take the form of four chapters, divided into decades: the seventies, the eighties, the nineties and the initial seven years of this century. However, the order will be inverted, so instead of beginning with 1977 and working forward to the present day, an archaeological approach is used. The book digs down through the deposits of the years and finishes in the seventies. Four writers have been asked to write about their decade and so the different chapters have slightly different characters. In addition, two reviews have been included, written by Peter Blundell Jones and Harri Hautajärvi. It is always difficult to establish divisions that work well. The most common approach when writing about architecture is to write about it only from the perspective of the date of completion. In this book the opposite condition applies: what is known as the year of design sets the boundary line between the decades. This means quite simply that if a building was designed in 1999 but not completed until 2005,

then the date 1999 determines the decade to which it belongs. Naturally, there are many drawbacks to this method. The building may have gone through a number of changes since the so-called design year and the final result that people come in contact with and use may well be very different to that which the architect intended. What it became after all the possible compromises between the architect and the client is important in architectural terms, everything else is just ideas. However, the design year is the nearest one can get to the architect’s original ideas. This also makes it possible to treat all the projects, whether built or not, on equal terms. There is another aspect that was important when choosing the design year as the decisive demarcation, and this concerns Gert Wingårdh’s view of his own work. He is interested in architecture as an artistic expression and in this respect proximity to his original ideas is important. The book is part of a large project that also includes an exhibition opening in January 2008, at the Röhsska Museum for Design and Applied Art in Gothenburg, which is Sweden’s sole special museum for design, fashion and handicrafts today. Why is the Röhsska Museum involved in this project on architecture? There are several reasons. The first is that it has been part of the museum’s 90-year history to highlight architecture. If you go back to the end of the twenties, and throughout the thirties and forties, part of our role was to show what was going on in architecture and housing. At the end of the twenties, there were exhibitions showing the new modern architecture in Europe. Modernism, or Functionalism as it came to be called in Sweden, was established and the Röhsska Museum felt it was its mission to be a part of the new wave. Later, for several years in the thirties, an exhibition was arranged, entitled Vår Bostad (Our housing), that not only aimed to present what was happening within the housing area but also what was actually going on in housing construction. Its underlying concept was to offer a comprehensive view, ranging from housing’s physical organisation and aesthetics to the recommended colour choice for a sofa. Another reason is Gert Wingårdh’s strong connection with Gothenburg. The Röhsska Museum felt it should produce this project now as Gert Wingårdh celebrates 30 years with his own practice.

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1.

Trademark status and an incipient international career

2000  –2007 Sensualism articulate Lena From

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There is something paradoxical about the Gert Wingårdh phenomenon. Although perceived from an early stage of his career as a typically un-Swedish architect, more often than not he has been the one selected to articulate the image of Sweden on international occasions. And although as an architect he has clearly disavowed all interest in urban planning, he has done more than anyone else to spur the Swedish debate on the subject. Such is in fact the situation today, with his practice celebrating its thirtieth year. The business which he started as a one-man concern in Gothenburg has grown into an enterprise with himself as ceo for 120 or so associates, divided between offices in Gothenburg and Stockholm. What began with small interior design briefs and eventually houses has, in terms of built reality, expanded into big research facilities, multi-family housing, schools, shopping centres, offices, cultural amenities, luxury hotels and, shortly, a big sports arena. And for greater competitiveness, not least in competitions and parallel sketching assignments, advanced collaboration exists with landscape architects, especially nod (Nature-Oriented Design). Add to this the fact that Gert Wingårdh has also become a person with enough celebrity status to attract a big audience. His being the only architect to have been invited in the 21st century to talk on the summertime radio chat programme says all. And not many architects are hailed with a mid-life exhibition. Carl Nyrén, Ralph Erskine, Jan Gezelius and others were a good deal longer in the tooth when this honour was vouchsafed them. To a wider public, Gert Wingårdh is known, above all, as an advocate of high-rise buildings and the architect behind Sweden’s German and American embassies. Professional colleagues for their part are most appreciative of his houses and note, with a pang of envy for the most part, that here at any rate is a confrère who has sometimes been able to work with clients who can afford the cost of fully developing and realising an idea. Gert Wingårdh is universally acknowledged as a frank speaker who does not fight shy of having an opinion and who speaks of architecture in a language that everyone can understand, a fact that has facilitated contacts with general public and clients alike. But it has also made him controversial in his own profession. Quite contrary to what has been traditionally accepted in architectural circles, Gert Wingårdh has always been good at marketing his activity. Very “un-Swedish”. And when Gert Wingårdh readily admits where and how in his architecture

he “quotes” themes from other architects, his colleagues have reacted with anonymous stabs in the back, accusing him of plagiarising the same – invariably foreign – architects (Günter Behnisch, Jean Nouvel, Tadao Ando …). At best the grudging ones are impressed by Wingårdh winning one competition after another; one-third of all projects so far during the 21st century have resulted from open/invited competitions and parallel sketching assignments. Or else they are floored, as for example when briefs are offered simply because Gert is Gert. Companies, local authorities and others count on attracting attention when they place orders with him. This is borne out by all the shops in the new Vällingby Centrum fashion store, on the outskirts of Stockholm, allowing their logotypes to be subordinated, in stylised form, to the red, suspended roof of the design concept (2003–2008). But clients also look him up because he is the only architect they know of. The Municipality of Landskrona literally commissioned a “Gert Wingårdh building”, and in due course took possession of the shimmering little blue Citadell swimming baths, where the second phase recently has been finished (2005–  06, 2006  –  07). Internationally, after Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao (1997), the architect is as important as the architecture for branding a locality or an activity. In Sweden this only applies to Gert Wingårdh. He is a trademark. And the same cannot be said of any other single Swedish architect today. Inside the entrance to the head office in Gothenburg is a wooden pillar from the exhibition Aspects (Swedish Museum of Architecture, 1991). It carries a brief text. Idleness is the heading, followed by a short poem, or rather a stream of associations noted down:

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Desire finds its moment in a daydream. Straight lines become curved. Pure idleness. I have a desire for idleness. For the beautiful. Probing feelings. Romantics. Unintellectual. Untheoretical.

Not unreflected. But unexplained. Like life. Life is desire.

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During the 21st century Gert Wingårdh has further developed and refined a dichotomy that has long existed in his output: the dichotomy of sensualism and aloofness, darkness and light, materiality and dissolution, which are often contacted in one and the same work. He has also confirmed and expanded the variations of the theses which Rasmus Wærn propounds in his great Gert Wingårdh monograph (Birkhäuser 2001). The fluid, Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired plans are still there. The hourglass recurs as a dramatic principle with openings and constrictions succeeding one another. And it is still – often – true that the projects are drawn from the inside outwards, bottom-up. But not always. In some projects during the 21st century, not least in Villa Astrid (2002–  04), which is one of the decade’s most poetical, the architect works instead from the top downwards. Gert Wingårdh has described how he studied, on a map, the contour lines of the dramatically hilly greenfield site and on that basis designed the house, which digs itself in from a low entrance level secluded from the surroundings. The dark house with its sheet copper cladding is barely visible where it lies at the end of a narrow road, midway between two simple, everyday, standard houses. After a narrow entrance passage the interior opens out into an atrium court suffused with daylight. The whole layout twists dynamically round this court, bores its way down to the bottom storey where the bedrooms have been placed; all of them opening directly onto a wooden deck which the house shelters from the elements. From the entrance level the sea view of the bay to the east is reflected in the glazing of the inner courtyard. For a moment one loses one’s bearings. Are we indoors or out on a rock with a clear view in all directions? Here, as in the bathroom one floor down, the rock which the building has been blasted into goes straight into the house, with no intermediary. The groundwater runs over the granite, audible and living. Transformed into architecture, nature penetrates from the outside. This top-down principle can also be instanced with the Müritzeum visitor centre in Waren (2004–  07), overlooking Lake Müritz, the biggest in Germany, and close to a large expanse of countryside, parts of which have been designated nature reserves. The building, which contains both exhibitions and an aquarium, is designed as two cones,

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slightly displaced in relation to each other and pressed down at the meeting point of land and water. Wood and glass are the dominant materials, and a visitor walking through the building can move between indoors and out. Over the water, the cladding is charred wood, a material which is expected to be capable of lasting unaltered for decades and which, on a limited scale, was also used for the Kvarnhuset guest chalet in Västra Karup (2000  –  01). Gert Wingårdh professes to have got the idea from a charred barn which he drove past near Särö, south of Gothenburg. Inquiries showed it to have burned down in 1927, and not just recently, as he had supposed. Below the water, the aquarium glazing affords an insight into the lake’s own life. Nature is part of the architecture, obtruding from outside. During the decade the treatment of materials and detailing has on the whole grown more and more exclusive, not only through advances in digital drawing and production techniques but also due to projects being better funded. This is most clearly apparent in the pared-down, minimalist VillAnn (2003–  05), the most consistent of Gert Wingårdh’s villas hitherto and also the one in which he has most been able to indulge his own hankerings after supreme quality. This villa also provides an illustrative example of a new trait appearing in Gert Wingårdh’s architecture from Universeum onwards. The structure is visible. In VillAnn it is laid completely bare. The client, versed in the industry, knew at the time of ordering exactly what he wanted: one large room of the simplest possible materials. Mostly concrete. Period. During the construction process, moreover, he was as uncompromising as many architects – Gert Wingårdh doubtless included – wish they could be themselves. If the result wasn’t good enough, it simply had to be pulled down and the work re-started. Consequently the site-cast concrete of walls, floors and outdoor pool is, quite simply, superb. Form tie holes are proudly presented in what is otherwise a perfectly smooth surface – as cheerful, warm and cool as a linen cloth put twice through the wringer. The layout comprises three generously proportioned rooms, two of them (bedrooms) on the upper floor. The ground floor is, in principle, completely open, but with two parallel, site-constructed storage units, rising from floor to ceiling and with a staircase to the upper storey, creating three secluded rooms within the room. Like the floor, these storage units are of brushed Douglas pine, lightly stained white: planks 30 cm wide and up to 14 m long, accentuating the length/ width and height of the room.

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The villa has been sited as far into the shoreline plot as possible, and in volume it conforms to the full permissible building width. The narrow black pool terminates the building franchise on the seaward side. Looking out from the ground floor through the glazed sections reaching from floor to ceiling, one sees water merging with water, with the greying wooden deck turning into an illusory landing stage out at sea. This is a supremely rational building, but the articulation effect, the interplay of wood, glass and concrete, between outdoors and indoors, is, to both sight and touch, sensual down to the tiniest detail. Today the intellectual sharpness of projects is matched more and more often by a sharpness of execution, which in turn has made it possible for some of Gert Wingårdh’s main themes – such as the grotto, the steps to the sky, the coal-black mirror pond and the acute angles sometimes projecting from his buildings into the landscape or townscape – to be further developed. The shade of red, long existing in wood and stone, is no longer quite so dominant, though it does recur and to some degree has lived on all the time. (Villa Astrid, for example, was originally to have been given an internal cladding of ribbed, red wooden ceiling, which, viewed in relation to its coppersheathed exterior and nod’s landscape architecture, would have made it a better concept, though the client’s (accommodated) wish for welllit rooms has made it easier to live in.) In return the light has become whiter and the blackness deeper. Nowadays the eye does not necessarily perceive the glass as a boundary or even a membrane between outdoors and indoors. Paradoxically, the biggest such dissolution of boundaries hitherto is in Sweden’s embassy in the us, otherwise known as House of Sweden. This is an unusually open building for an embassy, the reason being that, in addition to the embassy (in the middle), House of Sweden also includes flats and public spaces for exhibitions and other activities to which the general public are admitted. It also has an exceptionally accessible location. True, the plot is bounded on two sides by water, but it also forms part of a densely thronged walkway from the government offices and finance buildings to Georgetown, with its welter of shops and restaurants. Everyone walking this way is reached from afar by the signal of House of Sweden being an open house. The greater part of the entrance floor is glazed from floor to ceiling. All round the clock there is a clear view in from outside, added to which, the corners can be opened and shut. Just a few simple manoeuvres and indoors and outdoors become one and the same room.

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There are a couple of interesting parallels here to VillAnn, which was designed the same year. The floor plan is rhomboid, maximum use is made of the building rights and at one boundary a pool provides the end point. Here, though, the overall composition is best described as a wooden box wrapped in glass and girdled by the cantilevered balconies of the dwelling apartments. These, with their graining stamp lit up from above and below, make a contrast to the rest of the façade, which gets more and more ethereal the higher up one looks. The stratification of glass outside wood (laminate) erodes the boundary from the outside inwards. On the upper storeys the clear glass of the ground floor is given white raster dots which densify from one storey to the next, until the building takes on a cloudy whiteness. One readily endorses the architect’s own metaphor of the increasingly dissolved façade as the clearing of a morning mist. The water surrounding the plot has been made a structural element of the architecture in other ways too. Inside, this is further developed through collaboration with glass designer Ingegerd Råman, who among other things had a hand in fashioning the entrance. The Potomac River regularly bursts its banks, and the openable entrance floor has been put on the same level as the river’s estimated highest water level. Two water curtains (Ingegerd Råman) surround the narrow entrance passage, now typical of Wingårdh, which leads into a large open room flooded with light. This gives an illusory heightening of the true sensation of coolness encountered when entering the building from the hot and humid outdoor climate so often prevailing in the southern states. Immediately inside the security entrance one sees, straight ahead, a glazed lift shaft, a pillar of light which, from the conference level one floor down, projects a dark, cavern-like room straight up into the sky above. For all its transparency this pillar steadies the whole building, accentuating the recurrent contrast between darkness and light. Through perforations in the blond wood ceiling of the entrance storey, light filters through white fabric in dots which, to the upward-turned eye, resemble falling snow. The floor, white with touches of black, puts one in mind of thick winter ice with black fissures over the abyss. And then, on the conference storey furthest down, one finds a shallow mirror pond with a bed of highly polished coal-black granite. Here it is the architects who bring water into the building from the outside: a tarn. And it is here, in harmony with Ingegerd Råman’s addition of ice-rose frosted glass staves, that the aquatic metaphor achieves its consummation: part of her work

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March 6 a.m. Its name derives from the time of year in Sweden when the ice breaks up. It is worth mentioning here that, in connection with the growth of his public assignments, Gert Wingårdh has also been able to renew and intensify contacts with the artists whose dealer he wanted to be as a young man. So far the result has never worked better than here. Ingegerd Råman and Gert Wingårdh have evidently understood one another’s ways of thinking about water, which, through architecture and glass design acting in harmony, is transformed from running to frozen and back again; to steam, mist and fog. The client, Sweden’s National Property Board, purchased the embassy site because of its “typically Swedish” character, near the water and with a clear, direct view into the as yet untamed scenery of Roosevelt Island. Their decision, in 2003 after a competition, to award the design contract to Gert Wingårdh was due to his entry being judged better able than the others to meet the requirement of the architecture in built form effectively symbolising Sweden. Official Sweden as a democratic country whose citizens have full insight is here expressed both by the layout – the building’s accessibility – and by the form – its transparency. At night the house shines forth, beacon-like, on the shore of the Potomac. The symbolism is inescapable: Sweden, an enlightened nation, a leading light in what at present is the most important city on the world political scene. But the physical embassy, built mostly by American manpower, has little connection with Sweden. In the course of the construction process, for reasons of economy, the materials, which were to have been Swedish, a manifestation of the country’s natural resources, were replaced with American maple, black Italian granite and timpa – a mottled Italian limestone. The wooden balcony rails are not wood at all, but glass patterned with computer-generated, imitation wood pvb foil. The interesting point is that this pragmatism makes very little difference to the expressive quality of the result, The building looks “Swedish”, if by this we mean the image of Sweden established not least through the design boom of the 1990s and early 2000s. The National Property Board (which also commissioned the meeting environments, variously ice-frosted and birch-forest airy, depending on the time of year, that Gert Wingårdh and Thomas Sandell together designed in 2001, for Sweden’s first eu chairmanship) means just that. And, looking back on Gert Wingårdh’s output, one can see that this also approximates closely to his view of Swedish expression:

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plain, pure materials (albeit exclusively crafted) and functional (albeit complex) form. Turning to consider how, in speech and writing, he expresses himself concerning things Swedish, one also finds abundant references to the birches and tarns of the forest, the summer twilight, the red sky of morning and the secure, comforting light of the lantern on long, dark winter evenings. This being so, it is of minor consequence that there are also other, less stereotyped notions as to how the motley multicultural Sweden of today should be articulated. The competitions have been open to all comers, but several times Wingårdh has succeeded best in formulating the image of Sweden that the National Property Board wants to see. And so long as there exists between client and architect a tacit consensus that architecture which can be termed “simple, functional and uncontrived”, which uses “pale woods” and, in other respects too, has “materials of great durability and beauty” is typically Swedish, that is how architecture will be (the quotations come from the National Property Board’s policy for buildings representing Sweden abroad). All of which is in keeping with the theorem of sociologists William I. and Dorothy Thomas: “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.” The one line of development which Gert Wingårdh does not appear to have followed through in greater depth in his 21st-century projects is that of architecture with a sustainability perspective. He has been inspired by architects who have shown practical interest in sustainability issues in their architecture (Glenn Murcott and others), and has himself shown interest in them through the Ale High School in Nödinge (1993–  95), Universeum in Gothenburg (1998 –2001) and, not least, the ongoing rebuild and enlargement of his own country home at Tofta (1992–). Naturum Stendörren, where Wingårdh’s broken box has in principle been designed as a passive house, can also be included under this head (2006), but is not yet fully convincing. In the case of Müritzeum, for example, the choice of charred wood as a cladding material is admittedly ecologically defensible, but still primarily an aesthetical argument. The fact that the emergent Småland Music & Theatre building in Jönköping (2006  –) is also to be given the best possible chances of measuring up to the national environmental objectives marks another change of attitude which, at the present stage of things, must be ascribed more to the client than to the architect. Asked in so many words why he remains so comparatively passive on this point, Gert Wingårdh has invariably replied that he chose the

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architect’s profession because he has a need for self-expression, and not with a view to changing the world. As a debater he has instead profiled himself by advocating the high-rise building – the skyscraper – as an element of urban development, mainly in order to create a density accentuating the urbanity of the cities where he has presented development schemes: Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö. By doing so he has angered those regarding him as a typical one-off architect who ought not to interfere in matters of urban planning, and also, indeed, a relatively large sector of the general public who find skyscrapers “un-Swedish”. The vehemence of the newspaper debate following his scheme for skyscrapers in the Heden district of Gothenburg (2004) is one of the more illustrative examples, though it was his proposed Sergels Torn (Tower) for Stockholm which achieved the biggest media impact at national level. He was an early starter. Already in the 1980s Gert Wingårdh was proposing skyscrapers along the south bank of the river in Gothenburg, but at the time the idea fell on deaf ears. In the 2000s, though, this type of building has seriously entered the Swedish agenda, above all because Gert Wingårdh, by virtue of his now famous name, has put it there – albeit with a helping hand from his intermittent associate Thomas Sandell. His persistence in the teeth of compact opposition can only be put down to the intensity of a long-harboured boyhood dream, born of a predilection in early years for Manhattan. That has yet to be realised. Wingårdh’s practice is not among those currently sketching new development for the south bank land released by the construction of the Göta Tunnel. In the event it was Santiago Calatrava who, with his Turning Torso, gave Sweden its first skyscraper, at the same time as Wingårdh’s Scandinavian Tower hotel in Skåne failed to materialise. It is ironic that the skyscraper, so far, is practically the only type of building for which schemes have been repeatedly submitted without actually materialising. Wingårdh’s architecture today is a matter of teamwork: a process of collective creativity in which Gert Wingårdh has the last word. Out of the practice’s 124 associates, 95 work in Gothenburg and 29 in Stockholm, 63 are men and 61 women. 11 are interior architects and 23 are structural engineers. 10 work on visualisation, one as a writer. One is a model-maker, 3 are it specialists and 7 administrators. For each new assignment a new team is put together. Team leaders alternate, no one being, on paper, permanently senior or subordinate to anyone else.

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As supervisor in charge of design, Wingårdh professes to have learned his main working method from one of his first clients, who insisted on a solution to the problem at every new meeting. It didn’t have to be the best solution, but one that could be discussed and worked from. It’s a method that makes for swift concretisation and, consequently, swift progression to design. Out of the practice’s 280 or so projects this century, he has been personally in charge of design for more than two-thirds. He sets aside one full week every year for his own drawing. And perhaps, as this decade moves to a close, there are signs of an incipient international career, the one really big challenge remaining for Gert Wingårdh to take up in his present role as both architect and entrepreneur. The exclusively Swedish clients providing the as yet few foreign assignments have now begun to be joined by clients in Finland, Denmark and Germany. Housing developments are in progress in Finland, an office development in Denmark. In Germany, in addition to Müritzeum, which opened in 2007, the Glaskasten sculpture museum in Marl awaits construction (2005–). If the organic side of things is currently being exploited in projects like the Hyllie shopping centre (2006  –), the Carmen Frykense house of music (2007–) and an exclusive private Russian dacha (2006  –), here the opposite applies. The geometry is razor-sharp. The museum is an extension of the brutalist town hall by Van den Broek and Bakema (1958  –1962). A glazed passage connects the old to the new, which again has been sited at the water’s edge. An 85-metre-long white rectangular concrete box is supported by a steel structure but has the appearance of resting on a glass base – hovering far out over the water. The sculptures inside are provided with adjustable, exhibition-friendly toplighting. The exterior is a work of art. Bigert & Bergström were invited to collaborate on the design of the façade, in which the scheme is for the magnolia trees in the park to be reiterated by tree-trunk casts delineating negative trees in the 900-mm-thick walls. The gallery proprietor at last come true. Glazed sections in the end walls open the building outwards. Nature is once again part and parcel of the architecture, an architecture ethereally vibrant in the encounter between water and air. Thus, neither Gert Wingårdh’s architecture nor the purposive approach of his practice affords any glimpse of the idleness which he lusts after according to the motto on the pillar in the Gothenburg office. Decorative “superfluities”, perhaps, such as the tumbled glass instead of roofing felt for the roof of VillAnn, the updated Cosmati

flooring of the Citadel baths, with circles of blue mosaic, or the different stone finishes imparting a manifold lustre to the façade of the luxury hotel in Norra Bantorget, Stockholm. But seldom sheer idleness. Identity-creating markers, like acute angles, always have a concrete function. In the Kasper Salin-accoladed Aranäs High School, for example, they serve as classrooms. On the other hand, the lust for beauty, for the inexplicable, for life itself, shines through everything. Not least when the architecture, through its design, reveals its blatant love of the dramatically dynamic architecture of the Baroque, to which he has adhered ever since his first visit to Rome with the Göteborg Department of Art (now the Department of Art History and Visual Studies, Göteborg University). It is present in the bending of straight lines. In the small, private context, as in VillAnn, where what starts off as a constricted stairway from the entrance floor opens upwards, upwards, straight into the sky above. It is present in the big, public context, as in the House of Sweden lift shaft and the late 1990s Berlin Embassy spiral staircase leading skywards from the dripping water cavern of the bottom storey. The dramatically created encounter between sky and earth has also been present in many unrealised competition entries and recurs in several of the projects on the drawing boards and dreaming of one day being turned into built reality. In several of the public projects the objectives – of adulating and glorifying the state – can indeed be read as a direct parallel to the architecture of the Baroque, which was often built for the purpose of paying tribute to the ruler or the deity. But Wingårdh’s architecture cannot be construed as a bid for the ecstatic meeting of man and authority which the architecture of the Baroque sought to invoke through its contrasts of darkness and light. Gert Wingårdh is a romantic. A naturalist romantic. In his architecture sky and sea are made, in a seamless encounter, to embrace human beings in search of delight. In its best moments this works orgastically, dissolving the boundary between the explicable and the inexplicable.

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Lena From (born 1962) is a journalist and critic. After many years with daily press, Göteborgs-Posten among others, she is now an editor at the Swedish Review of Architecture, Arkitektur. She is a part-time freelance, mainly writing on contemporary dance, and author of books on the choreographer Kenneth Kvarnström and glass designer Ingegerd Råman.

2000  –2007 Hyllie Centre smot The Aula Citadellbadet Kallis Glaskasten Housing at Arabia Beach Ease Müritzeum House of Sweden VillAnn K:fem Björntand Sign Villa Astrid Dalsland Lodge Aranäs Upper Secondary School Culture house Polarportal Mimers House Mölndalsbro

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Hyllie Centre Hotel and commercial centre, arena Malmö, Sweden (2007, 2003)

A new shopping centre is under way in the centre of Hyllie. Wingårdhs won the competition and the centre should be ready some time in 2009. This centre is housed in a stringent block format, while the inside of the shopping centre is an organic structure reminiscent of human internal organs, with lungs, airways and arteries. It is easy to associate the movement in the shopping centre with the life-giving circulation of the human body. Two deep, organic openings – entrances – are the most characteristic features of the construction. These openings are soft inward bends in an otherwise rigid geometric form. Seen from above as a two-dimensional form, the construction looks like a puzzle whose pieces have not yet all been placed. The inward curves are made of soft, curved glass, one amber-coloured, the other green. The contrast between the flat glass surfaces and the arched ones is another characteristic of the building. Wingårdh has examined the possibilities of glass in a number of buildings. Amongst other things, he has become interested in screen-printed glass and what effects can be attained with printed patterns. In Hyllie, it is more a matter of utilising the design qualities of the glass itself. The organic structure is repeated in the interior. Stairs, tunnels and pillars grow from the ground as though it is nature created by man. At the heart of the shopping centre, Wingårdh has designed a jungle and possibly this is intended to correspond to the organic design idiom. The shopping centre is the nucleus, but there will also be housing, office accommodation and a multi-storey car park here.

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The main entrance to the new shopping centre, facing the new train station. Malmö Arena, an eventing and ice hockey arena under construction. 3. The hotel planned, with black granite façades in varying degrees of roughness/smoothness. 4. General plan of Hyllie Centrum, with the shopping centre in the middle, the arena to the right and the hotel at the bottom. 2.

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smot Concert hall and theatre Jönköping, Sweden (2007)

The opening picture for the presentation of Småland Music and Theatre shows a shining glass building by the water. The picture is striking: you can see life and movement through the fully glazed façade. Light reflections from the building are visible in the water. The feeling is Mediterranean, whilst the deep blue sky has an unmistakable Nordic tone. Here Wingårdh has designed a building that should definitely become iconic, almost the same type as can be envisaged in Björntand. The glassed façade is striped because the glass varies in width and each alternate slice is white. The screen-printed glass used in House of Sweden is once again used here and has also been used in other drafts, such as in Kallis. The entrance faces the water and the foyer is clad in pale wood. Here you can see Wingårdh’s interest in designing visually exciting entrances, an elegant stairway that is slightly curved initially and then continues straight. The general impression is light and airy. Undeniably Jönköping has great ambitions for the envisaged new music and theatre building. Småland Music and Theatre will include a concert house seating 800, a theatre with 250 seats and a children’s stage, a stage by the café and an outdoor arena with 300 seats linked to the stage of the main building.

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Plan and perspective of the entrance area.

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The Aula Auditorium, Karolinska Institutet Solna, Sweden (2006)

A glazed-in triangle, with an extraordinarily powerful point that extends dramatically through the block. The Auditorium is a proposal for an assembly and conference room for the Karolinska Institute in Solna. The layout shows the desire to break up the traditional pattern of rectangular buildings but nevertheless follows accepted practice regarding certain existing prerequisites. The Auditorium runs alongside Solnavägen as well as following von Eulers väg. It can be extended over the road due to the inclination of the building’s façade. The Auditorium’s façade leans in two directions, at its base and at the rear edge, facing von Eulers väg. The façade is concrete with a pattern of openwork holes with glass inside. The Auditorium is faintly reminiscent of thin cirrostratus clouds. The effect is achieved through the holes being randomly placed over the façade. While the shape is dramatic, the plan’s structure is relatively simple. Each floor is not built out to the glass wall to von Eulers väg, but phases out at every new level. The ceiling is partly composed of glass, which creates a striking view when you stand on the ground and look up to the different floors. However, the Auditorium is most striking at night-time when it shines in the dark and you sense movement behind the glass surface.

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Perspective, floor plan and longitudinal section of the proposed hall.

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Citadellbadet Swimming baths Landskrona, Sweden (2005) Citadellbadet is the first stage in the development of an older bathhouse. Gert Wingårdh has chosen to work with a simple rectangular form on the glass building that houses the entrance and changing rooms. The glass panes are positioned vertically and are of the same full height. However, their widths vary and they come in three different shades of blue. Some of them are frosted, others are delicately transparent. The building assumes an air of liveliness due to the variety of width and colour tone. The chosen theme is water and this has been allowed to characterise the glass façade. The blue tones of the glass contrast with the water in the pool. Reflections appear that acquire a playful quality. The movement of the water is reflected by the glass mosaic floor in front of the façade. Here it has been designed like rings of water moving slowly forwards and almost seeming to reach the edge of the pool. The building is crowned with a reversed cone, a tower for judges and the press, and is characterised by soft rounded forms in contrast to strict geometry. We recognise this from other works by Gert Wingårdh, although here there is no immediate similarity to any of his other buildings. The general impression is that this is an entirely new departure.

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Detail of mosaic in and outside the changing hall. The changing hall, with the tower reflecting the old water tower. 3. Details of the watered building. 4. The baths are immediately to the south of the Fort (Kastellet). The red lines mark the view of Ven and the old bathhouse. 2.

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Kallis Spa and hotel Helsingborg, Sweden (2005) Like striped material stretched at right angles to the direction of the beach, Kallis’s glass façade attracts the walker’s gaze owing to its movement along the beach. Layers of clear and white glass are placed on the 70-metre-long and 9-metre-high façade and the word Kallis appears as an integrated part of the glass. There are associations here to health resorts, bathing huts and towels hanging out to dry. The terrace forms a bow shape stretched between two original piers pointing towards the beach. The terrace is modified according to the bow shape of the beach. This bow shape recurs in a corresponding way in the east-facing entrance hall whose gentle movement welcomes the visitor into the building. The striped glass façades are screen- printed, a technique Gert Wingårdh has explored in different ways in other buildings. A seawater pool thrusts its way out towards the sea like a gangway. The pool breaks through an opening in the glass façade and makes it possible to bathe both inside and outside. The interior is warm, inviting and creates a sense of luxury and elegance. The walls, floors and ceilings are clad in red wood. The building covers 5,680 square metres and houses a spa, a restaurant and conference facilities. The plan has a simple structure where you are transported forwards towards the spa via a reception area. The facilities are arranged in a straight line, at a 90-degree angle to the entrance.

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Rendering and general layout of the proposed building. Renderings from the bathhouse design with the sea immediately outside the façade.

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Glaskasten Sculpture museum Marl, Germany (2005) Glaskasten in Marl is an extension to an existing sculpture museum. The new building is designed for contemporary sculpture. Wingårdh’s building both relates to and deviates from the other buildings in the area. Previously, a brutal concrete piece of architecture from the late fifties by Van den Broek and Bakema occupied this site. The new sculpture museum picks up the concrete theme, but the façade shows deviations in the form of relief patterns of trees, for example. The positioning of the building respects the character of the site. Simultaneously, it is not compliant. The bulk of the building (85 metres long and 7x7 metres in height and breadth) extends out over the pond in front of the site. In this way the entire building acquires a floating character that contrasts with the density of the concrete. The reception and café are on the ground floor with a totally different length and provide a 7-metre overhang above the water. There is visual tension here between the contrasting gravity and lightness. You walk up stairs via the reception to the sculpture hall. Once there, the significance of the long building becomes obvious. You enter a long connecting room, with light entering from skylights and the large side window at the end of the building facing the water. The surprise effect is what counts here.

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Air photo of the Marl administrative centre, with the proposed additions marked white. Sketch of the gallery. 3. Model photo from the sculpture pavilion. 4. Plan upper floor. 5. Section through the new gallery. 6. Sections through the communicating link between the new and pre-existing parts. 7. Plan ground floor. 8. Plan basement level. 2.

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Housing at Arabia Beach Housing Helsinki, Finland (2005)

There are two obvious themes to the residential block at Arabia Beach. One is the glass surfaces and the other is the materiality of the brick walls. The block turns to face the sea and here the generous glazed balconies provide a good view of the sea bay as well as allowing plenty of light into the flats. Glass is attached to glass at the corners of the balconies, eliminating the physical boundaries. One detail that can be seen clearly on dark evenings is the open fireplaces that are turned out to face the balcony. The chimneys run like a visible vertical band through the balconies, with a small opening on each floor. On the opposite side brick dominates over glass. The brick wall is red-brown and hard-baked and so is a very durable material to withstand wind and weather. The colour tone varies between the buildings to emphasise their different volumes. The bricks are built with different gap widths that again show the different volumes. The entire housing complex appears to be a game of scale, with precise geometric volumes and different colour tones creating dynamism between the buildings. This conscious attempt at bipolar tension recurs in Wingårdh’s architecture. Here you can clearly see the contrast between the lightness of the glass and the massive density of the brick, but also the dynamism in the different buildings’ volumes. There are two-room, three-room and four-room flats here.

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Façade, with the effect of bricklaying with different pointing widths clearly apparent. General layout. The buildings stand on a platform of their own, making all entrances easily accessible. 3. Different pointing widths serve to vary the character of the wall from one part of the building to another. 2.

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Ease Shop Stockholm, Sweden (2005)

Two different principles are to be found in the interior design of Filippa K’s shop in Stockholm: austere geometry and naturalism. The geometric principle dominates the interior. It is well defined in the wooden panelling of the walls, the wooden counter and the wooden benches that occupy a large portion of the first room. Contrasting with this geometry is the back wall behind the counter of the first room, which is composed of living green plants. It is possible here to be reminded of certain characteristics traditionally associated with Scandinavian design: light wood, restrained and austere design and proximity to nature. The verdant back wall could also be interpreted as a game, in view of the close connection existing between Scandinavian design and nature. Here nature is not shown through stylised interpretation but instead has a direct presence. Luxuriant greenery is a constant reminder of life-giving nature itself – our exhaled air is turned into fresh oxygen in this little shop.

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Interior from the entrance towards the shop. Floor and joinery in Douglas pine.

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Müritzeum Visitor centre, aquaria and exhibition Waren, Germany (2004)

Like Universeum in Gothenburg, Müritzeum is a visitors’ and science centre with an aquarium, exhibition halls and experimental workshops. Müritzeum is situated by Germany’s largest lake, Lake Müritz, and not far from the medieval town of Waren. Müritzeum is composed of two circular formations with different diameters touching each other, which are then transformed into two vertical cones. The south-facing side of the larger cone is severed to form the entrance to the visitor centre. The entrance is a straight glass wall where the word Müritzeum is clearly depicted. The north-facing façade has a glass window half sunk in the water. The visitor can stand inside the building and see into the water. The circular forms recur on different levels. In many respects the exterior is perhaps the most exceptional aspect of the building due to its intricate pattern. Here a number of intersections break up the surface and create openings and room for stairs and viewpoints. Once again Gert Wingårdh’s interest in creating sequences of events for the user to walk through comes into play. The two cones are a distinct landmark in the landscape and have a floating character connecting them to Lake Müritz. The façade is charred wood, providing a hard and weatherproof surface.

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Rendering of the building, which stands half out of the water. The building forms part of a walk round the tiny lake, at the same time serving as a viewing platform in it. 3. The wood is burned on the outside to give a durable surface, and varnished on the inside to bring out the colour. 4. A big slit opens the building up towards the city. 5. Detail of a barn on the island of Särö, south of Gothenburg, the wooden façade of which is just as the fire left it in 1927. 2.

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House of Sweden Embassy Washington, dc, usa (2003

The guidelines for how embassies should be designed emphasise openness. House of Sweden is also characterised by its large glass areas. From a distance, House of Sweden is dominated by balconies linked into one cantilevered box. At night-time, “the box” gleams when the screen-printed glass screens are illuminated. The pattern, resembling veneered slabs of wood, plays on the idea of Swedish design and light, simple wood. The entrance is glassed and recessed; above it the building is supported on pillars and appears to hover over the ground. Allow your gaze to move over the glass façade up to the roof and you note that there is a gradient of white dots within the glass that gradually changes from transparent to white, like a rising mist. The path up to the entrance is via a ramp along the long western side, forming a loggia behind the pillars. This introductory detail is recognisable from many of Wingårdh’s buildings; you walk towards a narrow entrance, unaware of what may unfold beyond it. Internally the walls and ceilings are panelled in light maple.

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Evening view, with the lights turned on behind the wood-patterned glazing. The stairs leading from the events areas up to the entrance level. Layout. The building occupies a prominent position at the confluence of the Potomac and Rock Creek rivers. Interior from the Hazelius homestead, Skansen. The Swedish tradition of imitation painting allowed itself great liberties at times. Similarly, the façade glazing of the embassy exaggerates the character of the wood. The entrance door, with a handle carved out of the door frame. Detail of the glass panelling making up the balcony front. A screen-printed glass on film, laminated into the façade, creates the appearance of wood. Detail of Ingegerd Råman’s work of art in the entrance, where the surface of the glass has been broken down with the aid of bone glue. Interior from the office section, with American maple panelling throughout. Staff room in the embassy section, furnished with classics of Swedish design. Detail of the screen-printed glazing indoors. Main façade of the building, overlooking the Potomac. View upwards from the entrance level to the ceiling. Plans of the building from the ground floor up to the roof terrace. The rear of the building, where the glass fin of the roof merges into an ever-whiter lift tower. The entrance level, with flooring of pale timpa and black granite. House of Sweden from the other side of the Potomac River. House of Sweden by night, mirrored in the water of the Potomac River.

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VillAnn Private residence Kungsbacka, Sweden (2003)

Austere, geometric, concrete, light and minimalist. These words are immediately applicable to VillAnn. Like a foreign body, the house seems to have landed in the archipelago landscape with its resolute forms. The entire building complex has a simple and clear organisation. On one long side, it is marked off by a pool cast in black concrete and on the opposite side by the house itself, with a very large terrace in between. The building has an extended rectangular form and is oriented in one direction, towards the sea. The façade is characterised by the unabashed massive concrete and glass construction. The detached house has the simplest possible design. Everything is arranged in a line along its length. There are only three rooms and a kitchen inside its 346 square metres. Inside, the smooth concrete is contrasted to the brushed and lightly white-glazed Douglas fir. VillAnn is seen as an exciting game of opposites: thick and thin, light and heavy, hard and soft. However, it is the outside view that takes your breath away in this house and you can clearly see here the tension of the contrasts.

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The main façade of the villa, facing seawards. All visible concrete was cast on site in smooth plywood shuttering. 2. The villa is unequivocally oriented seawards. The membrane between outdoors and indoors is of 10 mm glass, to withstand the incoming storms. 3. The villa terrace ends with a pool where the water finally runs over an edge of polished black concrete. In front of this, stylised sand dunes by NOD. 4. Plan of upper and lower storeys.



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K:fem Fashion store Vällingby, Sweden (2003)

As part of the regeneration of Vällingby centre Wingårdh has designed a fashion store, which comprises two buildings. The one at the front has a rectangular form while the smaller building, which is an annexe to the larger one, is triangular. The link to the square is immediate and brazen; here you encounter architecture that pulls customers into the building. A sharply cantilevered roof and a strongly recessed building create a dramatic effect that is strengthened by a red ceiling on which white logotypes have been placed. The façade is screen-printed glass that shifts from transparent to white. The entrance is formed by a large opening in the corner of the building. Gert Wingårdh’s predilection for relatively narrow passages that make surprise effects possible is often referred to. Here the relationship is reversed: the large opening lets those outside become aware of the inside. The experience is more like the contrast of inside/outside. The exterior is reduced while the interior reveals a number of forms and passages that lead away from the opening; lifts, spiral stairways and escalators. The little triangular annexe is designed exclusively as a boutique. Here the material is black glass emeral and the contrast to the white glass is evident. A narrow glazed passageway links the buildings.

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Rendering of the building’s main entrance. The innermost layer of the wall is red sheet metal. Glass panels with a white printed louvre pattern are fitted on the outside of this. The louvre patterning is completely white at the very bottom and completely transparent at the very top. The through-lit logotypes of the ceiling are cut out of a red film. The building by night, with the patterning of the screen-printed façade glazing now visible. Sections showing the open central room of the building and its link with the separate triangular volume. Ground floor (left) and first floor layout (right). General plan. The building conforms to the pre-existing pattern of the area, hence the separate volume at the very top.

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Björntand Opera and hotel Östersund, Sweden (2003)

At the top of the mountain a form appears that differs from the rest of the landscape. It is certainly not the strict geometrical shape that makes it stand out against the landscape’s organic character, but rather the contrary. Instead, its obviously soft organic style creates the deviation. As white as a snowflake, or shining like a lantern, the building represents a focus to be discovered. It is called Björntand (bear tooth) as its shape alludes to this and it is situated on the summit of a mountain in a natural ravine that is also a slalom slope. It will comprise a recreational centre with an opera seating 800, an exhibition hall and a hotel with 240 rooms and 50 exclusive flats. Björntand will be iconic in the same spirit as Santiago Calatrava’s Turning Torso in Malmö, and will put Östersund on the map. Björntand’s façade is composed of glass: it is double thickness in the hotel area, with a screen print on the outer level. The pattern has a varying level of intensity associated with ice and snow. The large open foyer leading from the main entrance characterises the interior. Once again the ambition was to surprise the visitor. Here an enormous room opens up towards the opera hall’s enclosed building, but becomes an intrinsic part of the landscape outside due to its large glass façade.

Östberget on the island of Frösön, near Östersund, with the opera wrapped in glass. Entrance floor, with the opera auditorium in the heart of the building. 3. General plan showing the positioning of the building in the midst of the skiing slope configuration.

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Sign Hotel, Norra Bantorget Stockholm, Sweden (2002)

In an early sketch of the hotel, the dominant elements were two bottlegreen towers, one of which formed an asymmetric cone reminiscent of the Arlanda airport air control tower or the Scandinavian Tower. In later sketches all the softness has been removed en rule there are no rounded corners or asymmetric cones here. The hotel is now razorsharp, two blades cut through the space between Norra Bantorget and the Central station. The two main bodies form an obvious scissors shape. The colour scale has also been changed en rule gone is the green and red, and black now dominates. There is an absolute gravity to one of the long sides. Black shiny stone runs in horizontal bands along its length and emphasises the building’s longitudinal direction. The other long side, facing Norra Bantorget, has a glassed façade. Here the two first floors are recessed and four pillars raise the cantilevered body of the building to form a loggia facing the square. The façade is broken up by each pillar and creates a change in tempo in the horizontal movement. Both buildings finish on a sharp point. Once again we see Wingårdh’s predilection for the projecting point. It creates a dramatic effect like a set design that always captures the eye of those passing by. Moreover, the point takes up and emphasises the direction of movement in the area.

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Tip of the building, where the façade on the shunting yard side, which is windowless for security reasons, has a cladding of polished, peen-hammered or rough-hewn black granite. General plan showing how the building has been wedged in between the shunting yard and the street. The hotel façade on the Norra Bantorget side leans slightly, intensifying the spatial unity of the piazza. In an early design, the building lay like a bottle-green glass serpent between two marked towers. Section showing Norra Bantorget on the left and the shunting yard on the right.

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Villa Astrid Private residence Gothenburg, Sweden (2002)

At first glance, Villa Astrid seems extremely complex, blasted as it is in between the rocks and surrounding houses, with its angles and corners and movement both upwards and downwards. From the outside, it looks like a relatively low building. The local plan states that the base of the roof should not exceed 3.5 metres. Gert Wingårdh has managed to construct a large house by excavating downwards, in between the rocks. This has also made it possible for him to create an element of surprise. The façade at the entrance has no openings, apart from the door. In that position you cannot understand the real height of the house. Once inside the door an atrium garden opens up and now the house suddenly becomes three storeys high. Once again we see Wingårdh’s predilection for creating an intensified experience for the user. The atrium garden offers a warm, pleasurable and windsheltered place to be in, as well as giving light to the house. The design of the house is simple. On the bottom floor are bedrooms and the tv room, on the ground floor you find the kitchen and eating area, a dining room, living room and library. Everything is arranged in a row. One detail is the mountain breaking into the living room. The façade is metal-clad and contrasts with the more traditional character of the surrounding buildings. The refractions of the archipelago landscape are echoed in the angles of the house.

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The seaward façade of the villa, with the “outsized” window imparting a surprising complexity. The building reveals its true height on the courtyard side. Here the private rooms, usually to be found one floor up, are on the ground floor. View of the inner corner of the building and of the factor governing the entire positioning – the sea. Where the ground rises, the house does the same, with a mezzanine storey above the rock which continues down into the bottom storey. The contours of the building stem from a creative interpretation of the area development regulations governing maximum height and roof pitch. The rock slab continues into the house through glazing cut into the bedrock and directly insulated from it. Section through living-room. Section through open yard.

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Dalsland Lodge Hotel Dals Ed, Sweden (2002)

Nature is magnificent. Lake Stora Le spreads itself out and in a little inlet you see a building that spans the abutments like a bridge. The building soars up to five metres above water level which makes it possible for boats to pass underneath. A landing stage runs under most of its length so that boats can moor here. There is a striking contrast between the unspoilt nature and the construction that breaks up the eye’s free movement in the bay. “The beam”, or Dalsland Lodge which is its correct name, is an elegant and exclusive recreational facility in an area of great natural beauty. The building comprises 30 rooms, a pool, restaurant and bar; everything to make a visit relaxing and pleasant. You can get here by train, car or boat from Gothenburg or Oslo. The aim is to attract foreign visitors for a short but exclusive visit. Dalsland Lodge is red and refers clearly to the traditional rustic red colour of the barn. Water is the theme that should permeate every visit to the Lodge. Water is constantly present wherever you are in the building, through the glazed floor, the pool and the aquarium. Water pours over the roof and in certain places Gert Wingårdh allows the water to run over the edge and down over the façade.

Rendering of the over 180-metre-long building, which has a free span of about 120 metres. Perspective and axonometries showing the possibilities of the large trellis-work structure. 3. Map of Stora Leer, with the intended positioning of the building straight across the narrow bay to the right. 4. Interior sketch, showing glass floor.

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Aranäs Upper Secondary School High school and theatre Kungsbacka, Sweden (2001)

Aranäs Secondary School is certainly not a cultural building with the same extensive programme as Ale Secondary School, but it has a similar ambition. Wingårdh was responsible for both the reconstruction and the new building. The entrance is dominated by a sharp extended point that leads the visitor in through the entrance door, which is bordered by the theatre building to the north. The aim to actively draw the visitor in is reminiscent of Ale Secondary School, though without the same sharp corners. The façade has a strong and concise character: large areas of black contrast with white and high above are various signs relating to knowledge and education. On the theatre, quite simply, is the word Theatre. The newly built area is dominated by two triangular buildings with atriums and the theatre building forms a square addition on the northern triangle. Wingårdh has used the triangular form in other contexts, and also the sharply pointed corner that takes up and emphasises a direction. The design is characterised by the same basic philosophy as in both Ale and Mimers House, namely to create an open and safe environment for the students. Here the corridors are glazed in. There is a cafe, library and theatre on the ground floor. On the floor above is a centrally placed space for studies with different sized classrooms placed around it. Its extremely light and positive image is created to a great extent by the large amount of light filling the atriums.

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The complex immediately adjoining Kungsbacka Centrum comprises a school and a theatre. School façade, decorated with symbols from many different branches of learning. Interior of one of the triangular indoor patios linking the study units together. The theatre auditorium, wheelchair-accessible without any technical additions. The playground, resembling a public piazza. Landscape architect Camilla Wenke/SCC. Reception counter adjoining the theatre entrance.

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Culture house Library and exhibition building Ulricehamn, Sweden (2003)

The glass form rises up and marks out the shoreline of Lake Åsunden. The building’s façade facing the water emphasises the natural curve of the beach and forms an extended, but clear S. The façade facing the lake is made of glass and angled Kerto beams. The glass removes the boundary between inside and outside. The lake becomes an active part of the activities in the building. Ulricehamn’s Culture House brings together a number of activities: a library, exhibition hall and auditorium. The design is simple, with the different functions added onto each other. The library and café extend along the entire breadth of the building, with mezzanines and boxes inserted for teaching facilities and music studios. The project had a tight budget and the Culture House uses simple materials and well-proven techniques. The floor is concrete and no exclusive woods are used in the building. All the wood is simple and stained with red distemper. The recycled glass is red like the Kerto beams, and the entire colour scheme is reminiscent of the typically Swedish rustic red colour.

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Perspective and plan of the building, which conforms to the shape of the beach. Ground floor and first floor.

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Polarportal Visitor centre and exhibition Oslo, Norway (2001)

Wingårdh has designed visitors’ centres with exhibition spaces in a number of different contexts, including Müritzeum in Germany. Müritzeum has a stringent geometric shape with two cones that intersect each other. The façade material is charred wood. Nordportalen is of a totally different character. Here cold, water and ice are the main themes. From a distance Nordportalen looks like a large block of ice rising up above the water level. The water has hollowed out the block to leave a number of ice pillars and above these a geometric form uniting them. The pillars are made of water-jet formed stainless steel.

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Rendering and elevation. The big steel sculpture was part of a grander scheme for developing Tjuvholmen, Oslo.

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Mimers House High school, municipal library, sport hall and theatre Kungälv, Sweden (2001)

Mimers House fulfils a number of different functions: theatre, library, music school, exhibition hall and secondary school. The aim is to create a building where there is always something going on. A building that seldom sleeps but is always used as a resource and a haven for those living in the town. The exterior is strict and restrained, characterised by an almost rational common sense. In this building facing the town, the façade is glazed and there are fibre-concrete sun shields alternatively mounted horizontally and vertically. The public spaces are the first you encounter and these have a welcoming character, contrasting with the exterior’s almost chilly austerity. The material is light wood panelling with occasional shots of colour in the fixtures and fittings. The design follows the reduced minimalism that one associates with the turn of the millennium. From the space of the foyer, you are transported via a system of stairs and passageways. The study rooms are in the inner sectors, separated from the public sectors but without losing contact altogether. The design of the school is characterised by openness; there are no narrow corridors that cannot be overlooked. The study rooms are oriented around an open courtyard with clear views of the different areas and so minimise the individual pupil’s exposure. Availability was a central concern for this building. Work was also carried out on coloration, amongst other things, to create an aesthetic style that also functions well from an orientation point of view.

The theatre, designed – like Kungsbacka – with all visitors’ convenience in mind, whatever their mobility. 2. The main entrance, with pale concrete sunshades. 3. Interior pictures. Progress through the public parts of the building offers several different room characters, from the library near the entrance to exhibition rooms and social areas. 4. Plans and section showing, among other things, the positioning of walkways on the upper storey of the building.

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Mölndalsbro Train station and bus terminal Mölndal, Sweden (2000)

Together with AstraZeneca, Mölndalsbro is a clear visual landmark for anyone travelling through Mölndal. Mölndalsbro is a hub for travelling, where commuter trains, long-distance trains and buses all come together. Its design marks and reinforces the clear directions and movements. On one level the system is simple: waiting rooms for those who want to be indoors and a continuous sheltering roof to protect those waiting outside from the rain and storms. This roof runs over the railway track and motorway like thin lines, with diagonal lines making movement possible between the different areas. The roof is narrow and high with sharp points projecting out into the corners. A delicate detail in the roof eaves is the double point that forms a W. Its height ensures that all types of buses pass freely underneath and the slimmed-down form gives a lightness to the whole construction. The colour scheme is warm and is designed to be welcoming for those who come here even when the weather is bad. The material used on the façades is rust-brown slate with untreated larch for the under-roof. Some of the glass panes are coloured, creating light effects on the floor and walls. The western and eastern waiting rooms are shaped differently. The eastern one has a straight and vertical gable whilst the wall in the western one is inclined. Wingårdh takes up this theme later in an auditorium project for Karolinska Institute.

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The bus terminal and platform decent to the right. View towards the café section. The terminal with the motorway underneath. Windows at the café section, partly covered by coloured film. The bus terminal, with roofing trailing the pedestrian routes. The café section, directly linked to the Mölndal civic and shopping centre. Waiting room and platform descent. Details of the two-tongued eaves, reducing the thickness of the roof beams to two edges.

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Photos of the Öijared Executive Country Club and its surroundings.

An architectural chameleon Harri Hautajärvi

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When examining Gert Wingårdh’s varied and unique production, which extends over a period of three decades, one feels compelled, on the one hand, to compare it to both contemporary architecture and the modernism of the last century, and on the other, to compare the individual and commonplace design practices of other architects. From a distance Sweden and Finland seem almost identical in terms of culture and society, but a closer look reveals many small differences. The architecture of these neighbouring countries is often compared – by Finns sometimes with a sense of pride, because Finland had Alvar Aalto and Reima Pietilä. Typical of these two masters of 20th-century architecture was the variation in their designs, creating different solutions for different circumstances. The fundamentalist wing of Modernist architecture has never appreciated the fact that the architect has a broad palette and thus in the 1960s and 1970s some architects criticised Aalto, but more so Pietilä, for not having a clear and “pure” style in the same way as, for instance, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe had. Also Eero Saarinen in his time became the target of the same dogmatic criticism, for the fact that all his works were different from each other. But the world has changed and has increasingly become a large potpourri of cultures, which has also broadened architecture towards a pluralism of styles and forms. Nevertheless, there are stubborn architects who, time after time, keep “designing the same building” irrespective of what the building is meant to be or where it is located or whether it fits, for example, into the historical milieu. With an individual and recognisable style it is possible to get critical attention and create a distinct brand, as in the architecture of Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid and Richard Meier. Polemicising slightly, one could say that in previous times Swedish architects used to joke that in Finland an architect-centred method of designing prevailed based on the heroic architecture of flat-roofed modernism. Finnish architects in turn complained that Swedish architecture was too anonymously client-centred, that it was too soft and pandered to the public with its new–old buildings. Gert Wingårdh emerged from such a contradictory postmodern architectural climate. After the most varied and different-looking small projects, Wingårdh began designing unique buildings, where the architect is a creative intuitive designer. He found inspiration, for instance, in the neighbouring country, Finland, where he was impressed by the sculptural work of Reima Pietilä. The Öijared Golf Club, which fascinatingly hides in the landscape, is an example where Wingårdh drew from

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Pietilä’s architecture. Sculpturality and free forms can also be found in Wingårdh’s other works, such as the AstraZeneca staff restaurant and the Hogia headquarters. It is typical of Wingårdh to draw inspiration from the most varied sources and apply them bravely and unconventionally. The solutions, forms and materials in the different projects vary considerably. The works range from a small archipelago villa to the headquarters of a large pharmaceutical company, and correspondingly the whole spectrum of the architecture ranges from soft and down-to-earth building, organic forms and natural materials, turf roofs and red distemperpainted timber walls to cool and straightforward high-tech and steel and glass structures. Of particular interest are the many smaller buildings, of which one can find modern applications derived from traditional buildings. There are also archetypal houses, such as the charming Mill House. Wingårdh does not mould his buildings into a particular form or style, but instead seems to develop and invent new and different applications depending on the situation, and sometimes in a ground-breaking way. In this sense his method would seem to be a curious form of play as opposed to rigorous seriousness. The function and location of a building seem to be the key starting points for the design solution rather than the predestined idea of one’s own style. Thus the buildings designed by Wingårdh easily adapt to the location and surroundings and, furthermore, have a recognisable identity. What they all have in common is the use of natural light and highquality materials and detailing. A consideration for a building with a long life-span also seems to be an important factor for Wingårdh, because many of his buildings have, apart from durable materials, sloping roofs and large overhanging eaves – in other words, there is a healthy realism of the demanding northern climatic conditions. Also, in this sense, Wingårdh has broken away from the dogmas of traditional fundamentalist modernism. What is new in Wingårdh’s work in recent years is the appearance of a modernist minimalist architecture, based on international trends, at the expense of the earlier varied and personal approach. Wingårdh’s strength, however, lies in his versatile and sculptural architecture. But also the minimalist and box-shaped buildings he designs with the help of his assistants are done in such fine detail that they stand apart from the rest of the works, often in a positive way. Wingårdh’s production is extensive, as is the number of assistants in his office. Judging by the variation in the buildings that the office

has designed, one could deduce that the project leaders also influence the design solutions. There is also the fact that Wingårdh has two offices, one at each end of Sweden. Running, organising and delegating in such an organisation is in itself already a very demanding task, but Wingårdh seems to manage well. Proof of this is the quality of the designs and the continuous renewal of the architecture. Moreover, the well of Wingårdh’s creativity shows no sign of drying up, because new, interesting and widely varying competition proposals and buildings continue to emerge.

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The author is a Finnish architect and the editor-in-chief of Arkkitehti, The Finnish Architectural Review.

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From rabblerouser to established trendsetter

1990  –1999 “Fight” Mark Isitt

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Gert Wingårdh is Sweden’s most influential architect. Not because of his buildings, but because he has reclaimed architecture for the people. More than a quarter of a century has passed since he embarked on his personal crusade, and if his colleagues had been less formal he would have been dubbed “rabble-rouser”, “big mouth” and “trendy”. For his own part, he sees himself as an architect whose ambition is to create “radical buildings that move people”; as a person restoring quality awareness to the architect’s profession, by taking responsibility for everything, from the idea to the tiniest fitting; and as a pain in the neck. Gert Wingårdh cultivates an image. Those who know him insist he is generous, exuberant, impatient, romantic, vain. But first and foremost he is a truth-teller. At least, that is how he wants to be seen. Wingårdh does what he can to break free of the attitude of detachment characterising the profession as a whole. No one would travel to the ends of the earth to talk to the typical Swedish architect – a white-shirted man spouting decorous clichés about user-friendliness and the importance of a roof over one’s head – but Wingårdh is different. Whatever the topic of conversation, he is quotable. Want to talk politics? “I’m pro-Bush, because no one else is.” Globalisation? “I’m all for it. Eating strawberries all the year round can’t be wrong.” Fashion? “The nearer you get to the body, the more difficult design becomes – T-shirts are a nightmare.” Or is all you want some entertaining facts and figures? “Do you know how long it takes for the population of China to march past? They can’t, because they’re multiplying faster.” And you still haven’t touched on what is perhaps the great love of his life: aircraft. “I can tell the Boeing 700-series from the 800 by listening. The 737 sounds at a slightly lower pitch, it’s to do with the length of the cabin.” On the subject of architecture, needless to say, he is particularly impassioned. Showing people round his buildings he gets as boisterous as a crowded school bus, spouting beautifully constructed, vividly descriptive tirades with almost hypnotic ease. He is super-articulate, an incessant talker. A cosmopolitan. And yet there is quite a different side to him which makes him interesting to the general public. I call it his “Ingemar Johansson personality”. Ingo pops up when Wingårdh wants to undermine something he is saying, show that he knows perfectly well he is talking in clichés or sounding omniscient and smug like some colleague or other. Then he raises his eyebrows, sticks his chin out and turns on

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the thickest of Gothenburg accents. Ingo is his ironic media-ego, but this too is a statement: even if he designs buildings to last a hundred years, he is still ”the guy next door”. Ingo is his attempt to narrow the gap between expert and general public. Clients love it, of course, and any detractors – Swedish architecture reviewers aren’t exactly vulpine – are quickly charmed to silence. Defiance, I believe, is something Gert Wingårdh inherited from his great-grandfather. Carl August Bernhard Wingårdh was a self-made man from Helsingborg who advanced from grocer’s errand boy to owner of the grocer’s shop to big fertiliser salesman to director of two fertiliser factories of his own, one in Malmö and one in Riga. On the beach, a mere 50 metres away from the royal residence of Sofiero Castle, he had a monument erected to himself, a fairytale castle where, seated in his turret chamber, he could play the Habsburg and see all the way to Hamlet’s Kronborg in Helsingør (Elsinore). Which was more than the royals could. Wingårdh’s elegant tower blocked their view. Would Mr Wingårdh consider taking down that copper tower cap? Nope. Whereupon the royals were obliged to buy the tower – and the house that went with it. In 1909 Crown Prince Gustav Adolf and Princess Margareta dismantled the spire, only to see Wingårdh building a still more ostentatious villa a short way off. Fertiliser King vs. Royal Family, 1–  0. Carl August Bernhard had a son called Erik. He was Gert Wingårdh’s grandfather, and from him Gert may have inherited a certain clear-sightedness. Erik Wingårdh was a graduate engineer and was working in the Riga factory when his father gave him the go-ahead for starting up in Skövde. That locality had an abundance of lime which was turned into fertiliser, but the business paid badly and Erik switched over to cement production. He started the ab Gullhögen factory in 1923, and by the time of his death – in 1953, from a heart attack suffered while on a European boat trip – Gullhögen was one of the most successful cement manufacturers in Sweden. “Grandfather’s factory dominated the whole town,” said Gert Wingårdh, broadcasting as summertime guest speaker on Swedish Radio in 2004 – probably the first architect ever to do so, which says a good deal about his having the common touch. “Tall silos, chimneys belching smoke, fire, creakings and rattlings, rotary furnaces, stone quarries and dynamite blasting, excavators and, the coolest thing of all, dumper trucks the height of houses. Having a father who could, literally, move mountains was very good for your self-confidence.”

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Little Gert divided his time between his grandmother’s National Romantic manager’s villa and the parental home next to it, which was also of fitting dignity, designed for the family by Hans-Erland Heineman. Bo, Gert’s father, succeeded Grandpa Erik as production manager, and, talking to the locals, one gets a feeling that the Wingårdhs lived in almost shameless luxury. “In between the villas there was a huge market garden with a swimming pool and its own gardener,” one of them recalls. “The guy next door?” Not exactly. In the winter of 1961, when Gert was ten, the family moved into a house in Påvelund, on the outskirts of Gothenburg. Gullhögen had been sold by then, and Gert’s father, having made a snip, was enjoying himself reading humanities at the university, while Ulla, Gert’s mother, was a full-time housewife. The move was not quite such a pleasant experience for Gert himself. On his first day at school he wore a fur cap with ear flaps that could be tied under his chin, for which he was immediately nicknamed “the Cossack Fiasco”. “The word ‘bullied’ didn’t exist in those days,” he recalled in his radio broadcast. “From being the centre of attention in Skövde I was now a nonentity in Gothenburg. I was wholly exempted from friendship. So I sought refuge in cleverness. School was one possibility, aircraft another; I spent a whole summer in the Chalmers University of Technology library, copying aircraft silhouettes. And then came music: the Who, Velvet Underground, the Doors. My father went haywire. I started smoking, drinking vodka and lime, going to clubs. The debating technique I developed against my mother and father as a teenager is, I think, one of my greatest assets today.” So where did this industrious oddball stand when the 80s turned into the 90s, that era of refreshing greed, newly awakened prudery, healthy social conformism, narrow-minded do-goodery and alluring prejudice? In stockinged feet, if I remember rightly. I interviewed him for the first time in April 1989, and he came shuffling out from his office on the sixth floor of Kungsgatan 10a in Gothenburg – the same address as now. Ragged black jeans, faded black college sweater, shoulderlength dark hair. Six months earlier he had won his first Kasper Salin prize for the Öijared Golf Club. I asked how highly he valued the distinction. “Whatever you do before 40 is only sketches.” He was 38 at the time. After he had piloted me through a number of highly colourful and

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material-saturated interiors, we went to the covered market and, sitting in the Amanda Boman restaurant over a bookmaker’s sandwich, he slouched over the table and, hidden behind shoulder pads the size of ice-hockey armour, nodded in the direction of a nearby table: “That guy’s an architect and his grandfather was an architect and his father, and now his daughter’s a trainee in the office.” As if to indicate how hopelessly conservative was the architect’s profession and how he intended to start a new era. Which he did only a couple of months later. Thanks to a gastric ulcer. The Fass pharmacology directory says that Losec “neutralises the acid gastric juices which help to cause ulceration of the duodenum.” Wingårdh knew nothing of the duodenum, but the successes of Astra Hässle were common knowledge. Every year Losec reaped huge profits for the pharmaceutical company, and before long the Mölndal research facility with all its brickwork was looking outdated. The existing 38,000 square metres needed doubling at least and, given the world dominion Astra had secured for itself, the occasion was seen to require a proper architects’ competition. It was a case of all or nothing. The Astra people sent invitations to a small but very exclusive cadre of practices – four of them, the cream of the profession, the Schumachers of lab architecture. With only one stipulation: the architect’s office had to be located in, well, Gothenburg. Victory in that district championship was a sine qua non of Wingårdh’s position today. Of course, the sheer scale of the assignment made for a somewhat stressful existence. For the duration of the project he was bound by contract to devote 80 per cent of his time to Astra, from the time of winning the competition in 1989 up to and including 1996, when Mats Nordén, the somewhat choleric project leader, was fired. But without Astra there would have been no big office, no 124 employees, no 60 projects in progress, no 20 buildings under construction (which is counting the 450 Volvo environments as one). For even though Wingårdh had been acclaimed already in 1989 – in my article I canonised him as “the Saviour of Architecture” – he was completely untried in the big contexts. Many looked on him as being all show and no substance. Or, as the architect Ragnar Uppman, advisor to the Astra competition, put it: “In the assessment group we agreed not to look at Gert but only at the pictures he showed. His presence threatened to transfer interest from cause to person, to the perilous detriment of credibility.”

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The assessment group are said to have been particularly put out by a crumpled suit, though Uppman could see that this had little in common with the clear-cut scheme that Wingårdh presented. In the course of his 120 rigorously edited minutes, Wingårdh came close to foaming at the mouth from his high-speed discourse on Norman Foster’s glazed façades, Meinhard von Gerkan’s sun-screening metal lamellas and Glen Murcutt’s corrugated iron houses, and his assistant worked away at the remote control as if it were a Game Boy. If it had been today, with the status Wingårdh now enjoys, he could have walked in like a Bruce Willis, just croaking: “You folks ever heard of the Holy Trinity?” The layout: anthropomorphic. The funnel-shaped entrance to the office block is the mouth; the central passage the oesophagus; the labs the lungs and liver; the restaurant at the end the stomach. In the 200-metre-long oesophagus it is “Hi there, how’s things? Cooked any good chromosomes lately?”, you borrow a book from the library and slink into the shop to buy a flower for the pet cemetery. Or you Fred Astaire across the limestone floor to the restaurant, a bright, diaphanous reinterpretation of comfy Öijared, built round a rocky outcrop instead of inside it. You move from space to densification to space, all in the same area as before. And the cool interior makes a perfect counterpoise to the austerity of the building, one of Wingårdh’s best ever. Hi-tech: the ventilation units are hidden by peaked caps on the roof and the ventilation shafts are wedged into the end walls. In this way the storeys can be freely structured. The sides are glazed and daylight floods in over the hollow-eyed research scientists and their presumably still more hollow-eyed experimental animals. Glass of various hues limits the admission of light, as do lamellas inspired by – you guessed it – aircraft wings. This is the building as machine and a stylish reflection of what the white-coated ones are up to in there. Trademark: Astra is situated at the intersection of the e6 highway and the Kungsbackaleden freeway, perhaps two of the busiest roads in Sweden. More than half a million vehicles pass by daily, doing an average of 100 km/h. Only the blind or the drunk can fail to see the complex, which from every angle looks both radiant and radiating; on a fine day the buildings scatter heat-monkeys round about them. This complex is a better advert for Astra than all the world’s hoardings, emblematic of the operation. As always with pioneering projects it’s hard now to realize just how radical it was when it first came. Uppman had seen efficiently

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structured plans before – and Wingårdh has delivered a good many more since – but “Hi-tech” and “Trademark” were the confectionery of smooth-talking hifi dealers. But then again, Wingårdh had a set of references that was all his own. While his Swedish colleagues were struggling in vain to reconcile the ideals of 1968 with catchy postmodernism, Wingårdh, carefree cosmopolitan that he was, turned his back on Sweden and Interrailed through the usa and Europe with a tattered, well-thumbed copy of Robert Venturi’s Learning from Las Vegas in his jacket pocket. And he has stayed that way, inveterately lacing his project presentations with international architects faster than others can think. A dropping of names that above all has to do with marking his independence from his Swedish heritage – “Aren’t you with me? Don’t you get it?” Four days a week at Astra. Given Wingårdh’s self-discipline, that left three days for other tasks. Between the end of 1989 and the end of 1996 he completed an almost mind-blowing total of 56 projects, not including Astra. And if we take him at his word when he says that he took hardly a single day’s holiday in the 90s, my pocket calculator tells me that an average of eight-and-a-half days was devoted to each account. Easily done with more than 50 employees? Perhaps, but Wingårdh says that the projects at that time were 90 per cent himself – “Not like today, when I only have time to involve myself in half of them.” And when I interviewed him in May this year, he said: “If I were to sum up the 90s in just one word, it has to be ‘Fight’. The 2000s I’d call ‘Flow’. And the 2010s? ‘Flat’.” Perhaps the rate of production had something to do with his personal situation. In 1989 he divorced his sweetheart of his youth, leather-clad Annika Egenwall, the former Gothenburgs Prima vocalist and mother of his two children. A year later he met Karin, architect, now a member of the office team and the mother of his third child. Or else, quite simply, it has to do with age: “The 90s are the decade when I’m forty-something, perhaps the strongest decade in anyone’s life – you’re still young, but you’re also experienced,” he once said. Most probably, though, he saw his chance of playing and testing new concepts so long as Astra footed the bills; for the first time in his professional career he had money and did not have to fall back on Annika Wingårdh’s advertising revenues. One of these architectural new departures was the Ale High School on the outskirts of Gothenburg. Although produced concurrently

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with Astra, between 1993 and 1995, it has very little in common with laboratory experiments and experimental mice – though some of the students might beg to differ. It is “low-tech” versus “hi-tech”, retro versus future, raw concrete versus smooth limestone. If Astra’s layout can be called an autobahn, Ale’s is a forest path (a highly dubious arrangement for a school). And whereas Astra’s palette is bright and elegant, Ale’s is muffled, the site-cast concrete painted dirty yellow and swampy green, in blotchy distemper throughout. One recognises the bid to create a piece of trademark architecture: the entrance building has a dramatic ceiling of dark blue ceramic. But even though some kind soul has likened this ceiling to a “butterfly on the wing”, it is more than anything else reminiscent of a stealth aircraft, it’s that welcoming. And the school being a prime instance of ecological building, complete with natural ventilation and self-heating, is not much of a sales argument for head teacher Roy Jörgensen to fall back on now that barely one-third of Ale’s compulsory school leavers are opting to attend Wingårdh’s creation. Mark: Failed. And yet any Swedish architect you care to name would gladly exchange his corduroy suit for Wingårdh’s first half of the 90s. The same year he designed Ale, he designed an office for Ericsson in Borås, a brief which has now resulted in buildings in Lund and Beijing too, plus innumerable interiors for the same company. And the year before that, he and Karin had bought an old crofter’s holding to which, delirious with National Romanticism and sea air, they had added two turf-roofed wings painted Falun (Swedish) red – an impressive fullscale experiment with the ecological solutions later adopted for Ale. And his best-detailed building up till then was completed at the same time. Villa Nilsson (1989  –  92): a simple pen stroke of a layout which he fragmented and complicated and overlaid until – hey presto! – he had a house on the brink of dissolution. He garbed Villa Nilsson in rough-cut staves of granite, both inside and out, and in the hallway the bedrock slabs thrust out from floor and wall. A good many socks and stockings could well have been worn out on that granite floor, but not with this client: Rolf Nilsson founded the well-known Din Sko footwear concern. In addition, AstraZeneca (as it is now known) brought Wingårdh his second Kasper Salin prize (1993), making him as victorious as Ralph Erskine himself. Most people knew the comparison was rather a hollow one, Wingårdh had no Tengboms, Ahlséns or Markeliuses

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to contend with. And unlike Erskine, whose golden years came during a period when architects shared roughly the same glorious credibility as journalists, Wingårdh homed in on a boom period with no counterpart. Obviously the prize meant a lot to him personally. As he himself put it, “It proved I wasn’t just a one-hit wonder.” Wingårdh designed three prestigious government projects in the second half of the 90s, namely the Arlanda control tower, the Swedish Embassy in Berlin and the proposed arena for the Stockholm Olympics in 2004, resembling a classical amphitheatre (but the Olympics Committee preferred “the real deal” and chose Athens). Through these three assignments he achieved three things: (1) He showed that he was internationally viable – Santiago Calatrava was the prime contender for designing the arena. Rem Koolhaas didn’t have a chance. (2) He moved from intra-professional celebrity to celebrity tout court – or whatever you call someone whose name alone put an extra half million kronor on the house price (according to Arkitekthus). (3) Most important of all, he cemented good relations with perhaps the most trendsetting clients in Sweden – the politicians of Stockholm City Hall and their architects at the City Planning Administration and the National Property Board. That love affair with Stockholm institutions is still going strong: the Fatburen office complex, Konstfack (the University College of Arts, Crafts and Design), the Swedish Embassy in Washington, dc, the Vällingby fashion store and the Sign Hotel on Norra Bantorget (Stockholm) have all materialised since then. It is still a matter of being best when the chips are down: three of the briefs resulted from competition victories. But in order to win you have to compete, and to compete you have to be invited, and to get invited you don’t just have to rake in Kasper Salin prizes. There is no harm in being a little “pliant”, as Jan Thews, former project leader at the National Property Board, has described Wingårdh: “Gert’s great advantage is his ability to turn a bit of business into architecture, he can reconcile extremes like that. And he listens to the client’s argument. It’s fantastic.” This “pliancy”, more than anything else, is Wingårdh’s strong point. No Swedish architect is better at interpreting the clients’ wishes. Take Washington, dc, for example. Whereas the other four competitors tried to cobble together a spectacular building on the square plot, Wingårdh delivered a volume fully adapted to the limits of the

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precinct. The result was a block – “as neat a shape as any other,” he said – giving a maximum of rentable floor space. In addition it meant a fairly unsophisticated structure which lowered construction costs and was intelligible even to the notoriously bad American construction workers. Knowing what to measure and how to measure it, and thereby transforming complicated decisions into simple ones, is another of Wingårdh’s talents. From an early stage in his career he took up the cudgels against the construction industry’s hazily formulated conventions by pointing out to the clients that the difference between the cheapest and the dearest contractor could sometimes be 100 per cent, and that any haggling should focus on that, not on the architecture, which, after all, accounted for only a tiny share of the final cost. The point he was making was clear for all to see: smart purchasing means more money for architecture. The effect of this simple revision of priorities can be seen in every little house that Wingårdh has designed. Wingårdh’s projects are probably the most thoroughly drawn in the country. Mention has already been made of the Villa Nilsson granite collage, but a still more striking example can be found in the tiny Kvarnhuset residence (1998 –2000) on the outskirts of Båstad. An ostensibly plain guest chalet measuring 50 square metres turns out to contain landings and steps and uninterrupted vistas, and the miniature scale of the building can be read off from wherever you are standing. One recognises the material from Astra – limestone and oak, with glazing from floor to ceiling – and the finish is so exceptional that the house resembles nothing so much as a tiny casket. The Berlin embassy attains almost the same pitch of detailing. Seen from the outside it is “really drab”, in the words of Foreign Affairs Ministry people I talked to at the official opening in 1999, but the lobby contains soft limestone set against stained birch panelling and joins of oxidised copper, while curling down from the roof is a serpentine staircase which is the loveliest thing that Wingårdh ever designed. All the more tragic, then, that the loose furnishings are a disaster. Not in the lobby – set with leather-and-metal armchairs specially designed by Mats Theselius – but on the other three office storeys, where Wingårdh had no say in matters. That assignment went instead to White, because they were cheaper. This is termed “public procurement” in Orwellian Newspeak and “a f–ing shame” in Wingårdh’s Swedish, but here again he has succeeded in disarming

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the system. As he declared at the opening of the Washington embassy (for which he designed both building and interior), “Today we charge so little for the interior design brief that no one can undercut us. We are even prepared to take a loss in order to be given overall responsibility.” If Gert Wingårdh’s “pliancy” is his greatest strength, it is also his greatest weakness. “Gert is at everyone’s service,” as Anders Wilhelmson, Wingårdh’s former business partner, critically puts it. Wilhelmson would like to see an architecture more rooted in ideology, but clearly Wingårdh’s prime objective is to build not to moralise. Build–build–build! With a near-anabolic frenzy. That will to build is far stronger than his desire to produce innovative architecture, as witness, for example, his changeability. In the late 80s he was Pomo, in the less flamboyant first half of the 90s he turned modernist and ecological, and when the economic tide turned and no client could dream of anything but the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, he became expressive and noisy and so intent on creating landmarks that there were times when he came close to being trivial (Scandinavian Tower in Malmö). There are of course recurrent elements in his work. Apart from cantilevered diagonals and a superabundance of limestone – a material which he already fell in love with in his father’s factory – it is the layouts which avert one to the possibility of this being a Wingårdh building. The layouts are lucid and well-trimmed and always provide the starting point for the architectural dress. The latter, by contrast, is tailor-made for each new competition and for every new client. This working approach can be politely termed “pragmatic” and impolitely “opportune”. And, putting it in musical terms, one can say that Wingårdh, who grew up on avant-garde art rock and punk, seems from the 90s onwards to be listening mostly to the Billboard list. The simile jars with his desire to come across as a radical, but not even his most rallying press statements do anything to alter that picture. His debate contributions are for the most part gently ironic – Ingo style – as if quickly cobbled together for a tv discussion he doesn’t want to stay out of. Even his infatuation with tower blocks seems pretty harmless: how much risk is there really in pleading for skyscrapers in one of the world’s most sparsely populated countries? Even if he were to realise a couple of them, high-rise architecture would never impact very heavily on our way of life. Most of all he would probably like to steer clear of debating alto-

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gether. At least, it seemed so in 1998. That year he and five other architects were invited to compete for Sweden’s pavilion at Expo 2000 in Hanover. Aspirations were running high, Sweden was at last to be manifested through bold architecture, but the initiative was frittered away. Because ncc, the contractors, wanted a building they could take over and turn into offices, the pavilion ended up as just a plain black box. Not all that radical, and all the indications were that the jury had been nobbled. Whereupon the architects taking part sent a very critical letter to the jury chairman. Everyone signed it, except Wingårdh (and the delighted winning entrant). The foremost example of his chameleon-like vocabulary is the Universeum science centre and Chalmers Student Union building – the Gothenburg institutions rounding off his 1990s. Although they were produced simultaneously and completed simultaneously and although they are only a jerky five-minute tram ride apart, they are as different as two continents. If we may view the world in an old-fashioned Phileas Fogg perspective, Universeum is Africa and the Student Union Europe. Universeum communicates and enthuses, everything is titled diagonally, everything looks unedited but quickly proves to be as judiciously balanced as the cosmopolitan Wingårdh’s bubbling sentences. The Student Union, for its part, is more austere, and all diagonals have been proscribed; it is even dressed in black (slate) and white (limestone) and it is more softspoken and academic than anything he had done before. Both effectively solve the problem on the spot, but neither of them presents a unique idiom. Instead they are typical instances of Wingårdh’s tendency to refer to high and low in modern architecture. In musical terminology this is called “sampling”, and just as in hop-hop, spotting the samplings in Wingårdh’s buildings has become something of a sport. In the Student Union building it is Diener & Diener and Peter Zumthor, and in Universeum it is Herzog & de Meuron and Peter Zumthor. In 1997 Zumthor became a personal friend of Wingårdh’s during three weeks of sauna sessions and jury deliberations in Jyväskylä. Zumthor was also invited to take part in the Universeum competition but did not grasp the message till it was too late, the City of Gothenburg having sent the invitation in Swedish. The most impressive thing about both buildings is their layouts, despite the “wrong” layout ending up in the “wrong” building. That is to say, inside the punctiliously straight façades of the Student Union

building, the spatialities flow freely, into each other and out into the pre-existing structures – an ordered chaos. And inside Universeum’s cut-and-paste interface there prevails an unexpected military discipline, four rigidly defined boxes on top of each other: first the wooden nave housing the entrance, restaurant and exhibition galleries; then the greenhouse where an entire rain forest threatens to burst the glazing; then the stone caisson with its shark-filled aquariums; and at the very top, a channel plastic box containing Lofty Mountains of the North. The inclined lift takes you from the entrance up a mountain and, stepping out beside the trickling mountain stream on the tenth floor, you follow it down through the world’s different climates all the way back to the entrance again. It’s round the world in 80 minutes or so and Wingårdh’s best idea ever. The Chalmers Student Union building earned Wingårdh his third Kasper Salin prize in 2001. Universeum wasn’t even nominated. But that same year the Swedish people voted it the best modern building in the country. It’s easy enough to work out which of Wingårdh’s buildings he himself prefers: “Universeum. Because it’s aimed at young people with brainpower, whereas the Student Union building is stiff and square and aimed at a target group of limited intelligence.” Says Ingemar Johansson.

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Mark Isitt is an architecture and design journalist based in Stockholm. He grew up in Marstrand, near Gothenburg, and first heard speak of Gert Wingårdh at the age of nine when a Chalmers student proclaimed him the bright spark of the class. At the age of 16 he came across the name again while on work experience in Lars and Margareta Åberg’s architecture practice; both of them were former teachers of Wingårdh’s. He interviewed Wingårdh for the first time in 1989 and since then has published about ten articles on Wingårdh’s work, several of them in Forum AID, the journal of architecture and design which Isitt was in charge of between 1999 and 2007.

1990  –1999 Sergels Tower Kajplats 01 Universeum House at Amundön Ericsson St James The Mill House Auditorium and Student Union at Chalmers Scandinavian twr Sweden’s embassy in Berlin Victoria Olympia Stadium Arlanda twr Ale Upper Secondary School and Culture Centre

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Sergels Tower Housing Stockholm, Sweden (1999)

A skyscraper at Sergels Torg in Stockholm! The proposal angered some politicians. They protested against a building that differed from the height of the other buildings. Gert Wingårdh worked on the proposal together with the architect Thomas Sandell. Sergels Tower has a clear tripartite division similar to the air control tower at Arlanda airport and the Scandinavian Tower in Malmö: base, shaft and capital. There the likeness ends. Sergelstorn is a straight, 110-metre-high shaft without projecting sections. There are no associations to animals here. All the articulation lies within its strict geometry. The structure is comprised of two towers on either side of a glassed stairway and lift hall. The two towers are marked at the end, two projecting heads. They are made up of two four-storey-high penthouses. The skyscraper is very slim and the problem for Sergels Tower seems to have been: how narrow can a skyscraper be?

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Rendering of the entry in which veneer was to have been laminated in between the glass panels of the impervious parts of the building.

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Kajplats 01 Housing Malmö, Sweden (1999)

Kajplats 01 is superlatively informed by its nearness to the sea. There has to be a view of Öresund, and the façade is nearly all windows. Wingårdh has refrained from balconies interrupting the smooth surface of the façade, and instead a lively rhythm is set up by a pattern of horizontal and vertical window rectangles. Inversion of the layout achieves a distinct variation of the façade. The solution inside leaves an impress on the exterior. The apartments occupy two storeys. For all the rhythm of its fenestration, this remains a stern-looking edifice, a clear example of the austerity of form characterising so much architecture, and design too, in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The façade expression is distinctly geometric, with rectangle added to rectangle. The roof terraces, as well as an enclosed courtyard for the residents, cater to sun worship. In the corner out towards the sea the building terminates in a glazed projecting part forming a definite accent. Perhaps a lighthouse playfully reinterpreted? However construed, it is a magnificent room to be in whatever the weather. Only in the lower wing building does one find a departure from the smooth surface. Here the windows are retracted in relation to the façade line and the walls out towards the façade are set at an angle. The main building out towards the strait and the wing is entirely different in character, giving it more in common with an elegant hotel in a Mediterranean bathing resort. Kajplats 01 was Wingårdh’s contribution to the Bo01 Housing Expo in Malmö in 2001.

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Façade of the low-rise section, with angled window embrasures concentrating the view of land and sea. Façade towards the sea. Glass barriers with moss caulking between the panes, an idea by NOD. The building viewed from the south-east. Detailed pictures showing the effects of the fenestration on façade and interior. Indoor staircase, with treads and risers of laminated glass.

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Universeum Science centre Gothenburg, Sweden (1998)

Universeum is a science centre where animal life in and around water is reproduced to imitate nature. The design of the building takes its direction from Korsvägen. The entrance is characterised by a sharply pointed angle facing the travel centre that Wingårdh designed on Korsvägen. The design is simple and Universeum “draws in” people who come from the centre. The façade facing Korsvägen is dominated by three themes: the large glass wall facing the rainforest section, the two projecting wooden modules, and the shelter of glulam wooden framework beams. The south-west and west-facing façades of the experiment workshop have a mounted screen of frosted glass making temperature regulation possible. Universeum has another façade theme and that is the upper portion facing west, the so-called stone chest. Here the façade is composed of blast stone. Once inside the building the glass wall to the left of the rainforest section takes over and extends through five floors. Apart from this, walking is directed so that movement is from the back going forwards, up going down. You take the lift up to the top of the stone chest and then begin the tour through Swedish nature. After this you make your way down through the immense world of the oceans, before you finally encounter the animals in the mythical rainforest. The programme may seem complicated but through Wingårdh’s designs it follows a relatively simple course.

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Universeum from the north. The technology exhibitions nearest Södra Vägen (South Road), above that the tropical building, above that the aquarium section and at the very top the Swedish natural history exhibition. The roof terrace beneath the big latticework roof of untreated wood. The stairwell between the tropical building and the exhibition building. Detail of the roof, optimised for carrying solar collectors. Evening picture, with the high Liseberg viewing tower in the background. Detail of the technology exhibition façade, most of it protected by plane glass on the outside. Sketch for the technology exhibition building. The Södra Vägen façade. Underside of the wooden latticework in which the climate shell of the tropical building is suspended. The point presented by the building to the city, built up of simple, unworked materials.

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House at Amundön Private residence Gothenburg, Sweden (1998)

A straight asphalt road between sea-polished granite leads up to a pale cement-rendered wall and you can see almost anonymous wood rails in the corner. The entrance reveals nothing of what is to come once you have passed the rails and walked over the threshold into the house at Amundön. The first thing you see in front of the door is the descending, deep tapering stairway. It is a powerful image; a flow of light entices at the end of the stairs and encourages you to continue walking around the house. At the foot of the stairs, you enter a room with a ceiling height of seven metres. The stairway finishes almost at the glass wall and sideways for the visitor. There is a pool by the extension of the stairway that also completes the line. The sleeping and working areas are to the left and a large open-plan area to the right consisting of kitchen, living room and dining area. As with several of Gert Wingårdh’s houses this is an extended plan with a simple functional division. What chiefly characterises the house at Amundön is the series of ah-ha experiences you pass through with the obvious aim of surprising the visitor. One characteristic detail in the house is the light that seeps in through the marble slabs placed in pairs on the terrace.

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The low-rise entrance façade between two rocks. View of the green roof of the house, looking out towards the sea. Seaward façade, with the long pool as an aquatic intermediary. Immediately inside the entrance, the concealed view opens up through narrow clefts in two directions. View of the bay from the terrace one floor down. Upper storey layout. Layout one floor down.

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Ericsson St James Office block London, uk (1998)

The image meeting the observer’s eye when looking up at the atrium ceiling is an intricate game of abstract forms. It could just as well have been an abstract minimalist artwork, but instead is the stairway system of Ericsson’s office in London. Gert Wingårdh himself writes that his inspiration came from a painting by the artist Frank Stella. The entire pattern of angled, rounded and diagonal shapes becomes an active and lively symbol of the importance of communication. Whatever position you choose when moving in the atrium, sideways or up or down, the visual picture changes constantly. Here it is obvious that Wingårdh wants to create surprises and experiences. The outside of the stairway is painted white while the inside is panelled in maple, a choice of colour and material that is revisited in the office areas. The interior design is what chiefly characterised 1990s design; cool, light and restrained. The aim of the project was to develop and increase the degree of collaboration between the people working at the office. The plan is open; here the conscious aim is to have an office environment that encourages contact between the employees. There are other meeting places in direct connection with the light atrium. Executed together with Thomas Sandell.

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The central patio room, where communication is the prime concern.

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The Mill House Residence and sauna Västra Karup, Båstad, Sweden (1998)

The brook in the ravine that makes its way over the plot becomes part of the garden arrangement. The large stones in the water break through the surface like mystical prehistoric creatures and willow screens rhythmically divide the eastern side of the trough. Free and unbounded nature contrasts with nature controlled by man. The framing of the little mill house is sublime, almost seductively beautiful. The Mill House is a small annexe to a large farm. The Mill House stands on concrete and limestone slabs creating a remarkable feeling that the house is floating freely on the water. The house and garden arrangements are reminiscent of Japanese architecture, but there is also an element here of modern southern Swedish half-timbered houses. Delicate details may derive from the Italian architect Carlo Scarpa, particularly the little water pipe that allows the rippling water to run out into the trough via a natural stone channel. The building’s plan is square and divided into smaller squares. The functions are a small kitchen, living room and sauna, plus a small open sleeping loft. Once again the treatment of materials and details has been taken to its extreme.

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Façade facing the artificial ponds. Garden design by NOD. Interior, showing the freely suspended fireplace. Oak and limestone are the materials used. 3. The bedroom loft, with a glazed section in which single panes have been fitted at 40-cm intervals. 2.

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Auditorium and Student Union at Chalmers Student union building and auditorium Gothenburg, Sweden (1999)

Gert Wingårdh has emerged over the last twenty years as one of the most lively and creative architects in Sweden, breaking through the hidebound and bureaucratised Swedish norm with a series of surprisingly diverse, exciting, and well-executed buildings. That these have not appeared earlier in ar* is perhaps due to the specificity of the work, which is always closely responsive to time and place, so not easy to appreciate at a distance. It has not helped, either, that Wingårdh feels no great compulsion to engage in theoretical debate and to prop up his work with rhetorical alibis. For the critic or historian he is hard to pigeon-hole, for he has shown a wide range of interests and skills, switching from one architectural issue to another as the project demands. Such flexibility should be regarded as a virtue, of course, and is almost certainly good for clients and users, but it hinders the production of a constantly recognisable style, the comforting “brand” which is today so much in demand. From the first glimpse the new buildings at Chalmers offer interesting views and contrasts of materials, but it is hard to see what the whole thing is about, and why the materials change as they do. To understand it properly, you must come to terms with a complicated situation, in which new elements were integrated with good existing buildings without disrupting the scale, while the whole complex continues to proclaim the northern entrance to the university. The site lies among hills south of the city centre, where the approach road sweeps around to drop off pedestrians at the mouth of a narrow and 1. 2. 3. 4.

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The main façade facing the city, designed as a gateway to the entire university. General layout, with the new parts shown in black. Entrance facing the campus, marked with a combined balcony and canopy. The room between the two aisles. Here all the movements of the building are united, in both layout and section. View from the intermediate room in towards the main auditorium, which can be opened and closed by means of swivelling louvres. Interior one floor up. Transparency to the city outside is reinforced by the glass flooring which terminates the room. The main auditorium, acoustically adjustable from speech to music by means of swivelling louvres. View of the student union building foyer. Slate wall in the high crevice between the two aisles.

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steeply sided valley. In the 1960s, a gateway building was erected by Jan Wallinder with an administrative wing to the east, a small auditorium to the west, and a bridged portico in between, but it was obliged to stretch a small programme to encompass the site. Further back into the site, built as free-standing, was a pitched-roof building by Melchior Wernstedt, designed in the 1950s for the student union and nicknamed “the church”. Further back still, on the south-west side, was a less distinguished auditorium building from the 1970s, which fronts the interior of the campus to south. The expansion of the facilities for students, and provision of a new large auditorium linked with the public north front, allowed the possibility to recombine these disparate elements. But the floor area would be more than doubled, and it was important not to overwhelm them. Wingårdh got over this by treating his new structures as a series of separate parts comparable in scale with the existing. He also made an early decision to abide with the strict orthogonal discipline of his forebears’ work, despite having designed several earlier works in a more angular or organic mode. The large auditorium and the sports-hall required big spans, and the general use of them could guarantee flexibility in the remaining spaces. This prompted the choice of a heavy concrete frame spanning 18 metres, something Wingårdh had not done before. Two parallel tracts of building were created, one running off the back of Wallinder’s auditorium, the other lying alongside it to west. As well as defining the new territories, these trabeated forms would also apply a unifying and visible discipline to the whole. The big frames also allowed external walls in thermal glass stretched to the structural limit of 7 metres. Three storeys high, the new blocks needed no visible roofs, so they could simply be topped with shallow trusses and a hipped covering at minimum pitch, a cheap and efficient solution with minimal surface area. On the inside it would be possible to divide up the volume in a variety of ways, and the facades could be variously clad in sympathy with neighbouring conditions to each side. The two main tracts take on the two main functions. The western one contains the main auditorium with its three-level foyer, left open to the north through a glass wall, in order to invite the public in from the paved square by the main road. The narrower tract, starting behind the Wallinder building and aligned with its eastern façade, houses the student union facilities, with a café on the ground floor and meeting rooms on the first, including a large clubroom with a new hearth in the revamped Wernstedt building. Externally to east the second

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tract defines a new pedestrian court between the Wallinder and Wernstedt buildings, the union’s new east-facing entrance marked with a dramatic cantilevered overhang that is also a balcony, a clever device to declare the sideways entrance for people coming under Wallinder’s archway. Behind, and in line with the main auditorium beyond a gap, is a sports-hall, set at first floor level with adjacent changing facilities. To south of this, another courtyard backs onto the 1970s building. This fully enclosed court required some deft infill, and on the ground floor it provides garden views and outside space for the student bar. Within the new complex, lying between the two tracts, is a toplit gap. This is perhaps the most architecturally important space of all. Deliberately street-like, it maintains the separate identities of the institutions to either side and preserves the comings and goings of public life. It is also the site of a ground floor ramp needed to absorb a difference of levels, and it takes the main stairs, like the servant bay in a Kahn building. Set in the kind of running sequence pioneered by Asplund and Aalto, the stairs are easy to find, opening up the spaces and inviting exploration. The glazed sides of the main auditorium allow it to participate in this central space rather than being left as a blind box. There are also bridge-like links from the auditorium’s foyer into the union, then again on across to the old Wernstedt building. The diagonal lines of movement contrast with the orthogonally structured space in a visually productive way, as predicted by the architect. Bathed in daylight, and sometimes in reflected sunlight, the gap is also bright, providing an illuminated back-wall for those entering the union. It was also meant to aid the passive ventilation strategy through the stack effect, the heavy concrete structure acting as a thermal flywheel. There are some of impressive details, sometimes stretching the technology to the limit, like the glass floor in the first floor front of the foyer which you can walk vertiginously across. Most impressive, though, is the general quality of finish and detail, far above what one expects of an ordinary university building, let alone one mainly for the use of students. The naked concrete on the inside gives a sense of solidity, and the internal claddings show the layered application, but on the outside the building is perplexingly chameleon-like, swinging from brick and stone-clad frame to applied slate and projecting glazing. I have already provided the argument for this – that the building must appear fragmented so as not to overwhelm its smaller ancestors – but it still makes me uneasy. Even the use of real, beautiful, highly

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textured materials is worrying if they are applied like wallpaper. Technical problems – cold-bridges and the like – certainly make “honest” construction ever more difficult to achieve, and with current insulation standards nobody can follow the example of Lewerentz’s late work. Even so, the relationship between tectonic fact and tectonic fiction remains a tense one, not easily dispensed with. Peter Blundell Jones *The text was originally written for publication in The Architectural Review.

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Scandinavian twr Office and apartment block Malmö, Sweden (1997)

Scandinavian Tower was never built, otherwise it would have been one of Europe’s highest buildings today. Moreover, it would have completely dominated the surrounding landscape and been much higher than the now-built Turning Torso. Right at the bottom a “skirt” extends to a height of 46 metres; this is followed by a straight column of about 200 metres and at the end, an eccentric cone. Nothing strange, but simultaneously an element that provides the skyscraper with a stylised figurative expression. A building with an expressed direction of movement takes its place on the field. Scandinavian Tower differs in this respect from most skyscrapers that are built as they generally do not have this clear tripartite division. In this way Wingårdh’s style is more like older skyscraper architecture. The form is a similar, though modified, form of the Arlanda airport air control tower. In the initial sketch Wingårdh had not thought of having the skirt. Instead he used a base form from a water tower nearby, a tower on long legs. However, the client felt that this occupied too much space. The material for the façade was intended to be glass.

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Model photo and photographic montage of the tower, with the Hyllie water tower in the background.

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Sweden’s embassy in Berlin Embassy Berlin, Germany (1996)

Sweden’s embassy in Berlin is situated in a large common area that also houses the other Nordic countries’ embassies. A band of copper unites the area within a soft, billowing curve. Wingårdh’s building has three different façades. The façade facing the copper band has a glass side ensuring a clear view into the building. Looking towards the common area are two natural stone façades, one of black shiny Brännhult diabase and the other of white Norrvange limestone. Here different techniques have been used. The white stone is mounted like a large flat sheet behind the window whilst the black one is mounted in horizontal bands between the rows of windows, with the stones overlapping each other in front of the windows. A Richard Serra-inspired limestone arc leads the visitor into the building, past the open conference room and towards the large room at the end. In this room, you see an intricate visual game of shapes. There are references here to baroque architecture. The spiral stairway is reminiscent of baroque’s twisted columns. The embassy is characterised by a number of different motifs. One of these is the constant new experiences offered to the user by following the arc in and then moving about inside the building. Another motif is the openness of the building. The large conference room on the entrance level is a symbol for ideas about the transparency of Swedish democracy. The work on the materials and details can be considered a third motif: the large room’s visual elegance in the precision of the light birch and natural stone façades. 1. 2. 3.

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The spiral staircase and the high glazed section overlooking the city. The embassy entrance, with a limestone wall accompanying visitors on their way in. The big committee room, which can be screened off from its surroundings with a thin copper wire curtain. Detail of stair rail – birch, like the rest of the interior. The meeting of the two stone-clad façades: pale, smooth limestone contrasts with rough black diabase. The opening in the copper façade common to the whole embassy complex, designed by architects Berger + Parkkinen. The open spindle of the spiral staircase, designed and constructed with the least possible tolerances. The large main room with the site-cast concrete staircase. The 1.5-ton door of solid limestone opens in towards the committee room. The entrance section, with the campus theme of mirror ponds brought in beneath the building. Detail of the limestone façade. The staircase, with its window overlooking Klingerhöfestraße.

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Victoria Olympia Stadium Olympic arena Stockholm, Sweden (1996)

2004 was the year when the summer Olympics took place in Athens, although Sweden had been one of the contenders for holding the games. A parallel commission for a new stadium was announced in order to show the Olympic committee a suitable arena. Important names were invited to take part, including Santiago Calatrava and Rem Koolhaas. Wingårdh’s proposal has its source in the antique arena, the amphitheatre. The amphitheatre was often placed in an area of nature where the topographic conditions were such that places for spectators were available naturally. The Victoria arena burrows its way down into an old rubbish landfill. The idea was that the arena should function as an outdoor stadium during the summer, with the possibility of covering it with a roof later. Wingårdh worked on this with Bergs, the former designer of the indoor arena, known as the Globe, in Stockholm. One could say that a new interpretation of the old amphitheatre was created here by connecting modern construction techniques with the enormous rubbish landfill.

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Model photo of the partly covered arena.

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Arlanda twr Air traffic control tower Sigtuna, Sweden (1995)

Two overlapping circles! That is how the plan looks for the air control tower at Arlanda airport. One circle has a diameter of five metres and the other seven metres. Seven metres was the smallest possible diameter for the tower not to exceed the defined limits for oscillation. The shaft reaches a height of 80 metres. That was the height required to give a clear view over the new start and landing runway. The towers approach the figurative; they look like two stylised birds that have come so close to each other that they have almost merged into one figure. What reveals them as being still separate is, amongst other things, the colour: one is white and the other black; also the control rooms on the two towers face in opposite directions. The towers have the typical older skyscraper style of tripartite division: a clearly marked base, a long shaft and a concluding capital. The artist Silja Rantanen has inscribed the shafts with texts. Initially the idea was to have two different authors, the futurist d’Annunzio and Saint-Exupéry. However, it was ascertained before the inscription was done that d’Annunzio had been a fascist and so the decision was taken to remove his texts. Today only Saint-Exupéry’s texts speak of man’s fragility.

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The control tower, in which a coupled tower has been generated by the dual functions of ground and airspace surveillance.

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Ale Upper Secondary School and Culture Centre High school, library and theatre Ale, Sweden (1993)

A gentle right-curving path leads up to the main entrance. A line of blue-glazed stone marks the middle and the line is further taken up as a break in the roof. There is a pattern with arrows in the ground that further emphasises the direction leading to the entrance. The façade leans out slightly towards the approach and the entrance, which almost becomes a cave opening through which you walk. Once again we see Wingårdh’s interest for building up tension that expresses itself once the boundary has been passed. The entrance door is not the building’s most prominent element; it is almost anonymous. Once over the boundary the building opens up. To the left is the library and to the right is the theatre. By placing the library and theatre in the same building as the secondary school, the aim was to create a building with evening as well as daytime activities. The classrooms are gathered around open areas that house assembly rooms, a café and information department. The plan shows that there are no long, narrow corridors. The aim was to create an environment that eliminates the insecurity that can be found in what is concealed. There was a conscious desire to foster high ecological standards and all the materials were chosen with a view to caring for the environment and are durable and low maintenance.

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The school building on the site of the former bus station. The butterfly shape of the main building ties in with the sculptures depicting the different phases of the butterfly’s life cycle. The library, the first room the visitor comes to. One of the triangular courtyards serving as both communication space and social area. The low-rise main entrance between the theatre and the library. Detail of the staircase, with its coloured concrete.

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Photos of Gert Wingårdh’s home, Tofta.

A flaneur, but a romantic withal Mikael Nanfeldt

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Few if any of those writing about Gert Wingårdh have concerned themselves with the personal texts he has written – a far cry from the traditional mode of architectural presentation. Among Swedish architects, marshalling all the external references and tracing the lineage of the buildings and architects influencing the buildings he has designed has become almost an end in itself. I have indeed read the dutifully presented biography of Gert Wingårdh, but once we come to the commentary on the individual buildings, the link with the person is severed. The inward connections are omitted, the outward ones made paramount, heralding words like: “The first years of my life were spent in Billingen, a limestone mountain protected by diabase, towering above the open landscape of the Västgöta plain. A private stream in the grounds. Playing all day long with water and at dam construction. Limestone bedrock affording good nourishment for dense foliage and near-impenetrable hazel thickets. Winter days with sharp zebra contrasts between black tree trunks and white ground, between black water and white ice floes. Every summer, play reposed with one’s head turned towards the foliage, towards the light” (from the exhibition catalogue Aspekter 90). There are of course reasons for this state of affairs. It is connected with a formalist tradition of criticism, and that tradition omits personalities when making an analysis. Precise and meticulous, but oh! so anaemic. In certain architectural journals, the entire procedure for putting a building under the microscope is utterly ritualised. First the architect presents the building: materials, structure and principal functions. Next somebody comments on the building, placing it in a physical context; its relation to its surroundings, the contextual themes discernible, a word or two about the way in which the materials are used and, finally, something about whether or not it is a good building. All that regular readers of these commentaries have to do is to sit down, pen in hand, and tick off the boxes. Tremors, vibratos, are few and far between. The search for the intangible is of no value. But the intangible is where feelings belong, and sometimes one wishes one could read a text with the courage to flout form and break new ground into the unknown. The only texts that depart from the established model are letters from the general public to the daily papers. Even though I hardly ever agree with those correspondents when they bewail something that has been built or is under construction, I usually delight in reading them. Often they are quite untrammelled by the analytical bent of the architectural pundit: they simply express

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a personal opinion that is immediate and comes from the heart. Although these letters are seldom progressive, they still serve to show that architecture matters. Mark Wigley was asked in an interview why a certain type of architecture makes people react so vehemently, both for and against. He answered that the people who react are in fact highly intelligent. They react to the achievements of good architecture. Good architecture makes people pause to reflect and to exchange opinions and feelings. So there is something there which good architecture is capable of awakening within us. Myself I love the personal, the imprecise, the elusive and the impossible – in a word, everything that is not verifiable outward connections. And this is one of the things that has interested me in my meanderings in the world of Gert Wingårdh. One of the first things I came across was his poems and short prose compositions. Some people are sure to raise their eyebrows a little at this: poems, prose – does he write that kind of thing? The texts I have in mind always occur in relation to architecture, but in form and, often, in content they deviate entirely from the traditional presentation of architecture. They have a form and syntax which manifestly belong to another branch of art, that of poetry. Which is probably the reason why no architectural writer has looked at the texts when analysing his buildings. They become too personal, perhaps also too strange and imprecise, and their relation to the building is not clear. We simply don’t know what to do with them. The late Professor Staffan Björck, a literary scholar, writes in the preface to his book Romanens Formvärld (1953): “A flourishing critical tradition [– about which more presently –] challenges the right of the author to comment and explain his own works […].” So do I. The personal reference becomes an important part of my supremely personal interpretation, that which makes me relate to the building. One of the most interesting books on architecture I have read in recent years is Thinking Architecture by Peter Zumthor (mentioned previously in this book). There one finds no pictures of entire buildings, no layout drawings elucidating the relations between rooms, no section drawings showing relations between storeys, no concrete descriptions of structures, no clear connections – all that has been left out. All one meets with here is personal reflections and meditations on architecture and its relation to other things in life, not least – the most baffling of all – memories, music and poetry. Arguably, I have been won over by Zumthor’s words, and similarly by Gert Wingårdh’s, to

such a degree as to lose all objectivity when studying their buildings. That is possible, but of no consequence. For me, Zumthor’s architecture takes on a life beyond the immediately visible when I read what he writes. One of his paragraphs runs as follows: The design process is based on a constant interplay of feeling and reason. The feelings, preferences, longings, and desires that emerge and demand to be given a form must be controlled by critical power of reasoning, but it is our feelings that tell us whether abstract considerations really ring true. To a large degree, designing is based on understanding and establishing systems of order. Yet I believe that the essential substance of the architecture we seek proceeds from feeling and insight. System and logic are necessary to architecture and must always be there, but, as Zumthor writes, much of what one is looking for lies beyond this logic. It is only to be found in elusive feelings. Longing, desire, love, pain and joy all go to make up the foundations beyond the structural system. In the catalogue for the exhibition 20, Gert Wingårdh quotes the following poem by Marcel Proust in connection with Villa Hansson:

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It is a well-known fact that the poet’s amours and sorrows have been of help to him when he built up his work, and the unknown women who least suspected it have, each and every one of them, one through nastiness, the other through archness, contributed their building blocks to the erection of a monument which they will never see, but one seldom stops to think that

the author’s life did not end with this work, that the same Nature which caused him the very sufferings which have taken their place in his work will live on after the work has been concluded, and impel him to love other women under conditions which would be identically similar, if they were not subject to the slight shift which is a consequence of time influencing both circumstances and the person himself, his amorous longing and his ability to withstand pain.

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This poem, quite simply, tells how all things are part of the work of art. In one of the texts in this book Johan Linton writes that for a time during the 1990s Gert Wingårdh had a mistress. A type of remark one seldom comes across in Swedish writings on architecture, so unusual that one reacts instantly. As soon as he writes this Linton is venturing into unknown waters for a Swedish architectural author. The reason may possibly be that he is on the editorial board of a journal of psychoanalysis. Either way, the mistress is the type of inward connection that is usually omitted. Does it make any difference to the way in which Gert Wingårdh thought, felt and reasoned during this period? Answer: of course it does! How one sees it in his architecture is impossible to say, but the personal aspect is of interest nonetheless.

I will now turn to consider some of the texts which Gert Wingårdh has written, though lack of space forbids me to address all of them. Instead I will confine myself to those which are not architectural presentations in the traditional sense. Many of these texts express a direct perception of architecture, while others are more indirect and require interpretation. At the same time we come close to themes which to a great extent inform his architecture. I would venture to say that here we find manifestos, declarations of intent. In the poem A Flaneur, printed in the exhibition catalogue Flanör (1994), the second verse reads: To stroll is to experience in sequence. The flaneur is ruled by his instinct. Unintellectually but not unreflectingly. My buildings are for flaneurs. The same theme recurs in a poem in the exhibition catalogue Aspekter (1991), where, in a poem entitled Onytta, he writes: Desire finds its moment In a daydream. Straight lines are bent. Sheer idleness. I am drawn to idle things. To the beautiful. Probing feelings. Romantic. Unintellectually. Untheoretically. Not without reflection but without explanation. Like life. Life is desire.

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Two themes unite both texts. One is the emphasis on an untheoretical stance and the other is the desire for experience. The poet’s ego says that life does to need to be structured, categorised and analysed. It can be discovered and experienced instantly, at the moment one is faced with the event. In the moment is the desire, the poems say. It

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is a matter of daring to stray, daring to discover, to admit to oneself that not everything can be explained. The flaneur is guided by his instinct, not by a theoretical model. In one of the fragments in Walter Benjamin’s passage works we read: “Going out without being forced to and following one’s impulse, as if the simple act of turning left or right was already in itself a fundamental poetic act.” This quotation expresses the beautiful thought that the most insignificant thing we stumble on can actually be the greatest, that the tiny detail encloses the mystery of the entire world. It is seldom today that the detail is permitted to expand and occupy a position on a level with the whole. Rationality demands that one be clear about the big picture. Delving into the small and elevating it to greatness is to give idleness precedence over utility. In the exhibition Aspekter Gert Wingårdh used a number of antithetical poems as a presentation of himself and his relationship to architecture; one of them has been quoted already. There were six poems altogether, ranged opposite each other like plus and minus poles in a force field. Each pair had the same point of departure, Utility or Idleness were the titles. In the poem which is the antithesis of the one quoted above, Gert Wingårdh writes that it is utility that decides what our day will look like, that it demands straight lines and no unnecessary square metres. Idleness, by contrast, seeks the curved line simply because it can be beautiful, not because it is the most practical. Idleness seeks beauty in the detail, not because it is necessary but because it can create an overtone transcending reason. Gert Wingårdh pays tribute to idleness as a way of affirming life; it is in idleness that great things are made manifest. In another of his idleness poems he writes of Leonardo da Vinci: “Leonardo was idle, too. / Otherwise we’d have forgotten him by now.” One frequent point of criticism raised against Gert Wingårdh’s architecture is that it does not emanate from a theoretical standpoint, that instead of recurrently exploring one theme in his buildings he varies them from one occasion to the next. This way, allegedly, the big picture is lost. It is easy to establish that many of his buildings differ from one another, but at the same time themes can be crystallised to which he is forever returning. Parts which he allows to burgeon and take their place as significant factors. One of those themes is the desire for detail and his fascination with its importance. In Villa Nilsson one sees the S-perforated girders accompanying part of the length, and when sun from the rooflights falls through these “holes”, patterns are formed on the wall. Unnecessary, but exciting! It is exciting

to follow the line in the driveway up to Ale High School which is then elegantly reiterated in the pitch of the roof, or the appealing idea of enabling the students to scribe their names in the benches outside the entry and make them their own. Or the finely tuned gradient in the glass of House of Sweden, playing with the romantic image of mist rising from the lake of a summer’s morning. Many more such examples could be quoted, and they exist to be discovered by the willing stroller, whoever dares to be a flaneur and relish the unexpected: There is a story in every join. The surface depends on a choice or an economisation measure. The join is Inescapable and is about morality. It can be concealed or acclaimed. A detail that reveals its author and its executant. Thus Gert Wingårdh, writing in the catalogue for the exhibition 20. The migratory theme occurs in several of Gert Wingårdh’s texts. We have already quoted from the poem A Flaneur: “My buildings are for flaneurs”, he writes. The wanderer moves in past and present simultaneously. Everything is brought together in the instant, becoming the wanderer’s reward. The opening of the poem A Flaneur is a romantic contemplation of nature which can be applied to his architecture:

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Mist-laden Västgöta plains with no beginning and no end The search for dry tufts in my parents’ footprints. The plain becomes a slope. Small changes of angle which are sensed more in the foot

than in the eye. Winding and climbing. Rough-faced limestone and basalt pillar. Hand gropes for purchase on moist stone. One heave and the eye has pierced the veil of mist. The sharp bundle of sunbeams between spruce trunks. Fresh cones under the arch of the foot. Resin. Fragrance. Freshly cut nails pierce the peel of the blood orange. The sun of Sicily in Sweden’s. Reading the lines carefully and with a certain amount of reflection, a personal manifesto stands out before one’s eyes. Personal reflections, which, without saying a word about architecture, tell us a great deal about the architecture of Gert Wingårdh: “Not without reflection/but without explanation.” That is how he characterises himself. Here is the importance of the place, the mist-laden Västgöta plain. The relation to what has been, history, the search in his parents’ footprints. The purely physical revelations of the walk, the small changes of angle signalling through the body. The love of material, the way in which the hand seeks to touch the stone, the rough surfaces of limestone and basalt pillar. The sensual, sometimes sensational revelation when something happens to put things in a new context, the heave and piercing through the mist. How the world is present in little things, the fragrance and light of Italy through an orange. The same method, but more concretely concerned with architecture, is in evidence when he writes about Villa Nilsson, a text which I will crave the indulgence of quoting in full: After a twisty crossing of the Årnäs peninsula the road ends, A path continues towards a sunken grey façade. The façade has just one opening, a solid door. Japanese fashion, there is no preparation for what awaits on the other side of the door. No premonition of the sea.

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Walk through the door. Still the sea is obscured. You are at the upper edge of a big room. To one side wardrobes, A toilet and a long cantilevered table for your keys, a message, a flower.

On the other side a long wall. First shaded then bathed in light. Steps downwards between converging bedrock. The whole panorama opens up. Southwesterly breakers rolling in over the entire length of the room. More steps downwards and the room grows high. The steps grow uncertain. Out on the terrace wind or past the stove up a few steps to the warm cherry-wood platform supporting the dining area. The roof light leads on, past kitchen and laundry out into a winter garden sheltered from the sea behind rocks, facing meadowland close by. A group of seating furniture, a pause for breath. There is an alternative way back. Along the façade past kitchen and dining area, down between indoor and outdoor fireplace and up between the slabs of rock, to a view-stopping study projected like a lookout post westwards. A house like a line drawing and elucidating Nature’s variety against Geometry’s abstraction. Halland enfilade like a section of a bridge. Time is forever strolling through the house. The sun with shifting, blanked out girder shadows describes its circular path above the high far wall. The tooth of time breaks out gaps in the sawn sunshade slats. The materials vary from the unshakeable permanence of granite, via the bare aluminium steadily turning to corrosion-pinked saturation, via the shifting of the teak to silvery, polished greyness and via the salt-leached grey porosity of the rendering to a house delineated by time, not by timelessness.

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Here he emphasises the importance of the details, the presence of the material, the joy of motion and the excitement of breaking through and being surprised. With small shifts of meaning he guides the reader, hand in hand, through the building, draws our attention to the

small nuances and says: this is the idea, and at the same time, on a deeper level, how it can be experienced. But at the same time with the understanding that it is you, the person walking through the building, who create your own context. Read this poem parallel to En Flanör and behold the magical world which opens up through the personal reflections and the indirect approach of En Flanör. In other connections he allows himself to be more concrete when communicating to us his view of architecture. With reference to Scandic Crown, he writes as follows in the 20 catalogue: What is organic? Contrast with classicism Prussianism and symmetry. Starting point in The freer shapes Of Nature. This is no theoretical manifesto, but certainly a cogently thought-out view of things. He is no friend of allegiance to a predetermined theory or ideology which has to be complied with all the time. When you speak to Gert Wingårdh, he abjures theorising but can speak at length about an encounter with a material or about inspiration concerning a detail discovered. Only a fraction of everything Gert Wingårdh has written could be quoted and remarked on here. There are many paths to architecture, but personally I rejoice in texts like Wingårdh’s and Zumthor’s. Not that their words are to be taken as absolute truths, but they endow me, the reader, with an extra dimension.

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3.

Exoticism in the Swedish landscape

1980  –1989 Success and maturity Johan Linton

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At the beginning of the 1980s, Gert Wingårdh, now aged about 30, experienced his first breakthrough. Villa Nordh (1979  – 81), the second house to be designed by him personally, attracted notice as the first postmodernist building in Sweden. It was presented in the trade and popular press and exhibited internationally, e.g. at Louisiana, Denmark, as a Swedish contribution to the exhibition Huset som Billede. Wingårdh’s long labour of love with architecture had borne fruit. More, perhaps, than Villa Hansson (1977–78), Villa Nordh (1978 – 81) conveys a premonition of Wingårdh’s professionalism. The layouts have features in common as regards the two interlinked main volumes, but in Villa Nordh the result is more elegant and more composite. The corridor solution has been replaced and the link between the main volumes made an independent part of the building. The villa stands on a rocky eminence, with kitchen, bathroom and garage planted on the ground while other parts reach outwards on plinths – an arrangement which Wingårdh has conceptually termed “the hanging garden of Babylon”. The segregation of dwelling spaces from services and storage spaces puts one in mind of Louis Kahn’s ideas of a division into “served and servant spaces”. As in so many other works of Wingårdh’s during this period, connections are also perceptible with the works of Frank Lloyd Wright, as for example in the low, elongated projecting eaves and their interplay with close-set vertical lines. Another resemblance to Villa Hansson is Wingårdh’s experimentation with the façade. He has described how postmodernism here allowed him to make the wooden trellis traditionally employed with plinth foundations grow up over the entire façade in a decorative arch. Retrospectively he has also mentioned the somewhat earlier trellis-clad water tower in Marne-la-Vallée by Christian de Portzamparc – a building sometimes nicknamed “Château d’eau babylonien”. This breakthrough, however, did not have the sequel Wingårdh had been hoping for. On several occasions he has recalled how he expected the media coverage to bring in more building assignments, which it did not. Instead the 1980s were to be the decade of interior designs, a decade he would afterwards describe as “a bad one”. At the same time, the experience he gained was to play an important part in the successful build-up of a large-scale architect’s office, which began in earnest at the close of the decade. Wingårdh has described how the shoestring budgets of the interior architecture briefs taught him to reason with craftsmen and building companies and to understand vital aspects concerning the economics of construction. Although he

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has described the 1980s as overcast by “leaden clouds”, one can imagine that he found this a congenial period all the same. Economic growth was running high, Sweden’s internationalisation was gathering speed and there was growing demand for the kind of trendy, internationally tinged environments which he had learned to handle. Soon after his American trip at the end of the 1970s he wrote: “At the turn of the year I was in Los Angeles and saw any number of coffee shops, drugstores, drive-ins and even one or two McDonalds. Seems fun. Especially now that Sweden is entering a kind of American fever.” Wingårdh had been trained by Jan Wallinder, Voldemars Vasilis and Johannes Olivegren – architects associated with postwar social construction – but he himself became a new kind of Swedish architect. Annika, his wife, who worked in advertising, introduced him to circles with a different view of pr and economics from what was normal among architects at the time. The internationally minded Wingårdh hobnobbed with advertising and restaurant people in the latest crumpled Armani suits. Little interested by the political and social ideals of the time, he devoted himself wholeheartedly to architecture in itself, an interest for which he found an important interlocutor in Anders Wilhelmson. At the height of their interchange they could spend several hours a day talking architecture and could phone each other at any hour of the day or night to discuss thoughts and ideas. In practical terms as well, their interchange was virtually symbiotic, and they drew in and out of each other’s drawings. It is impossible here to distinguish the different contributions to this close collaboration, but clearly it meant a great deal to both of them. We may also note that passion for the architect’s profession in terms of the joy of creating things and expressing oneself was regarded sceptically, often condescendingly in the Swedish architect’s profession at that time. Several of the interiors of the early 1980s were in the centre of Gothenburg. Diagonally opposite Leoni’s (1978 –79) in Fredsgatan, the Peking Restaurant was fitted out (1981). Laura Ashley (1981) was not far away, in Östra Hamngatan, and Yoko Yap (1982– 83) was realised a few years later almost opposite. All these interiors were published, and none of them is inessential to Wingårdh’s output. In between them, moreover, lay nk, where he completed several assignments (1981– 85), and in Kungsgatan, near Yoko Yap, was the less well-known boutique Pysar och sländor. The interiors were perhaps more amenable than buildings to experimentation and boldness of expression, and several of them have

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something to say concerning Wingårdh’s wide frames of reference and zest for creating spatial experiences. In one of his earliest published texts he consistently refers to Marcel Duchamp and describes the Laura Ashley shop as a “collage of ready-mades”. His realisation of other works as the 1980s wore on brought out this point – his creation, by means of journals and journeys, of a wide raft of knowledge for making different choices. The office’s letterhead at this time carried the motto: “Choice is the only artistic act.” In that sense the very small interior for Laura Ashley was composite. According to Wingårdh, the fabric ceiling was taken from Hans Hollein’s travel agency in Vienna, the rough pillars supporting both ceiling and cutting table came from Michael Graves or Robert Stern, and the Östra Hamngatan shop window with its divided lights derived from George Ranalli’s First of August Shop in New York. As in so many interiors at this time, Wingårdh used mirrors for artificially enlarging the visual room. The cutting table stood in the middle of the shop premises, which did not even measure 10 square metres, and, as he points out, “the functional and symbolic centres coincide”. The “artistic choices”, then, were paralleled by a focus on the client’s needs. Wingårdh’s statement could therefore be taken to express what he was already good at – interpreting, within the framework of a concentrated aesthetic expression, the clients’ preferences, including those which they themselves had perhaps failed to formulate. The zestful exploration of references would always respond to different needs on the part of the clients, an activity relatable to Wingårdh’s later utterances about “the joy of solving equations”. At the beginning of the 1980s Wingårdh went on another important field trip, this time to study the works of the Venetian architect Carlo Scarpa. He, Stefan Ostrowski and Wilhelmson stayed at Hotel Danieli and visited Scarpa’s buildings in Venice, Verona and Possagno, as well as the important Brion family tomb at San Vito di Altivole. They also visited buildings by Andrea Palladio. Scarpa’s influence is apparent, for example, in Yoko Yap and in the Gulin and Laura Ashley stores in Stockholm, on which Wingårdh collaborated with Anders Wilhelmson. The Laura Ashley store, incidentally, was one of the few assignments where Wingårdh and his client fell out. Even so, afterwards he refers to the spatially intricate interior as a work of key significance. Yoko Yap came to be one of the most important references among Wingårdh’s lesser interiors of the 1980s, due perhaps to it being so concentrated and distinct. It also expressively enshrined the work on

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contrasts which has been of general importance to him, the tension between bright and dark, heavy and light, rough and fine. The approach was Japanese and the whole concept was devised in the office, where – through Wingårdh’s wife Annika – the logotype was designed as well. That store was also the last project which Wingårdh drew single-handed. He has spoken of the illuminated shoe shelves against a background of white plexiglass as “rice-paper screens”, and one can highlight the way in which, on other occasions, he has referred to his fascination with the Japanese imperial palace of Katsura Rikyu. There is a striking similarity to the thin, rectangular-patterned wall screens in that palace. Unlike Katsura Rikyu, Yoko Yap’s “ricepaper screens” were fixtures, whereas the tall storage shelves behind them could be moved along tracks in the floor. Wingårdh had already experimented with a similar motif – transparent shoe shelves with white plexiglass divided by mouldings – in an interior for the Kjellberg shoe store in Arkaden not very long previously. The shop floor itself was given Kasthall mats with red edges which, like the palace tatami, rhythmicised the floor, but this time on the basis of west Swedish textile tradition. Scarpa was another important reference, and an adaptation of his work can be sensed in the background elements – the grey-rendered ceiling with the countersunk black spotlight tracks and the heavy rectangular pillar behind the cash desk. The three concrete blocks – the cash desk perforated with rectangular holes and the two long benches positioned at an oblique angle and resting on steel cylinders – also put one in mind of his work. Perhaps there are also references to Pierre Chareau to be seen in the black steel frames round the “rice-paper screens”. Finally, it is worth pointing out that, of all Wingårdh’s early designs, Yoko Yap was presumably the one which most effectively addressed the street space, transforming the palpable corner of the Gothenburg environment into a “sensual” rice-paper lantern. Allusions to movements of the time, e.g. Mario Botta’s far more monumental corner at Edificio Ransila in Lugano, a widely noted construction project from 1981 then under construction, can also be read into the steps leading up to the corner. Then, at mid-decade Wingårdh, together with Wilhelmson, himself stepped out onto the international scene with interiors for Marc O’ Polo in London and New York (1985– 86). The success of his interiors notwithstanding, it was houses that Wingårdh wanted to design, and he has dwelt on the fact that almost a decade was to pass before he was able to realise another building

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after Villa Nordh. One or two projects did, however, come to be built before that, among them a stables conversion at Särö Säteri (Manor) (1984– 87) – an assignment which won him an award – and Villa Arlycke in Särö (1985– 86), one of Sweden’s few architect-designed houses of the postmodern period with Ionic columns. He also made several housing studies which were not realised, among them a number of villa projects displaying an affinity to houses by Robert Venturi. Together with Wilhelmson, Wingårdh also took part in the widely noticed competition for the Vasa Museum, announced in 1981. Their entry, which Wingårdh still values, attempted to recreate architecturally the spatial circumstances attending the foundering of the ship. The large main volume was set at an oblique angle to give a spatial sense of the Vasa keeling over, and the windows of the building opened onto the waters in which the ship set out on her fateful maiden voyage. Another project worth mentioning – also undertaken in collaboration with Wilhelmson – is the “Home of the Future” assignment presented at the Co-operative Movement fair “A Good Life” in Gothenburg in 1985. The concept comprised tower blocks inaugurating the emotionally charged discussions which have often attended Wingårdh’s various high-rise housing projects ever since. Simultaneously with the exhibition, another project was underway in which Wingårdh went a long way with woodwork, namely the exclusive Hotel Kramer in Malmö. For this he designed a muffled, Viennese-inspired interior – Wingårdh himself made reference to Josef Hoffmann – in which green and white marble encountered large expanses of dark mahogany stained to a deep gloss. This striking composition was part of the reason for the office soon afterwards landing what Wingårdh has called “our first really big assignment”, namely the interior architecture of Överkikaren precinct, which subsequently became Hotel Scandic Crown and is now the Hilton Hotel Stockholm Slussen. That was a project in a complicated location and with a complicated genesis. For financial reasons Stockholm County Council made over a magnificent development site near Slussen to a private construction and finance consortium, with an approved draft plan and façade design by Mats Edblom, who had just left Nyréns Arkitekter. A more spectacular designer was wanted for the interior furnishings, and all the interior architecture was entrusted to Wingårdh, in association with Wilhelmson. Wingårdh had designed other hotel and conference projects before Kramer, and as a child had lived with his parents in Germany, a

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period which had left him with positive recollections of travel environments. For the new hotel assignment he concentrated on the magnificent views of Stockholm as a basic quality to be cherished in the project. In connection with that work he also made a statement concerning his view of architecture in general, referring back to another experience from early years – his fascination with aircraft. He wanted his buildings to provide the same experience one gets in a dc 9 when the machine breaks through the cloud cover into sunlit space. For the floor plan Wingårdh took as his starting point the circular turning point outside the entrance and organised the hotel functions on the basis of big, partly overlapping circles. These circles were then reiterated in stepped ceiling patterns, counters and wall sections, an approach for which Wingårdh made reference to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum (1956  –59). One also recognises the mushroom-shaped, tapered columns from the Johnson Wax Factory (1936  –39), here compressed into a far lower room. The arcuated steps later reappeared, for example, in the interior for the Kompassen shopping centre in Gothenburg. The abundance of pale and dark wood panelling was inspired by Eileen Gray’s curtain walls divided into rectangular fields. In both the circles and the detailing one also finds allusions to Scarpa – the irregular flow of the rooms comes closer to Scarpa than to Wright. In the richly overlaid geometry it would also be possible to see an allusion to Baroque architecture. In another connection, referring to his encounter with the churches of Gianlorenzo Bernini and Francesco Borromini, Wingårdh describes such overlays as “pure geometrical fun!” At the same time, Scandic Crown has something glossy and light-hearted about it in relation to references of that kind. The shiny materials and the lighting of ceilings and stairs convey at times an almost nightclub-like urbanity. Work on Scandic Crown also gave Wingårdh his first experience of enlarging a practice. The scale of the project enabled him to start engaging associates from other offices – Nyréns among them. Here again, his collaboration with Stockholm-based Wilhelmson was important. Between 1985 and 1988 they were both partners in the firm of Wingårdh & Wingårdh & Wilhelmson, and the intention was for their activity to be further consolidated. This was a special and interesting constellation of two strong but different architect temperaments which could complement one another in running a broad and competent business organisation. Based both in Stockholm and in Gothenburg, it could certainly have become a hard-hitting practice even after

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the building boom of the 1980s. The targeting of Nyréns was no coincidence. Wilhelmson had actually worked with Carl Nyrén during his time with Bengt Lindroos, and he had contacts with and inside information about the office at a time when it had just been reorganised following Nyrén’s retirement. In addition, Nyrén was perhaps the contemporary Swedish architect Wingårdh appreciated most, and the view photographs in the office archives taken by its own members include pictures of the Hamngatan building in Spektern precinct, Stockholm (1975). Wingårdh too has recalled mention during his student years of Nyrén’s having a “building box”, i.e. living experience of the constructive management of previously completed work in an architect’s office. Scandic Crown was important in that sense, but also expensive, to Wingårdh. The project was hard to manage, it was subjected to heavy spending cuts and frictions developed in the fast-growing organisation. In addition, Wingårdh was unhappy in his marriage and was also living with a mistress. All these factors combined were a heavy strain, not only on Wingårdh himself but also on the project and the people working with it. Looking back, Wingårdh has said, in modern parlance, that he “hit the wall”. He developed air travel phobia and got caught up in a process whereby he parted company, not only with his wife but with Wilhelmson too. Simultaneously with these difficulties, though, he had started on another project, the first of two from the end of the 1980s which were to be of pivotal importance in his career and would both earn him Kasper Salin prizes. Or, in his own words: Öijared and Astra were the projects “that started the ball rolling”. The Öijared Golf Club was also a product of the 1980s. Jonas Brandström, a corporate physician, and his wife Monica – Lennart Wallenstam’s eldest daughter – had recently bought Öijared Manor (säteri) and, starting with a pre-existing golf course, wanted to create a new kind of health care centre for corporate clients. Brandström has described how he spoke to several architects but Wingårdh was the only one capable of a creative, life-giving approach to his vision. The aim was to create a truly special environment which could offer genuine natural scenery within the framework of a business operation with a corporate focus. The solution was a building which could communicate and become part of Öijared’s beautiful surroundings. The house was literally built into the natural surroundings. Vegetation and grass were permitted to grow on the roof, which was also made the teeing-off point for the first hole, and trees were preserved

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as close to the building as possible. A crinkly glazed façade opened up the panorama on the surroundings, almost as if the house had risen straight out of the ground. Next to the glazed façade in the relaxation area, a pool had been fashioned and coloured like a forest tarn, and not surprisingly, Wingårdh made reference to the Swedish fairytale illustrator John Bauer. For the architecture he has mentioned several important references, including Emilio Ambasz’s buildings recessed below the ground, the organic architecture of Reima Pietilä, but also specific projects like Louisiana in Humlebæk, Claude Petton’s own residence (1983) and Wright’s Fallingwater (1935–48). The two last mentioned are villas in which nature has almost suggestively become part of the interior. Wingårdh also sent the clients on a field trip to Badenweiler, a spa in south Germany, a building with freely configured concrete decks covered with vegetation and projecting from the mountain beneath an old ruined castle. He himself had discovered the place – awarded the 1972 Hugo Häring Price – on one of his European motoring trips as a student. Subsequently he has also spoken of Katsura Rikyu. One is also readily put in mind of Nordens Hus in the Faeroes (1977– 83), by Ola Steen and Kollbrún Ragnarsdóttir, another grass-grown building with a crinkly glazed façade. Wingårdh himself had taken part in the competition for that building (1977), with an entry that playfully combined postmodernism and structuralism. At the same time one can note how, long before Öijared, he had designed building projects in which nature was allowed to come right up to the building, e.g. his design for Grönmura, together with Stefan Ostrowski and Lennart Assmundsson, for the competition for Humanisten, Gothenburg, in 1978. The same goes for Gabriel, in association with Wilhelmson, an entry for a Solna crematorium in 1980. There part of the building was incorporated with the ground section and covered over with grass, while the other part – in words reminiscent of Öijared – “rises up out of the soil”. Öijared was also the first project for which Wingårdh used computer-assisted design. His former fellow student Sven Magnus Sjögren took charge of this side of things as a subsidiary consultant and handling architect. Construction work started in December 1987, the building was officially opened in September 1988 and soon afterwards it was awarded the 1988 Kasper Salin Prize. The citation referred to the building having “well-known prototypes, which, however, have been artistically and independently developed.” Another work from the end of the 1980s makes an interesting

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contrast to Öijared. The Good Morning Hotel project, developed in collaboration with contractor Christer Ericsson, can also be said to reflect what the Kasper Salin citation termed “the boom characterising the latter half of the 1980s”. This project is perhaps the clearest implementation of Wingårdh’s first important architectural reading experience, Robert Venturi’s Learning from Las Vegas (1972). The building concept, inspired by the French Formule 1 hotel chain, is Venturi’s “decorated shed” with a difference. Just as with the Öijared villa, Wingårdh wanted to insert the buildings in the “vegetative”. The hotels were to be constructed as plain boxes on cheap sites, concealed behind earth ramparts and covered over with quick-growing greenery on trellises. Green was also the colour for the hotel rooms, which were decorated with vegetative patterning. Hotels were built in Mölndal, Lund and Örebro, among other places, but were never realised in accordance with the original idea, thereby detracting from the architectural effect intended. As further examples of the breadth of Wingårdh’s activity and of his ability to handle several influences at once, mention can be made of a couple of Botta-inspired projects from the latter half of the 1980s. First there is the scheme for a conference centre at Snäck, just north of Visby, on the island of Gotland; a tall volume having an equilateral triangle as its unifying shape. That project shows resemblances to Botta’s simple pure geometry, but also to his high brickwork façades subdivided by a central crevice extending from top to bottom, something which Botta worked with early on and which featured in several of his notable projects at this time. Another interesting project is Villa Kjellberg (1987– 88) on the Smithska Udden promontory in Gothenburg – something of a variation on Botta’s well-known Villa Banchi in Riva San Vitale (1971–73). Wingårdh started off with a similar layout organised into four quadrants, but unlike Botta he has twisted the quadratic volume 45 degrees in relation to the slope, causing the entrance to come at the very bottom of one corner. This villa was never built, and instead, finally, it was a second home on the island of Dyngön (1988 –  91), similar in a number of respects to Öijared, that ushered in a new period of elegant single-family dwellings in Wingårdh’s career. The Astra Hässle extension in Mölndal, Gothenburg, belongs mainly to the 1990s, but here it is worth mentioning the important role of that project in the course of events which, from the 1980s onwards, involved the Wingårdh practice in the rapid developments of the following decade. Just as with the Öijared Golf Club, it was his capacity

for concerning himself with the client’s problems with empathy and originality that won him the project. Planning work started in 1989, and, just like Öijared, Astra Hässle came to be computer-designed. This time it was a stipulation, but Wingårdh had from an early stage been amenable to enlisting the aid of the latest technology, and the young architects working in his office at the end of the 1980s can describe how it was here they had their first close contacts with fax transceivers and cad stations. He himself has said that the new technology also partly concealed the office’s lack of experience of major construction assignments. In his public appearances Wingårdh has often described how, during the difficult years at the end of the 1980s, he opted for therapy, a process which led him to overcome his air travel phobia and also to divorce his wife. In one connection he has also mentioned that his psychotherapist pointed out to him that he “experiences the greatest security” in foliage. Wingårdh related this to Frank O. Gehry, who had also undergone therapy. Gehry had been told by his psychotherapist that he was happiest in his mother’s bathtub, patting his yuletide carp, which prompted him to design houses resembling fish. The fact of Wingårdh, ever with an ear to the ground, latching on to a current trend, can also be instanced with the idiosyncratic Peter Eisenman asserting, more or less at the same time, that “as far as building is concerned, I started doing it because of my psychoanalyst.” Whatever that may mean, we may note that Wingårdh’s two important breakthrough buildings from the end of the 1980s can be construed in terms of foliage. The Öijared Golf Club, integrated among the preexisting trees with its branch-like roof rasters reaching skywards, is a building literally placed under the treetops. Astra Hässle too has its specially made “hi-tech foliage” – the perforated, aircraft winginspired solar screens along the façades which follow the communication paths which Wingårdh has unconventionally elevated out the culverts and positioned above ground.

This article is based on books and the office’s archive material. In addition I have spoken with Krister Bjurström, Jonas Brandström, Jan E. Ek, Charlotte Erdegard, Christian Frisenstam, Stefan Ostrowski, Jacob Sahlqvist, Sven Magnus Sjögren, Anders Wilhelmson, Annika Wingårdh and Gert Wingårdh.

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Johan Linton, B.Sc. (Eng.), is an architect and holds a Licentiate degree in the theory and history of architecture. Among other things he is active as researcher, designer and translator.

1980  –1989 Villa Nilsson AstraZeneca Scandic Crown Hotel Öijared Country Club Laura Ashley Vasa Museum Yoko Yap Peking

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Villa Nilsson Residence Varberg, Sweden (1989)

Villa Nilsson is organised along a long line. When you walk along this line, different details are revealed, or rather experienced, in sequence one after another. The entrance reveals nothing of what is to be expected inside. The entrance to Villa Nilsson is almost anonymous, as in so many of his detached houses – it forms a boundary you must pass as a ritual act. Wingårdh plays the role of dramatist and sets a number of scenes for the user to pass or experience before the drama reaches its denouement. The first detail is the long axis finishing with glass doors out to the greenhouse. Between the first and second stairs after the entrance, the axis is accompanied by a skylight that goes right up to the door facing the greenhouse. Down the second stairs the room opens out to the west, out to the terrace and the sea. In this position the tension that has been built up outside the entrance and further heightened when you stand inside the door reaches a climax. After this you can take a deep breath and note the treatment of materials and all the surrounding details. The granite slabs overlap each other to form elegant patterns. The rock breaks through at the entrance to become a part of the interior.

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The seaward façade. The close-to-nature design of the building also informs its conjunction with the ground, which has been made as artless as possible. Layout heightening the boundary between stone and wooden flooring. Roof storey. The long, narrow building extends right across the tiny valley. Details of wood and stone patterning. The beam structure of the terrace roof has a patterned subdivision which also affords stress raisers for future natural and harmless cracking in the wood. The building where the most private facilities stealthily descend towards the natural setting at the back. The entrance, where the rocks on the site penetrate walls and flooring. Pattern-forming detailing. Cross-section through the building and the long lighting slit running parallel with the core wall. All the stone detailing is made up of granite. Shadows cast by the terrace roof and perforated steel girders.

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AstraZeneca Research complex Mölndal, Sweden (1989)

AstraZeneca’s research facility in Mölndal can, without exaggeration, be described as an intricate artery system. One main axis runs through the plant, starting at the glazed main office and finishing at the staff dining room. Off this axis, a number of side systems branch out, with various research facilities. The whole facility is very compact. Units have been added onto units at right angles. The ability to make optimal use of the area was one of the facts that impressed the jury when selecting the architect. Aluminium-clad façades and arched roofs give the AstraZeneca plant its special character. The arched roofs also make it possible for the sun to reach ground level in spite of the buildings being close together. The design idiom here certainly expresses something extremely advanced, along the lines of a space station. The main axis running through the facility is a communications axis facilitating an efficient flow. Simultaneously this corridor also works as a place for chiefly informal meetings. The corridor is not a long uniform channel: there are areas where it narrows, thus encouraging spontaneous meetings. The corridor widens out into a larger spatial element where you can stop a while and talk to each other. This is a familiar concept from other work places designed by Gert Wingårdh. He possesses a constant desire to make and stimulate contact between employees. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

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Office block KD, constructed 2002–04, a general volume adapted for ease of enlargement. Interiors from block KD, where the sun screening varies according to points of the compass. Detail of the multi-storey car park façade. Laboratory building façade. The curved roofs maximise the room available for installations. Evening view of the façade, with the specially made sun screens providing an accent. Office block KC, 1994–96. The north-facing glazed façade lays bare the wooden interior. Dining room of the Paul G Nordström Conference Centre, 1991–95. Office block KC, entrance to the complex and starting point of the walkway ending in the dining hall. Details of stairwell. Main entrance, KC block. End wall of laboratory building. All media are gathered together behind the secretive façade, imparting maximum flexibility to the interior. Stairwell, KD block, designed as a border zone between workstations and social areas. Multi-storey car park CA, 2002–03. From the presentation at the nordic pavilion at the Biennale in Venice 1996.

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Scandic Crown Hotel Hotel Stockholm, Sweden (1989)

Wingårdh provided the interior architecture for Scandic Crown. In many ways this comes across as a typical product of the postmodern ’80s. It has an abundance of exclusive materials and a superabundance of circular shapes. The powerful interior use of materials and form assumes a pictorial character far removed from the more minimalist late ’90s. The circle joins together in different parts of the hotel interior and, through its constant reiteration, imparts fluency to the room. Wingårdh picked up the idea of the recurrent circle from the hotel forecourt. It then recurs in the reception counter, the bar and the stairs. It also figures as a pattern in the ceiling and the intarsia walls. The most striking thing about the whole interior is the strongly colourful impact of the woodwork. Pale is sharply contrasted with dark, and by this means Wingårdh achieves a distinct patterning effect. Blotchy birch has been juxtaposed with cherry wood or Italian walnut. At some points the wood runs in distinctly horizontal bands, but near the lift it describes distinctly circular patterns. Otherwise there is a good deal of pale marble, which again effectively contrasts with the wood. The lighting on the marble stairs puts one in mind of old-time film musicals, which often feature a grand staircase for grand entrances, very often with treads lighting up in time to the star’s descent. Wingårdh’s staircase does not offer this latter effect, but it does have the illuminated treads. Lighting effects are also employed for other parts of the interior.

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Section through the building designed by Mats Edblom/K-konsult. Standardised room, with interior planned by Wingårdhs. 3. Ground floor and entrance level, with the circle used as the theme for the interior. 2.

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Öijared Country Club Golf club Lerum, Sweden (1986)

International references, Emilio Ambasz and Frank Lloyd Wright, in combination with a suggestive John Bauer-like Nordic nature romanticism. This might be a rudimentary description of Öijared Country Club. The building is so well integrated in its environment that it has become a part of it. Gert Wingårdh has let the turf spread out over the roof and the golf course has its first tee here. You associate this with a cave, or as has been written, an uprooted tree. The entrance is a lopped-off hexagonal which embraces the remaining trees preserved here. This is the lowest point of the building, and from this position, you move upwards via stairways. Öijared is the firm’s first computer-designed building and the plan has a triangulated structural framework. The façade is composed of glass sheets that are turned at 15-degree angles to each other. The roof is completed with two overlaid traditional rustic red sunscreens and a pipe railing to stop golfers falling off the edge that creates a shadow play against the glass façade when the sunlight falls through its slats. The interior is characterised by the well-developed treatment of materials; here are different grades of polished limestone, from rough-cut to polished. Öijared Country Club was Gert Wingårdh’s first breakthrough and he was awarded his first Kasper Salin prize in 1988 for it.

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View of the club house, with the first tee on the roof. The entrance façade. The pool in the uppermost part of the building, designed to resemble a dark forest tarn. Façade with sun screen and safety rail combined. The pool as end point of the progress beginning at the low entrance. Progress through the house, viewed from the entrance. The structure is much the same as in later buildings, such as AstraZeneca in Mölndal and Ale High School. Evening view, with the pool room in the foreground.

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Laura Ashley Shop Stockholm, Sweden (1984)

The little boutique is extremely geometric. The design shows two walls that cut through each other in the shape of a cross. By opening up the walls in the middle of the cross, Wingårdh deliberately creates a look-through between the various areas and makes the boutique seem larger than it is. Those working in the shop are able to survey the whole area from the middle of the room. In the first room you come into, the cutting-out table takes its place in the centre as a symbol of the activity. Here people work with clothes and the table is transformed into an important iconic symbol. The building is brick and the walls are polished on the inside and painted with a colour that gives a golden sheen. Gert Wingårdh has consciously created a contrast between the rough walls and the soft materials. The vertical veneer is zebra striped and executed in a type of wood called tineo. A wardrobe with glass doors is positioned by the counter and is intended for bridal gowns. A little detail here is the door hinge which is a narrow silicone strand running along the entire edge. Just as in other interiors from this period, Laura Ashley is a flowery environment, full of references and associations. The interior design is no longer there.

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Table for storing and cutting out cloth on rollers. Materials; tineo and birch. The premises originally comprised six rooms. Removal of walls enabled one person to survey everything from a central position. Differences of level made possible a combination of steps and tables.

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Vasa Museum Museum Stockholm, Sweden (1983)

The magnificent warship capsized on her maiden voyage in 1628. It was not until 1956 that she was successfully localised, and was salvaged some years later. Wingårdh collaborated with Anders Wilhelmson in the competition for a permanent Vasa Museum. The idea behind their proposal was to let visitors establish a visual and emotional relationship with the ship as she was wrecked. They transferred the same list of the Vasa to the building, although the ship would be housed vertically. The façade facing Nybroviken was envisaged as a mirror in polished stainless steel. The façade facing Skeppsholmen was to look like the stern of an old ship with projecting galleries. The entrance was designed entirely in glass. The last side was to be copper.

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Yoko Yap Shop Gothenburg, Sweden (1982)

Until the start of 2007 the shoe shop Yoko Yap was at the corner of Kungsgatan – Östra Hamngatan in Gothenburg. When the shop moved to another location on Östra Hamngatan, the last of Gert Wingårdh’s interior designs disappeared in Gothenburg. Yoko Yap clearly announces its presence on the street scene and uses its position in a corner effectively with a deeply recessed entrance. Worth noting here is that the recessed corner is something that Gert Wingårdh would use in a number of buildings later on. Yoko Yap has a graphically strong character on both the streets. The shop windows have different heights and become gradually higher as you reach the entrance so that this is emphasised even further. Above the windows is a milk-white plexiglass screen that is lit from behind and divided into rectangles. This is a clear association to Japanese screen walls. The strict geometric form that Yoko Yap directs towards Kungsgatan – Östra Hamngatan is taken up in the interior. The same rectangular field as was in the glass walls recurs in the permanent screens on which the shoe shelves are mounted. There are moveable shelves where all the shoes are stored in their boxes behind the screens. The floor is divided into large rectangles. Two counters and two screen walls that are slightly crooked diverge from this strict geometry.

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Corner entrance between Östra Hamngatan and Kungsgatan.

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Peking Restaurant Gothenburg, Sweden (1981)

Restaurant Peking has a similar design to the restaurants Leonis and Marmite: they are all characterised by mirror walls that give the illusory effect of the room being larger than it actually is. Look into the room and it seems to develop into an endless number of sections. When the restaurant is full of guests, it looks as though there are a large number of them because of the mirrors. The interior design is mainly blue, with red features in the mirror walls, in the attachments of the material to the ceiling and in the painted Chinese signs found on the tables. The ceiling is a light, wavy textile, reminiscent of a tent. The room arouses strong associations and can be described as typical of the postmodern eighties. The interior is no longer in existence.

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The Peking Restaurant in Fredsgatan, Gothenburg

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Photos of the architect’s office in 2007.

The experience Mikael Nanfeldt

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A roof, sharply pointed, juts into space and aspires to more than affording protection from wind and rain. Abstract lines run straight through space, a contorted, intricate play of lines and volumes concealing stairwells. The stairs, slowly narrowing towards a passage, one step above the boundary and the sea, meet with infinity. A wintry landscape and, on a mountain peak, a remarkable ice sculpture seeking contact in the winter night. The play of sunlight with the roof beam becomes an image of eternity. The untreated wooden bench which stands ready to make the school pupils’ carved initials an enduring part of the school’s history. Simple sentences, or rather, images, which, without explaining or describing, convey a personal experience of some of Gert Wingårdh’s buildings. The experiences are utterly meaningless as objective presentations, but absolutely essential for one’s own relation to and understanding of architecture. Experience is by definition strictly personal. We can never feel the same thing on a deeper level. And it is impossible to define what generates the profound experience in each and everyone of us. At the same time, someone may create opportunities for me to pass through a spectrum of experience. Ecclesiastical architecture is an example of staged experience. Baroque architecture often consists of a series of experiential points which lead the user forward towards an end point, a crescendo. In his book Experiencing Architecture, the architect Professor Steen Eiler Rasmussen wrote that the architect is a form of theatre producer creating the framework against which we human beings live our lives. True, there is something predetermined about that statement, but if we nonetheless choose to agree with the idea, then three things are immediately evident. First, the responsibility devolving on all those who have the power to influence urban development; second, that as a user I dare to make myself a participant and to make demands; and third, that architecture must be constantly capable of developing. Architecture is an important part of my experiences, or rather, it enables me to experience. What happens if the framework is bad? How will my life develop if the “stage design” is poorly planned and wretchedly executed? Gert Wingårdh deliberately makes experience an active component of his architecture. By staging variations, changes of tempo, juxtapositions of materials, transitions and patterns of movement, he lays the foundations of the user’s encounter with the building. Sometimes the staging is visually spectacular, almost theatrical: the geometric play of the staircases in Ericsson’s London office building, the confrontation

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with the five-storey glass wall and rainforest in Universeum, the baroque-inspired spiral staircase of the Berlin embassy, the all-glass façade of the Chalmers student union building when you pass by it on a dark evening, the intricate geometry of the Mölndal bridge, the opening out towards the sea after negotiating the steps at the Villa on Amundön, or the thrilling pointed prow of the Sign Hotel in Norra Bantorget, Stockholm. Other buildings present a more muted appeal: the sublime setting of the diminutive Kvarnhuset (The Mill House) in Västra Karup, with all its finely tuned contrasts, the encounter between raw and smoothed limestone in the Öijared Country Club or the symbolic white gradient on the screen-printed façade glazing of House of Sweden, which densifies as you move upwards. Another point to be noted is Wingårdh’s frequent use of experience purely as an element of surprise. He introduces the user to the experience as a purely physical transition, occasionally with transcendental pretensions. The first thing encountered when approaching the Villa on Amundön island is the long and modest driveway. It is not until you have entered the house, descended the staircase and are confronted by the view in the big room that you understand. The passageway can indeed be symbolically charged. Now it may well seem as if I am describing here an architecture which is to be viewed as a picture, but that is not the point. Unlike other art forms – painting or sculpture, for instance – architecture depends on the physical encounter. Gert Wingårdh underscores this heavily by saying that architecture is not a picture – in other words, it has to be physically experienced. It is only through movement and direct confrontation with the room, the materials and the detailing that the experience of architecture is liberated. “My buildings are for flaneurs,” Gert Wingårdh writes in the introduction to the Flanör exhibition catalogue (1994). This is a challenge addressed both to himself and to anyone wishing to meet his buildings. In 1995 the journal Arkitektur devoted a monograph issue to Gert Wingårdh in which, talking to Olof Hultin and Claes Caldenby, Wingårdh says that in practising the architect’s profession he seeks to empathise strongly with people’s reactions. His architecture is physical: for example, motion through his buildings means everything. Often his plans appear calculated to guide the user’s steps deliberately through the building towards the calculated occurrences. This physical approach also reaches out to the user through the handling of materials. Gert Wingårdh is nothing if not an architect of materials, and his work is

informed by a conspicuous fascination with their capacity for eloquence and impact. The visitor experiencing his buildings at close quarters wants to touch and be touched. One of the latest additions to his listed works is the visitor centre at Müritzeum, which he has given a façade of charred wood. Not to make too fine a point of it, the charred wooden surface is damnably beautiful, and anyone so inclined can let their imagination range freely in the outback of mythology to see the phoenix rising transformed out of the ashes. Concurrently with its physical mode of address, Wingårdh’s architecture also seeks to communicate by means of a powerful visual impression. Sight is one of our strongest senses, and Wingårdh’s architecture looks for close contact. In this respect, architecture is, in spite of everything, transformed into an image on our retinas. Sometimes, though, one finds Wingårdh’s pursuit of powerful visual expression so formidable that more “images” are created than the beholder can assimilate, whereas in other connections he is soft-spoken in the extreme. Architecture, to Gert Wingårdh, is an art form. In the conservation mentioned above he says: I would prefer to call my own approach one of free artistic expression, because that’s my real motive for having this profession.

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Using diversity as a strategy for learning and building

1970  –1979 Becoming an architect Claes Caldenby

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Industry, energy and productivity are the first things that strike one about Gert Wingårdh’s 1970s. Here we find a young man working intently – through training, practice and competitions – to become an architect. Wingårdh’s fun-loving, light-hearted or apparently downright flippant attitude to architecture must not deceive us into thinking that there is no hard work behind it all. But it wasn’t all that self-evident from the beginning that he was going to be an architect. When, in the autumn term 1970, he started the ab2 university course (40 credits, i.e. full time) on modern art, it was with the intention of becoming an art dealer. And parallel to that, also full time, he took economics courses at the School of Business, Economics and Law. What inspired the change of plan was meeting Elias Cornell, Jonas Göransson, Ursula Larsson and Boris Schönbeck from the Architecture School at the Chalmers University of Technology, who taught the architectural history part of the history and theory of art. A journey to Rome in January 1971 made a profound impression on Gert Wingårdh. There he met greatness in the Pantheon and the other Roman monuments. He was moved, not least, by Borromini’s Baroque. He planned a degree thesis on Borromini and Bernini which never came off. The relationship between Borromini, the outsider with a small output, and Bernini, the acclaimed and successful one, still occupies Wingårdh’s thoughts. Surprisingly, he says that a small output can be more intense than a copious one and that there are advantages to being less appreciated. He considers himself today a Bernini, while his associate of the 1980s, Anders Wilhelmson, is a Borromini. It is a strange coincidence that Jan Wallinder, destined to be his most important teacher at Chalmers, had already written an essay on Borromini while studying on a Rome fellowship in the 1940s. Wallinder highlighted the functionalist in Borromini. Wingårdh seems above all to have been fascinated by the complexity, dynamics and drama. Starting in the autumn term 1971, we find Wingårdh reading architecture at Chalmers. His main subject for the first year was Form, with the revered Jan Wallinder as professor and Rolf and Margareta Åberg and Johan Hedborg as his other teachers. The tasks were concerned with things like giving expression to horizontality and verticality. Wingårdh was already “clear about the codes” from his studies of the history and theory of art, and was able to make Mies van der Rohe take care of horizontality, Sant Elia for verticality. The concluding assignment was to design the interior of a terrace house, right down to the flower pots, and this earned Wingårdh a 6 – the second-

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highest rating, rarely awarded. Another important teacher was John Miller, for theory of perspective and presentation techniques, partly because the subject was interesting but also because Miller presented the newly published first edition of Learning from Las Vegas, Robert Venturi’s and his colleagues’ bible of pictorial American postmodernism. In the summer of 1972 Wingårdh did a work experience placement stint in the office of Voldemars Vasilis, who had done his training with Brolid and Wallinder, at that time one of the leading Gothenburg practices. The professional ethic acquired there made place, function and structure points of departure, but Vasilis also had a strong love of form. Glöstorp Church, Hisingen, which was on the drawing boards in 1972, was a case in point. Wingårdh’s first publication is an interior perspective for Vasilis’ Opera project, which signed, quite simply “Gert”, was made the cover illustration for Arkitektur No. 7 (1974). In his second year, 1972–73, Lars Ågren (construction planning) and Johannes Olivegren (housing planning) were his main teachers. Wingårdh remembers them as absent teachers, which made him promise himself for a long time not to teach if it clashed with his own practice. Salvation from the school’s “anti-design” was afforded by the Lorelei discussion club, which used to meet in fellow-student Lennart Assmundsson’s home, the Landala Water Tower. Jan Wallinder was also of the company, and topics of discussion included, for example, Robert Venturi’s book Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, a “quiet manifesto” which, according to its preface, addresses something which architects are not in the habit of discussing, namely architecture. Architectural history lessons had too little to say concerning the “near-modern”, and when a memorable lecture was delivered on Louis Kahn, it came from Johan Lamm, one of the assistants. Second-year assignments included designing an arts centre in Alingsås. Wingårdh chose to submit three schemes, in three different genres: a Niemeyer, a Renzo Piano, a highly geometric Italian architecture. Here he noticed a rapidly growing interest in the school in hearing his presentations, attention he had nothing against. And he also noticed the difficulties the teachers had in taking a stand on formal exercises of that kind, though without really questioning his undertaking them. In 1973 Wingårdh also began subscribing to his first architecture journal, the Italian Casabella, which at that time was full of structures, modular systems and a lot of geometry, but also reflected a politicised world in which architecture was seeking a role to play. The third year, 1973–74, with urban development as the main

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subject, was experienced by Wingårdh as a “long black hole” with “tedious politicising exercises”. Form and function were polarised into form or function. In the summer of 1974 Wingårdh wrote his degree thesis for Lars Ågren, under the tutorship of Ragnar Hjertén. He was in a hurry, partly because his military service had been deferred and he was hoping to defer it a little longer by quickly going abroad to work. The thesis assignment was an extension to the Museum of Natural History in Slottsskogen, Gothenburg. Here again, he quickly prepared three schemes showing the influence of architects like James Stirling and Louis Kahn. Structural thinking was all the rage, and the young Wingårdh was no exception. It leaves its mark on his thesis in systematic analyses of different rooms with different requirements concerning dimensions and technical installations. Much work was also devoted to the perspectives, which were executed with almost pedantic care. During his last year in the school Wingårdh assisted John Miller with teaching the theory of perspective, and in that capacity he met Anders Wilhelmson, who was a few years below him. On top of all this, in 1974 Wingårdh found time to take part in his first competition, a church in Växjö. His entry was purchased and was published in No. 6 (1974) of Tävlingsbladet, the competition record published regularly by the National Association of Swedish Architects (sar). Wingårdh’s entry was clearly akin to the architecture of Reima Pietilä’s Kaleva Church in Tampere, Finland, though he himself denies it was an active prototype. Rather it was Louis Kahn’s structuralist ideas of “served and servant spaces” which provided the point of departure. In his third year Wingårdh also prepared a scheme in the so-called Wernstedt Sketch, a student competition in which he shared first prize for a basketball hall in Frölunda Torg. Wingårdh completed the fourth year (1974–75) in half the set time. His assignment was a College of Design adjoining the old handicraft teacher training college at Nääs, to the east of Gothenburg. Once again Jan Wallinder was his teacher, and he gave Wingårdh the highest award obtainable, a 7. This scheme is indeed an essay in the haute école of design. Some introductory “ulterior thoughts” concerning the college of design as a symbolic building serve to formulate a kind of credo: “Art must manifest itself. Just as religion needs churches, so art needs the college of design. Just as in a church, the symbol is the function. The college of design is a symbolic building, a place of pilgrimage, a landmark, a step forward. Let us first of all accept and underscore

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this. Only in the second instance accept the concretely expressed, functional content. Towards a deeper functionalism with the fragrance of a Madeleine cake on its palate.” So speaks a budding postmodernist who has read his Venturi, but this also sounds as if it could have been written with the branding mentality of the early 21st century. Moreover, it is written with a zest for language and a feeling for the right cultural references. Yes, indeed. Asked where the Madeleine came from, Gert Wingårdh says that for a long time he had a pile of books on his bedside table which he worked through a little at a time – a little Proust, a little Joyce. And a few detective novels for variety. Even as regards reading matter, there was a remarkable energy and sense of purpose. The Nääs design is studiously formal, fully in keeping with the tone of the text. Every function is articulated in a volume of its own, the declared ideal being Cézanne, “the hymnologist of primary shapes”. The buildings are cylinders, cones, pyramids, rectangles, squares in a dense but still divided configuration. Wingårdh abjures the slimming of areas (“when the form is the function, let us find high ideals”). But, almost in passing, he goes on to point out that the division into many small buildings and the location on a slope leading down to the water facilitates adjustment to the pre-existing 19th-century development of villa-sized timber houses. Graduating in January 1975, Wingårdh began looking round for a job – at a time of fuel crisis, with the Million Homes programme in tatters and with unemployment widespread in the architect’s profession. And also with his first child on the way. Looking back, he recalls, clearly with some wonderment, that he regarded himself as an “éminence grise” and not as a star architect. White Arkitekter as a big structure interested him, and he looked up Armand Björkman, who, however advised against it: “If you start here, you’ll quit after a fortnight.” He went to London with a letter of recommendation from Jan Wallinder and called on Foster, Stirling and other big practices, but there was nothing doing. And then the Olivegren practice invited him to take part in a competition for a housing development in Kuwait, and after that he got a permanent job there, something which at that time it was very hard to say no to. Olivegren had just been taken over by the big ffns practice, and it was Leif Åberg, the new office manager, who hired Wingårdh. Wingårdh hadn’t had much time for Johannes Olivegren in student days, but at the office they found themselves working together on competitions and they became good friends, “in opposition to the others”.

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Wingårdh became competition architect at ffns. Quickly finding ways of tackling a task was quite a useful experience, but it was frustrating in the long run “not being able to learn the architect’s profession from the basics upwards”. Several prizes were won through these competitions, but nothing got built. A high-rise hotel in Poland yielded a first prize which nothing came of. The design had three arms with a lift core in the middle. The façades are concave and the elevation too is concave in shape, with an expanded bottom storey and a cantilevered top. During his time with ffns Wingårdh was occasionally seconded to Wallinder. In 1975, for instance, they produced the competition entry for an extension to the Swedish Museum of Natural History. Wingårdh, of course, was familiar with the programme through his thesis work, and he likes to point out how freely Wallinder shaped it, with two rounded courtyards surrounding existing trees and stones. Wallinder’s design, however, cost more than Cederlöf’s, the one which later got built. Meanwhile, Wingårdh continued competing on his own behalf, “every weekend”, in spite of having small children at home. He readily recalls a crematorium chapel in Årekärr with a triangular layout on a three-cornered modular network, a structure which recurred in the Öijared Golf Club a little over ten years later. He also made a big effort in a competition for an office block in the centre of Vienna, but without success. In 1977 Wingårdh handed in his notice at ffns, tired of being just a sketching architect. Annika, his first wife, had a friend who was wanting to build a house at Fiskebäck. Villa Hansson, Wingårdh’s firstborn, was designed in the summer of 1977 and completed in 1978. This time he did everything himself, so as to learn the ropes. A number of simple volumes insinuate themselves into the bumpy terrain, and the façade is clad with rough grey boarding. The traditionbased modernism of the Californian Sea Ranch villa group was one source of inspiration. There were also mistakes to learn from. The entrance went all round the house, with the result that everyone used the back entrance, large expanses of wood-framed glazing cracked, and the roof leaked. It’s almost like Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, with the important difference that Wingårdh associated with the family for 25 years and successfully corrected all the faults. The original client has now left the house. An old fellow-student, Lennart Assmundsson, took up the cudgels for a renewal of the Haga royal park but also had visions of future architect assignments there. Together with Stefan Ostrowski, another

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old friend, they started aow arkitekter och samhällsvetare AB (architects and social scientists Ltd) in September 1977. It may seem surprising, Wingårdh the designer being part of a constellation so closely geared to the 1970s social commitment and interest in urban renewal rather than new development. “I suppose it wasn’t altogether harmonious, but it wasn’t uncomfortable either. Processes are good for you,” is Wingårdh’s verdict today on his half-year with aow. Through the new office he went on competing. They clocked up four competitions for senior housing in Stockholm. They did best with Kofoten precinct in the Södermalm district, where their entry, Après vous, took second prize. It consisted of a tower block with five small apartments grouped round an unheated stairwell. Storage facilities were built with lightweight walls and the scheme included a social vision of neighbours having the option of pulling them down and building a communal living room. Anders Wilhelmson helped out with pleasantly populated 1970s plans showing hobby activities, rag rugs and a cat on the sofa. Leoni’s Salad Bar was another assignment which came through Annika Wingårdh and her contacts in the advertising world, and this is what led to the parting with aow. Wingårdh and Ostrowski went on a three-week tour of America in January 1978. When they got back, Assmundsson had changed the colour of the glass at Leoni’s. Gert Wingårdh “went through the roof” and “vowed never to have partners any more.” Assmundsson moved to Stockholm and the practice was dissolved. Leoni’s (in Fredsgatan, since gutted) was presented by Wingårdh as baroque “done with mirrors” and “if not worthy of a Borromini then at any rate of a Portoghesi”. Undulating blocks of glass concealed irregular pillars and old walls and were reflected by a complete wall of mirror glass to make a symmetrical layout. Otherwise the American trip was a great experience, both because of all the architecture Wingårdh and Ostrowski saw and thanks to American hospitality. It started with New Year’s Eve at John Portman’s big hotel in Los Angeles, continuing with New Year’s Day in an empty Salk Institute, Louis Kahn’s laboratory complex in La Jolla. They were startled by a guard who said “hands up” but, after they had explained their interest, politely showed them round. That was the biggest experience of the trip – that something so reduced can be so powerful. Salk paved the emotional path to the minimalism of Barragan or Pawson, Wingårdh maintains. There were more Louis Kahn buildings waiting for them along their route, such as the Philadelphia laboratories and the slate-fronted Bryn Mawr College student

housing. There was more American hospitality with an overnight stay in Greene & Greene’s Gamble House, whence Wingårdh derived the eave overhangs for Villa Nordh. Paul Rudolph’s dramatically formulated School of Architecture in New Haven made an impression. Of Robert Venturi’s work they saw Guild House, a piazza and the house for Venturi’s mother, with the gable at the side, just as with Wingårdh’s Villa Nordh, which he started work on immediately after the American trip. So there Wingårdh was at the end of the 1970s, with his own practice, manifoldly prepared for the architect’s profession but still operating on a small scale. Houses and interiors were the principal stock in trade. Villa Nordh spelt his public breakthrough, several times published. The first in a succession of quickly drawn and mostly shortlived shop and restaurant interiors belong to the late 1970s. One of the few apparently still extant is the Marmite restaurant in Åre, dating from 1979, with trellises, mirror glass, brass and plaster vaulting. There were also a few competitions, without success. Together with Anders Wilhelmson, Wingårdh took part in a competition for a small boat marina in Kiel in 1979. This turned into a study of consecutive historical strata which left its mark on the ground with temporary screens as the first stage of a development. When, at the beginning of the 1980s, Wingårdh entered the architectural scene, it was as a cheerful postmodernist. But even then, interviewed by Månadsjournalen in 1982, he said that “the principles of functionalism are perfectly compatible with insisting that buildings must be fun to look at.” And his roots in 1970s structuralism have stayed with him. So, too, have the competitive habit of quickly grasping an assignment and the zest for exercising the architect’s profession right down to the details. In a word, the broad professionalism whose foundations were laid through single-minded hard work in the midst of the “anti-design” of the 1970s.

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This article is principally based on an interview with Gert Wingårdh on 2nd May 2007, plus a review of documents in the office concerning student assignments, competitions, projects and published mentions in Tävlingsbladet and Arkitektur. The background also includes my own experience of the period and the environment concerned. We moved along partly parallel paths through the 1970s, though it was not till the beginning of the 1980s that we actually bumped into each other. I started as a postgraduate at Chalmers at the same time as Wingårdh enrolled as a student. I met Lennart Assmundsson at Haga and, as editor of Arkitektur, I published Villa Nordh.

1977–1979 Marmite Villa Nordh Leonis Villa Hansson

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Marmite Restaurant Åre, Sweden (1979)

Marmite has an obvious kinship with the restaurant Peking, not least in the choice of chairs but also the diagonals that attach the mirrors to the walls. The room is oblong with a slightly arched ceiling. Where the ceiling and the walls meet, lamps are mounted to throw a soft light up towards the ceiling vault. One long side is dominated by windows facing the street. The other long side is characterised by a mirror wall that starts at chest height and extends up to the ceiling. Even the ends of the room have mirror walls. The same illusory effect is achieved here as in both Leonis and Peking, that is to say the room seems much larger than it actually is. Marmite is the only one of Gert Wingårdh’s interior design commissions from the eighties that still exists.

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Villa Nordh Private residence Gothenburg, Sweden (1978)

Presenting Villa Nordh in the journal Arkitektur, No. 4, 1981, Gert Wingårdh describes the trellises which he has raised in decorative arches over the façade as the result of: “A liberty with the façade which would not have been possible without the discussion of postmodernism.” Earlier in this book, mention has been made of the way in which Wingårdh assimilated postmodernist ideas, and here he himself puts the whole thing in a nutshell – a liberty. This is expressly a matter of liberty in design, the possibility of allowing an element of the building to assume a pictorial character. In Sweden at the beginning of the 80s, that attitude was fiercely criticised. Today, if you ask Wingårdh whether the façade has to express the function within, his answer is a blunt negative. The freedom introduced by postmodernism is something he still believes in. Olof Hultin, in his introduction to the 1995 monograph issue of Arkitektur, writes of Villa Nordh that its presentation in 1981 was the very first showing of Swedish postmodernism. The layout resembles Villa Hansson in comprising two separate main volumes at a slight angle to each other. Villa Nordh occupies an eminence, and looking at the layout, one notes a distinct focus on the view. A straight line leads from the entrance door to the big room with its generously proportioned picture windows. Otherwise Villa Nordh can be described as a shoestring project, with cladding of perfectly ordinary plywood.

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Trellis façade, with abundant traces of other contemporary architecture.

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Leonis Restaurant Gothenburg, Sweden (1977)

The restaurant Leonis in Gothenburg has a strict design idiom. The ceiling is clearly divided into a distinct grid, which recurs in the mirror wall that runs along the room in a straight line. On the opposite side is a glass wall mounted in soft, waving curves. Even the glass walls are strictly geometrical through the well-marked joins. There are a number of pillars hidden behind the glass walls. The mirror walls create the illusion of the room being larger than it actually is. Gert Wingårdh worked with mirrors in several of his interiors in order to change the experience of the room. The interiors are no longer in existence.

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Interior, with descent to the bottom storey through the concrete glass. The mirror wall creates the impression of a bigger and wider place.

472

Villa Hansson Residence Gothenburg, Sweden (1977)

Villa Hansson was Gert Wingårdh’s first detached house and was designed in 1977, the same year he started his own firm. Wingårdh applied for, and was granted, building permission for the area so as to have maximum freedom in choosing where to place the two buildings. The house is made up of two buildings that connect to each other and are slightly angled. Back in this early piece he worked with a motif that often recurs later in his career, the element of surprise. You walk towards the entrance via a narrow path that does not reveal what is to come behind the door. Once inside, the detached house opens up into a light space, in strong contrast to the unobtrusive façade, with green vitriol (ferrous sulphate) wooden panelling. The plan shows a rectangular, projecting form, a recurring theme in Wingårdh’s houses. Inside, the building is clad in whole sheets of plywood that can be replaced without a problem as each joint is clad with a strip that can easily be unscrewed. Even if Wingårdh worked with a tight budget, he shows a well-developed feeling for materials in this first work.

1.

Façade of unbevelled cover boarding. The living room – an addition designed in 1992. 3. Plan of ground floor. The gray area between the buildings is an extension from 1992. 4. The building conforms to the undulating terrain. Consistently low rise at first, it acquired a high-rise room through the extension. 2.

476 1.

2.

3.

4.

Photos of Chalmers School of Architecture in 2007.

A time of change Mikael Nanfeldt

492

At the beginning of the 1980s something had clearly happened in Sweden. A breakwater had been erected in architecture. The break was between functionalism (modernism) and postmodernism. The functionalist diehards looked on the new movement as a perversion, absolute superficiality in architecture. They found in it no real depth of thinking. They were appalled, either by the façades of, say, Charles Moore and Robert Venturi, in which arches, columns, ornaments and sculptures had taken their places without having any clear function. Writing in the journal Arkitektur No. 6 (1981), Olof Hultin reports from the conference Functionalism in the Future, at which the new movement is accused of being a Coca-Cola culture, lacking the elegance of earlier styles, and departing from the relation between form and content. This was to underestimate the complexity of the postmodern discussion. A younger generation of architects were no longer prepared to defer to functionalism as the sole truth. In 1966 the American architect Robert Venturi wrote: “Architects can no longer afford to be intimidated by the puritanically moral language of orthodox Modern architecture.” Instead functionalism was regarded as one of the expressions of an age, to be freely used or rejected according to preference. As Charles Jencks observes in his introduction to The Language of PostModern Architecture, an absolute breach with history was not accepted. In the exhibition catalogue for Flanör (1994), Gert Wingårdh writes: “By all means with a design in the modernist tradition/butwith a spice of expression”, thereby admirably underscoring Venturi’s ideas. Gert Wingårdh trained as an architect in the first half of the 1970s, a time of urban planning and government commissions. How was society to be organised? How were such big public construction projects as schools and hospitals to be planned? Big issues and a very great deal of politics. None of that interested Gert Wingårdh at the time, nor does it today. He was interested in architecture as art and looked to Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, Francesco Borromini, Mies van der Rohe, Louis Kahn and others – great architects, great artists, each with a distinct language of his own. As the first sentence in the manifesto for a school project in 1974, Gert Wingårdh writes: “I have to a great extent been inclined to construe the College of Design as a symbolic building”, declaring at the end of the same paragraph his willingness “to accept the concretely expressed, functional content in the second instance only.” Bold words, coming from a young student architect already in 1974, aspiring to transcend function as the first and foremost requisite. To cap

all, this young student had the nerve to maintain that the symbolic building possessed a deeper functionalism, far beyond the omnipotence of the smooth surface. Notwithstanding a certain youthful pathos vibrating between the lines – he invokes both Marcel Proust and Paul Cézanne – there is no mistaking his command of rhetoric, a skill that has accompanied him throughout his career and been an important ingredient of his success. Already as a student, Gert Wingårdh came into contact with the ideas of Robert Venturi as expressed in his Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966), as indeed is evident from the manifesto to his degree thesis. Venturi pleads for a both–and instead of the exclusive either–or, writing for example that: “A valid architecture evokes many levels of meaning and combinations of focus: its space and its elements become readable and workable in several ways at once.” All influences and first-hand experiences were architecturally justifiable, just as it was permissible to garner impressions from other architects and styles. There no longer being any absolute truth, quotation was possible. Much of what Gert Wingårdh designed in the 1980s has what one might call a distinctly postmodern expression: Villa Arlycke (1985), with classical fibreglass columns; Hotell Kramer (1984) with all its marble and its gilded detailing; Yoko Yap (1982– 83), with its references to a Japanese architecture; and Good Morning Hotel (1986), with a textual reference to Venturi’s concept of “The decorated shed”, taken from the book Learning from Las Vegas. The list of buildings could, of course, be extended. In time the postmodern vocabulary disappears, but not the determination to forever seek new inspiration and make new discoveries. That determination includes constantly testing new solutions, being inspired by new buildings, quoting and continuing to investigate the potentialities of material. Gert Wingårdh writes in a short poem: Art is a matter of life and death. Otherwise it is decorative art. Architecture is seldom a matter of life or death.

494

And perhaps that is what it all boils down to, a perpetual desire for architecture to be a matter of life and death. A desire that is rarely fulfilled but is no mean object of pursuit.

1–4.

366 works: 1974– 2007, including 152 competitions and parallel assignments, with 51 winning projects

List of works

498

366.

361.

361.

360.

363.

354.

361.

354.

357.

351.

358.

354.

357.

360.

360.

351.

352.

359.

351.

357.

351.

352.

2007

366.

St Helen’s Church, Skövde Church of Sweden, Skövde Extension

365.

Hallen, Båstad Fireplace, Hakonhus Housing estate

364.

363.

362.

Thor’s Tower, Stockholm Öyer Invest Construction of two hotel towers Asplunds Allé, Solna Skanska Local development plan. Parallel assignment

360.

359.

357.

West of the river, Kungsbacka Municipality of Kungsbacka Local development plan, town centre School of Architecture Campus, KTH, Stockholm Akademiska Hus Construction of new higher education establishment. Parallel assignment. Unrealised

Åby Travsällskap (race course) Local development plan Parallel assignment. First prize 354.

Villa Odéus, Alingsås Birgitta Odéus New house 353.

358.

356. 361.

Tekniska Nämndhuset (City Engineer’s Office), Stockholm City of Stockholm Rebuild and enlargement, offices and public premises. Parallel assignment

355.

Second homes, Bodrum, Turkey Sandellsandberg Group of holiday homes Second homes, Mölle Peter & Camilla Lauring, Dennis & Helle Hartman New semi-detached houses

Åby Stallbacke, Mölndal

349.

Campus Lindholmen, Gothenburg Chalmers Fastigheter New higher education establishment Parallel assignment

Idrottsparken, Norrköping Municipality of Norrköping Multi-family housing. Parallel assignment

348.

Strandviksstrand, Haparanda RYM Markutveckling New housing and hotel, with Pelle Lotén

Möllstorp, Öland CA Fastigheter Local development plan, housing

347.

Frodeparken, Uppsala Municipality of Uppsala Local development plan, housing Parallel assignment. Unrealised

346.

Landvetter Airport, Landvetter Luftfartsverket (Civil Aviation Authority) Arrivals hall rebuild. In progress

345.

Tvättstugan Precinct, Sundbyberg Folkhem Local development plan, multi-family housing Parallel assignment. First prize

352.

Strömstadstorn, Strömstad Strömstadsbyggen New multi-family housing

351.

Ökkern Centrum, Oslo, Norway Sten & Ström Local development plan, shopping centre Invited competition, together with Jensen & Skodvind and NOD. Unrealised

Snöskatan Precinct, Solna Folkhem Local development plan, housing 350.

CA fastigheter Local development plan, housing

Borgholm, Öland

329.

330.

344.

328.

339.

344.

330.

339

340.

339.

339.

340.

337.

236.

328.

327.

329.

326.

329.

328.

325.

329.

2006

344.

The Aula, Solna Akademiska Hus New conference facility

343.

Borås Kulturhus, Borås Municipality of Borås Arts centre rebuild

338.

Berga skola, Linköping Riksbyggen and HSB Local development plan, multi-family housing

337.

342.

341.

340.

339.

Villa Haapalo, Helsingborg Haapalo family New house Assignment. To be completed 2008 Naturum Stendörren, Nyköping Södermanland County Administrative Board New visitor centre Invited competition in association with NOD, Motto: Mitt i naturen. First prize. To be realised Basaren Precinct, Stockholm

SKB New multi-family housing Parallel assignment. First prize. To be realised

336.

335.

354.

Buff, Stockholm David Lefevre Shop interior, Biblioteksgatan Completed 2006

Önnered, Gothenburg Wallenstam Local development plan, multi-family housing

333.

Smålands Musik och Teater, Jönköping Jönköping County Council Performing Arts Centre Invited competition. Motto: Spira. First prize To Be realised

Münchensbacken, Stockholm Wallenstam Multi-family housing Parallel assignment. First prize

332.

Villa Orange, Mölnlycke Olson family New house. To be realised

331.

Hotel and spa, Varberg Varbergs Kurort Hotell och Spa Conference facility enlargement. To be realised

Träsket Precinct, Stockholm Diligentia Rebuild and enlargement of former Skandia head office Parallel assignment. First prize Eriksvik, Stockholm Arkitekthus.se Semi-detached houses To be realised

330.

Naturum Koster, Strömstad Municipality of Strömstad, West Götaland County Administrative Board New visitor centre Invited competition. Motto: Sund. Second place Unrealised

329.

Högsta punkten, Lund Pålsson och Öyier Invest New hotel and residential tower block

328.

Stockholm City Library, Stockholm City of Stockholm Open competition for enlargement Two entries. Mottoes: Brass and Origami unrealised

327.

Tyresö Gillöga Land allocation competition, local development Plan, housing Unrealised

326.

Glashus i Borås, Borås Municipality of Borås New café Open competition. Motto: Orangery. First prize

325.

Hekla Precinct, Stockholm AP fastigheter New office development

323.

318.

314.

311.

312.

312.

319

318.

311.

318.

310.

311.

308.

311.

311.

319.

319.

310.

306.

305.

2005

324.

Villa Carlsson, Kungsbacka Carlsson family New house To be realised

323.

Malmö Nya Stadium, Malmö PEAB New football stadium Parallel assignment. Unrealised

322.

Töpelsgatan, Gothenburg Skanska Nya Hem New multi-family housing development Parallel assignment. Unrealised

319.

Mölndals Centrum, Mölndal Sten och Ström Land allocation for commercial premises, Housing and public premises First prize. To be realised

318.

Fritidshus Pineus, Fjällbacka Pineus family Greenfield project To be realised

317.

Sköndal, Stockholm Wallenstam Local development plan, multi-family housing

321.

Studio Songwork, Skövde Lars Hallbäck New music studio To be realised

316.

Designskola, Mittuniversitetet, Sundsvall Akademiska hus New higher education building Unrealised

320.

Kanalhuset, Gothenburg SVT and SR (Swedish Radio and Swedish Television) Interior. Completed 2007

315.

Swedish Embassy, Teheran (Iran) Swedish National Property Board Rebuild To be realised

314.

Glashuset, Stockholm Wingårdhs Interior design, own office Completed 2006

313.

Villa Grindebacken, Gothenburg Grindebacken family Greenfield development. Unrealised

312.

Ørestad Syd, Copenhagen (Denmark) Kuben and Area Local development planning in association with Enthasias, Jensen & Skodvind and Vogt

309.

Skola i Hagfors, Hagfors Municipality of Hagfors New school Invited competition. Motto: From north, south, east and west Unrealised

308.

Tell us, Stockholm SSM Residential tower block

307.

Pilots’ houses, Marstrand, Kungälv Haggnö family Terrace housing conversion

311.

Hotell Tjuvholmen, Oslo, Norway Aspelin & Ramm New hotel building Invited competition. Motto: The Mahogany Unrealised

306.

Vaniya Mir, Carelian Isthmus (Russia) Private Dacha Invited competition. First prize. Under construction

310.

Villa G, Lidingö G family Greenfield development, three detached houses To be realised

305.

Ease for Filippa K, Stockholm Filippa K Shop interior Completed 2006

302.

302.

301.

302.

301.

301.

296.

294.

295.

287.

294.

289.

301.

291.

286.

299.

297.

299.

286.

291.

304.

Eksjö Regemente, Eksjö Brinova Conversion of former army barracks to fitness centre

303.

Volvohallen, Gothenburg Volvo Car Corporation Rebuild Completed 2006

302.

301.

Kymlinge, Sundbyberg Vasakronan Urban development project in association with NOD, White and KHR

299.

298.

297.

Sven Harry Karlssons samling, Stockholm Folkhem Art museum and housing To be realised 296.

300.

Volvo Brand Experience, Gothenburg Volvo Car Corporation New entrance building Completed 2006

Karolinska, Solna Locum New hospital building Invited competition in association with Tengboms and NOD. Motto: K2 Unrealised Materia & Klaessons, Tranås Kinnarp New factory and exhibition building Unrealised Oslo Terminal, Helsingborg HSB New multi-purpose hall, aquarium adventure Baths and office block Parallel assignment. Motto: The Third Wave. No prize awarded. Unrealised Visans hus, Västervik Municipality of Västervik Concert hall Open competition. Motto: Ballad Grove Honourable mention. Unrealised

295.

Second homes, Hamburgerön, Tanum Västkusttomter Second-home estate development To be realised

294.

Rydebäck, Helsingborg HSB New multi-family housing development

293.

Second home, Puranen, Färingsö Puranen family New building and alteration

292.

Västra Fäladan, Landskrona Brinova Local development plan, housing

291.

Visitor centre, Ales Stenar, Ystad County of Skåne New visitor center Parallel assignment in association with NOD, Unrealised

290.

Bryssel Precinct, Örnsköldsvik

Byggsigurd Construction and alteration of commercial Property To be realised 289.

Glaskasten in Marl, Germany Pesch & Partner New development and alteration, art museum Invited competition in association with Bergström & Bigert and NOD, Motto: Tubular. first prize, to be realised

288.

Eiranrantaa, Helsingfors, Finland Apollo-Rakenne Oy multi-family housing Invited competition. Motto: 34 34 34 In association with NOD. Unrealised

287.

Värtan, Stockholm AP fastigheter New office block Unrealised

286.

Hambrosgade, Copenhagen (Denmark)

284.

279.

277.

274

274

271.

285.

275.

282.

283.

282.

279.

274

281.

278.

282.

270.

278.

2004

285.

284.

283.

Freja eiendomme AS Greenfield office development Parallel assignment in association with NOD, Unrealised

282.

Citadellbadet, Landskrona Municipality of Landskrona New development and alterations, service facilities for open-air baths Stage 1 completed 2006 Stage 2 completed 2007 In association with NOD Published in Arkitektur 6/2006 and 4/2007

281.

Plogen Precinct, Sunne Sunne Byggnads AB Multi-family housing and library, in association with Radar To be realised Silon, Gothenburg Klippan kulturfastigheter AB New multi-family housing development To be completed 2008

280.

279.

278.

Vagabond, Varberg Vagabond International AB Greenfield development, offices Completed 2007 Hotell Birger Jarlsgatan 18, Stockholm Ekstranda Alteration and new building, hotel Unrealised Precinct Förrådsbacken, Stockholm AP fastigheter Local development plan Unrealised STIAS, Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study, Stellenbosch (South Africa) STIAS New research centre Invited competition. Second prize. Unrealised Art Museum, Kalmar Municipality of Kalmar Enlargement and new building, art museum

Open competition. Motto: Mirage Unrealised 277.

276.

275.

Handelshus, Sundsvall Norrporten New commercial building in Stortorget Unrealised Villa Soludden, Kungsbacka Eklund family New house (detailing not by Wingårdhs) Completed 2007 Kallis och Karantänen, Helsingborg Brinova New spa and hotel building Parallel assignment. First prize

274.

Fyra höga hus på Heden, Gothenburg Wallenstam Four apartment and office blocks, plus an arena Unrealised

273.

Böljan Precinct, Helsingborg JM New multi-family housing development Parallel assignment. Unrealised

272.

Volvo VCC designstudio, Gothenburg Volvo Car Corporation Enlargement and rebuild of design department Parallel assignment. First prize. Under construction

271.

Utropia, North Cumbria (England) Model for development of ex naval weapons dump. Unrealised

270.

Arabianrantaa, Helsingfors, Finland Helsingfors Stads Bostadsproduktionsbyrå Invited competition First prize. Under construction

268.

260.

259.

257.

257.

259.

257.

265.

257.

258.

268.

268.

265.

265.

257.

258.

266.

264.

269.

268.

267.

266.

257.

Försvarshistoriskt Museum, Boden Näringslivsförvaltningen i Boden Extension, interior design and exhibition facilities, defence history museum Parallel assignmentUnrealised Arkitekthus.se, different locations Arkitekthus.se catalogue housing, greenfield development, single-family homes AH 60 atrium house, AH 61 two storeys and AH 62 hillside house In 2007 four houses had been completed and upwards of 30 were under construction Published in Residence 1/2005 Tofta Manor, Kungälv Kallander family Kitchen enlargement in one wing Completed 2005 Varvet Precinct, Helsingborg Brinova Greenfield development, hotel and offices

264.

258.

Parallel assignment. Unrealised 265.

264.

263.

262.

261.

Villa Roser, Skara Roser family new house Completed 2005 Published in Arkitektur 5/2006 Kristallhotellet, Nybro Municipality of Nybro New hotel

Urban development model presented in the newspaper Göteborgsposten 260.

Södra Älvstranden (South Bank), Gothenburg GP

421, Gothenburg Aspelin & Ram Shopping centre conversion and enlargement of industrial property (Braid Factory) Parallel assignment. First prize Completed 2007. Published in Rum 1/2007

259.

Ericsson China HQ, Beijing (China) Ericsson China Greenfield development, offices Competition in association with NOD. First prize. Stage 1 completed 2007

258.

Havneholmen, Copenhagen (Denmark) Skanska Öresund Urban development Parallel assignment. First prize 2005 multi-family housing. Unrealised 2006 Atriumhuset Greenfield development, offices To be completed 2008

Copenhagen X, Copenhagen (Denmark) Örestadskonsortiet Urban development Unrealised Villa Germundsson, Gothenburg Germundsson family Rebuild Completed 2005

257.

2006– Tower Greenfield development, offices To be realised 257.

Villa L, Hinsdale, Illinois (USA) New house Completed 2007

256.

Müritzeum, Waren (Germany) Landkreiz Müritz Centre with aquariums Invited competition. Motto: 070666 In association with NOD. First prize Completed 2007

255.

Vision Uddevalla A vision for Uddevalla Presented 24th March 2004 to Västfront

254.

Bebop 4 light fittings for Ateljé Lyktan On sale 2007

253.

Lydmar Hotel, Stockholm

256.

252.

245.

241.

238.

252.

244.

241.

241.

237.

250.

247.

246.

244.

236.

246.

239.

243.

2003

Lydmar Hotel Interior design of hotel rooms Unrealised 252.

Kulturens Hus, Luleå Municipality of Luleå Concert hall, exhibition facilities and library Invited competition. Motto: Open House Unrealised

251.

Planet Fitness, Stockholm Planet Fitness Interior Parallel assignment. Unrealised

250.

Brovakten, Stockholm Wallenstam New multi-family housing development To be realised

249.

Viken, Höganäs HSB Local development plan, low-rise housing Unrealised

248.

Hotell Birger Jarl, Stockholm Hotell Birger Jarl Hotel room interiors Unrealised

243.

Pool, Floda, Gothenburg B Olsson Outdoor pool Unrealised

247.

Gasklockan Bostäder, Stockholm Folkhem Two residential tower blocks Unrealised

242.

Fiskebäck, Gothenburg Eliassons Fastighets AB New multi-family housing development Parallel assignment. Unrealised

246.

Marieholmsförbindelsen, Gothenburg WSP Visual design of bridges and tunnels

241.

Maria Sofia (Skifferhusen), Helsingborg HSB Terrace housing. To be completed 2008

245.

Söderhöjd, Varberg Varbergs Bostads AB 3 apartment blocks Parallel assignment. First prize Completed 2007

240.

Kungsportsavenyn, Gothenburg Wallenstam Programming and refurbishment of buildings in Teatergatan and Kungsportsavenyn Parallel assignment. Unrealised

Margareteholmen, Copenhagen (Denmark) Freja Ejendomme AS Urban development Parallel assignment. Second prize. Unrealised

239.

244.

GIH Idrottshögskolan, Stockholm, Akademiska Hus College of physical education extension Parallel assignment. First prize. To be realised

238.

VillAnn, Kungsbacka O family New house in association with NOD (landscaping). Completed 2005 Published in Arkitektur 7/2005; The Architect’s Journal 2005:222, 223; Ottogono 2006:187; ASB 4/2007; Arkitekternas Villor 2007; A10 7/2006; Urbanism and Architecture 31, 4/2007

237.

Experience, Geneva, Frankfurt, Birmingham, Detroit and elsewhere Volvo Car Corporation Global exhibition concept for motor show rooms. Implemented from 2003 onwards

236.

Konserthus, Stavanger (Norway) City of Stavanger New concert hall Open competition. Motto: Spafkri Honourable mention. Unrealised

235.

Munich Central Station, Munich (Germany) FSW Düsseldorf

235.

232.

231.

232.

235.

226.

228.

228.

228.

231.

223.

223.

222.

222.

231.

230.

227.

229.

222.

235.

new offices and commercial premises invited competition in association with NOD Fourth place. Unrealised 234.

233.

232.

230.

Välle Broar, Växjö Municipality of Växjö Parallel assignment in association with NOD Unrealised Hotell Opalen, Gothenburg Atrium Hotel extension Unrealised

229.

Bohushöjd, Ale Sverigehuset Housing estate Parallel assignment. First prize Completed 2005 228.

231.

Fritidshus LP (Burön), Öckerö LP family New second home Unrealised

Björntand, Östersund Municipality of Östersund Hotel and arena Invited competition. Motto: Biesse Beine First prize Published in Cool architecture (2003); Groundscapes, Ilka & Andreas Ruby (2006); CA Contemporary Architecture 55/2004; 9th International Architecture Exhibition at la Biennale di Venezia, Trajectories, Catalogue 2007: Second entry, hotel and opera house Stureplan precincts, Stockholm Diligentia alteration and enlargement of offices and Commercial premises Parallel assignment. Unrealised Nötsäter Konferenscentrum, Skärhamn Sjöleden AB Parallel assignment. Unrealised Published in CA Contemporary Architecture 55/2004; Cool Architecture (2005)

227.

Volvo Next Face VCC Volvo Car Corporation Global concept for interior design of dealer environments Completed for more than 450 dealers the world over

226.

Norra Djurgårdsstaden, Stockholm SKB New multi-family housing development

225.

Venus Precinct, Gothenburg City of Gothenburg Urban development Parallel assignment. Unrealised

224.

223.

222.

New offices Invited competition. Unrealised 222.

Nobelmuseum, Stockholm Skanska New museum building. Unrealised

221.

Uppsala konsert och Kongress, Uppsala City of Uppsala New concert hall and conference centre Open competition. Motto: Urban 1. Unrealised

220.

Strömsholmen, Norrköping Municipality of Norrköping Parallel assignment. Unrealised

Tegelvaerkshavnen, Copenhagen (Denmark) Dominia Local housing development plan Invited competition in association with Helle Juul and Flemming Frost. Unrealised

219.

Homes for the Homeless, Gothenburg Räddningsmissionen New housing development. Unrealised

218.

Sim City, Mölnlycke New hotel building. Unrealised

EU, Strasbourg (France) EU

217.

Oden-Ygg Precinct, Uppsala

216.

216.

208.

206.

212.

213.

211.

206.

207.

205.

210.

214.

2002

216.

AP Fastigheter Office alterations and enlargement Unrealised

212.

Dalsland Lodge, Stora Le West Swedish Tourist Council New hotel

North of Kolbäck Bridge, Umeå UMI Fastighetsutveckling Greenfield multi-family housing development Unrealised

211.

Swedish Embassy, Washington House of Sweden, Washington, DC (USA) Swedish National Property Board new office and housing development with exhibition and conference areas Invited competition in association with NOD, Motto: Madeleine. First prize. Shared with VOA, Chicago and Washington, completed 2006. Published in Arkitekten 2/2003; Architectural Record 4/2003; Building Europe, The European Wood Magazine 1/2003; ID November 2003; Nordic reach, 14/2005; L´Arca 181/2003; Pol oxygen June/July 2003; 9th International Architecture Exhibition at la Biennale di Venezia, Catalogue (2004); Arkitektur 8/2006; Forum 3/2006

215.

Blekholmen Precinct, Stockholm Drott New office development. Unrealised

214.

Västra Nordstaden meets the Harbour, Gothenburg Göteborgs Maritima Center Model for extension of Nordstadsberget down towards the Opera House. Unrealised

213.

Modevaruhus K:fem, Stockholm Svenska Bostäder New commercial premises Parallel assignment. First prize. To be completed 2008

210.

Villa Astrid, Gothenburg Johnsson Gannedal family New house

Completed 2004. Published in Arkitektur 7/2005; Wallpaper 82/2005; Resort Houses (2005); Arkitektur (DK) April 2006; Ottagono 188/2006; Bauwelt 20/2006; Abstract January/February 2006; Architect residential September/October 2006; Werk 7/8. 2006; Arkitekternas villor 2007 Helge Zimdal prize 2006 209.

Villa Lindkvist, Lidingö Torsten Kai-Larsen New house Completed 2003

208.

AstraZeneca Gärtuna, Södertälje AstraZeneca New office development Parallel assignment. Unrealised

207.

Noibai Airport, Hanoi (Vietnam) Swedavia New control tower, competition in association with Bergs Arkitektkontor Unrealised

206.

Harven Precinct, Jönköping Henningssongruppen multi-family housing with commercial premises and cinemas parallel assignment, first prize, completed 2007 by another architect

205.

Hotel, Norra Bantorget, Stockholm Öijer Invest and Skanska new hotel (Sign) Scheme 1. Unrealised Scheme 2. Completed 2004–2008 Published in Stockholm den växande staden (2005), CA Contemporary Architecture, June 2004 vol. 55

204.

Söderstadion, Stockholm City of Stockholm New football stadium in association with Bergs Arkitektkontor Unrealised

203.

Kvarnholmen, Nacka Scheme 1

202.

202.

200.

197.

197.

197.

197.

200.

201.

199.

200.

191.

201.

200.

189.

189.

197.

202.

197.

199.

KF Urban development, Parallel assignments. Unrealised Scheme 2 2004 JM Local development plan, housing Parallel assignment. Unrealised Brunnshög, Lund Vasakronan New offices (Sony Ericsson) Assignment to be completed 2008 Saltarvet, Fiskebäckskil Gullmarstrand Addition of two exhibition galleries for Lena Cronquist Unrealised Tjuvholmen, Oslo (Norway) Skanska Land allocation competition, in association with Thomas Sandell and NOD Unrealised

195.

192.

197.

201.

196.

199.

Rålambshov, Stockholm Skanska New hotel (Mariott Garden) Parallel assignment. Unrealised

198.

Kajan Precinct, Limhamn Ferring New office development. Unrealised

197.

Villa Arvidsson, Malmö Arvidsson family Greenfield development, with full building documentation. Unrealised

196.

Royal Swedish Academy of Music, Stockholm Akademiska Hus Conversion of former Konstfack (University College of Arts, Crafts & Design) building to college of music. Parallel assignment. Unrealised

Went to the second stage before the project was dropped 194.

Trängkåren Precinct, Stockholm Bonnier City Fastigheter New office development Parallel assignment. Unrealised

193.

Alcro Repainting of house – railway brown and mirrorglass base For advertising campaign. Completed 2002

192.

Ericsson, Lund Ericsson Interior design. In association with Thomas Sandell Completed 2003

191. 195.

Sollentuna Expo Center Sollentuna Municipality of Sollentuna Scheme for two residential tower blocks Invited competition. Motto: A Pair of Towers

197.

Telefonplan, Stockholm AP Conversion and further development of former main LM Ericsson factory building 2002 urban development, housing

Parallel assignment. Unrealised 2002 construction of building 23, offices Unrealised 2003–2004 conversion of building 01 to college (Konstfack/University College of Arts, Crafts & Design) Published in Arkitektur 8/2004 2004– conversion of building 10 to Designens Hus (Telefonplan Designcenter) 2004 conversion of building 03 (School of Architecture) 2006 conversion of building 11 (Riksutställningar/Swedish Travelling Exhibitions) 2006– addition and extension, building 10 (Swedish Association of Architects) 190.

Eldsjälen Precinct, Jönköping Riksbyggen Multi-family housing, Munksjöstranden tenantowner development. Completed Stage 1 2004 Stage 2 2007 Stage 3 2008

187.

183.

185.

187.

179.

184.

177.

176.

179.

184.

174.

179.

175.

186.

186.

178.

184.

2001

Stage 4 2008 Stage 5 2009 189.

188.

187.

186.

Margaretaplatsen, Helsingborg Scheme 1, Erik Banck Foundation New senior housing Parallel assignment. First prize. Unrealised Scheme 2. HSB Two new apartment blocks. Completed 2007

185.

184.

Lackarebäck, Mölndal Harry Sjögren AB New office development. Unrealised Piano Pavilion, Lahti (Finland) Finnish Forest Association New café building Completed 2007 in association with Anders Adlercreutz

183.

Raus Vång, Helsingborg Riksbyggen New terrace housing Completed 2006

182.

Spiror, Stockholm Arkitekturgalleriet Model in connection with the exhibition HighRise Buildings unrealised Karolinska Institute, Solna Akademiska Hus New conference centre Parallel assignment. First prize Unrealised (see The Aula 2006 in which the project is transferred to a new property) Monumental Buildings, with Claes Hake Galleri Dunér model in connection with the exhibition HighRise Buildings Unrealised Campus Uppsala, Uppsala Uppsala University Urban development Parallel assignment. Unrealised

181.

180.

179.

Stenunge Strand, Stenungsund Riksbyggen New tower and terraced block development Unrealised New scheme 2004, slab blocks Stage 1 to be completed 2008 Mariestad Library, Mariestad Municipality of Mariestad Library alteration and enlargement Parallel assignment. First prize. To be realised Kappseglingen Precinct, Stockholm SKB New multi-family housing development Completed 2007

178.

Kulturhuset Åsunden, Ulricehamn Municipality of Ulricehamn New arts centre Parallel assignment. Unrealised

177.

Investor, Stockholm Serco

Office alteration and enlargement Parallel assignment. Unrealised 176.

Precinct Strömpilen, Umeå UMI fastighetsutveckling AB Shopping centre enlargement Unrealised

175.

Umeå Östra, Umeå Municipality of Umeå New travel centres Parallel assignment. Unrealised

174.

Aranäs, Kungsbacka Municipality of Kungsbacka Urban development Parallel assignment. First prize Alteration and further development of upper secondary school and theatre Completed 2006 Published in Arkitektur 7/2006 Kasper Salin Prize 2006 2004 local development plan for the area south of the school

169.

169.

169.

165.

165.

163.

165.

165.

163.

165.

163.

164.

163.

160.

2000

173.

172.

Posten Klara, Stockholm Skanska New hotel, congress and railway complex Scheme 1. Parallel assignment in association with Bergs Arkitektkontor. First prize Scheme 2, 2002–04 Scheme 3, 2004–05 Scheme 4, 2004–06 Unrealised Tvålflingan Precinct, Stockholm Drott AB Urban development Parallel assignment. Unrealised

171.

170.

169.

Torsvik, Lidingö JM Local development plan. Multi-family housing Completed by another architect

166.

162.

Fanan 4 Precinct, Halmstad AB Drapeau New office development Unrealised

Multi-storey car park at Örgrytemotet (intersection), Gothenburg Göteborgs Parkeringsbolag Unrealised

Single-family housing, Barkarby Kyrkby Folkhem Local development plan Parallel assignment. First prize. Completed 2007

165.

Focushuset, Gothenburg Göteborgs Parkeringsbolag Alteration and enlargement Completed 2003

161.

Våråsgården Stäket, Järfälla Folkhem New low-rise housing development Completed 2002

164.

Knutpunkt Mölndal, Mölndal Västtrafik Waiting rooms and amenities Invited competition. Motto: Runway. First prize Completed 2003 Published in Arkitektur 1/2004 and 4/2004; Deutsche BauZeitung 4/2005

160.

163.

Växjö City Library Municipality of Växjö Extension

New high school, Kungälv Municipality of Kungälv Pilot studies for new teaching premises in three different positions Realised as Mimer’s Houses, Kungälv Municipality of Kungälv Alteration and further development of high school, library, theatre and exhibition centre Invited competition. Motto: lu men. First prize Completed stage 1 2004; stage 2 2005; stage 3 2006

Denmark Precinct, Stockholm NCC High-rise multi-family housing Parallel assignment. In association with Thomas Sandell. Unrealised

168.

Gyllins Trädgård, Malmö Municipality of Malmö Local development plan Parallel assignment in association with NOD Unrealised

167.

Villa Banning, Värmdö Banning family

New house Completed 2002

Invited competition. Motto: The Art of Seeing Unrealised

158.

143.

154.

158.

147.

149.

152.

152.

149.

144.

156.

155.

155.

Diligentia Office alterations and enlargement Parallel assignment. Unrealised

158.

157.

Bastu, Skärhamn Swedish National Property Board New sauna building Unrealised Ran Precinct, Umeå Balticgruppen AB New multi-family housing development Unrealised, building documents and interior Fittings completed

154.

Isafjord Precinct, Stockholm Drott Local development plan Parallel assignments, first prize Stage 1: Isafjord 2B Precinct New office Development. Unrealised

153.

152. 156.

Jericho Precinct, Stockholm

New house Completed 2001 151.

155.

AstraZeneca Alderly Park, Macclesfield (UK) AstraZeneca Master plan Competition, first prize, realised by AMEC and others, completed from 2003 onwards

Skolan Precinct, Skövde Skövdehem New multi-family housing development Parallel assignment Unrealised

150.

IT college on Chalmers Campus, Lindholmen, Gothenburg Chalmers Fastigheter New teaching facilities Unrealised

Gjutaren Precinct, Kungälv SverigeHuset Multi-family housing Unrealised

149.

EU 2001, Sweden Interior architecture and organisation for Sweden’s EU chairmanship In association with Thomas Sandell Completed and demolished 2001

Gamen Precinct, Stockholm Vasakronan Conversion and enlargement of high-rise housing to hotel Parallel assignment. Unrealised

148.

Fritidshus Andersson, Hindås Andersson family New second home Unrealised

Villa Eistam, Gothenburg Eistam family

143.

144.

151.

Published in Arkitektur 3/2003 and 8/2004; Schulen in Deutschland Neubau und Revitalisierung (2004) Nominated for the Kasper Salin Prize 2005 159.

143.

147.

147.

Vargen Precinct, Vellinge Vellinge Bostäder AB New multi-family housing development Parallel assignment, first prize, completed 2002 Published in Arkitektur 7/2003

146.

Sjöstadsporten, Stockholm Wihlborgs Local development plan, housing and nonhousing development Parallel assignment in association with Thomas Sandell. Unrealised

145.

Värtan, Stockholm Position Stockholm Local development plan, housing non-housing development Parallel assignment in association with Thomas Sandell. Unrealised

144.

Posten’s new headquarters, Stockholm Postverket New head office building Invited competition. Motto: Post-it. Unrealised

142.

140.

137.

138.

138.

138.

139.

138.

134.

137.

133.

132.

139.

1999

143.

Varvsholmen, Kalmar City of Kalmar for local development plan KIFAB for offices and CA for housing Local development plan, housing and nonhousing development Parallel assignment. First prize. 3 stages now realised Stage 1 semi-detached housing. Completed 2004 Stage 2 new office development. Unrealised Stage 2 terrace housing. Completed 2006 Stage 3 multi-family housing. To be completed 2008

140.

139.

138. 142.

141.

Oslo Opera, Oslo (Norway) City of Oslo New opera house Open competition. Motto: A Torso with a Heart Unrealised Student Union, Karolinska Institute, Flemingsberg Karolinska Institutet New student union building. Unrealised

Linnahall, Tallinn (Estonia) Österled Foundation Sports centre rebuild Parallel assignment in association with Thomas Sandell. Motto: Linnahall Y2K. Unrealised Kårhuset (student union building) Stockholm University, Frescati Campus, Stockholm Stockholm University Open international competition. Motto: Böj Went to stage 2. Motto: Ba-nan Second prize. Unrealised Kängurun Precinct (former Krokslätt Factories), Mölndal Husvärden 1999 local development plan, multi-family housing and offices, scheme 1 2005–08 new office development, to be completed 2008 2006– local development plan, multi-family housing and offices, scheme 2

Hagelberg family New house Unrealised 136.

Tennishallen Precinct, Nyköping Municipality of Nyköping New multi-family housing development Parallel assignment. Motto: @home Unrealised

135.

Carnegie, Gothenburg Kulturfastigheter Klippan New multi-family housing development Parallel assignment

134.

Wolfsburg Science Center, Wolfsburg (Germany) Stadt Wolfsburg New science centre Invited competition. Motto: 010101 Unrealised

133. 137.

Villa Hagelberg, Åsa

Korsvägen, Gothenburg Västtrafik

Kiosk Parallel assignment. First prize Completed 2002 132.

BO 01 Housing Expo, Malmö MKB New multi-family housing development Completed 2001 Published in Forum 1/2001; Area 89/2003; AT 11/2001; AT 12/2001; Abitare 409/2001; Architectural Review 1253/2001; Arkitekten (DK) 18/2001; Arkitektur 6/2001; Arquitectura Viva 81; FORUM Inredning Arkitektur Design 1/2001; 1/2003 01; Guide till Malmös arkitektur (2002); md, international magazine of design 1/2002; Arkitektur i Sverige 2000–2005. Awarded the SAR Housing Prize 2001.

131.

Bohuslän Museum, Uddevalla Municipality of Uddevalla museum alterations and enlargement Invited competition. Motto: Yes box alright Unrealised

129.

123.

125.

129.

127.

128.

122.

119.

122.

119.

125.

117.

120.

116.

128.

1998

130.

129.

Fogsvansen Precinct (Norra Älvstrandens Handelscentrum), Eriksberg, Gothenburg Eriksbergs Förvaltning Shopping centre Parallel assignment. First prize. Completed 2001 Also interior architecture for Svenska Handelsbanken. Completed 2002

development, 39-storey tower block, 1999, trainee’s design Scheme 2: New hotel, 11 storeys, 2000 in Association with Thomas Sandell Parallel assignment. Unrealised 126.

Långedrag Restaurant, Gothenburg Higab New restaurant building IInvited competition. Motto: Look out. Unrealised Published in Arkitekturtävlingar /2000 125.

128.

127.

Kostern Precinct, Gothenburg Riksbyggen New multi-family housing development Parallel assignment. First prize. Completed 2004 Published in Arkitektur 3/2005 and Forum 0301 Sergel Torn, Sergels torg, Stockholm Tenant-owner housing Scheme 1: New multi-family housing

124.

Bolinder Strand, Järfälla JM Local development plan Parallel assignment. First prize Stage 1, new multi-family housing development, Completed 2003 Fatbursjön Precinct 5, Stockholm Atrium / kb Fatburssjön 5 Conversion and further development of Industrial property for offices In association with NOD. Parallel assignment. First prize. Completed 2003. Published in Arkitektur 1/2004 and Rum 1/2005 Villa Berntsson, Gothenburg Berntsson family New house. Unrealised

123.

122.

Baldersnäs Manor, Dalsland Baldersnäs Foundation New orangery and stage Invited competition, motto “Tension Field”, Unrealised Published in Arkitekturtävlingar 8/1999 Police station, Heden, Gothenburg Vasakronan Office and housing development/rebuild Parallel assignment. Motto: Ekocity. Unrealised

121.

Östgötaporten Jan Steen AB New visitor centre. Unrealised

120.

Hotel Opera, Gothenburg Capona New hotel. Unrealised

119.

Museum of World Culture, Gothenburg Swedish National Property Board New museum building open competition. Motto: Terra Incognita

Purchased, unrealised Published in Arkitekturtävlingar /1999 118.

Glasberg School, Mölndal Samfast / Municipality of Mölndal New school Parallel assignment. Unrealised

117.

Universeum, Gothenburg Västsvenska handelskammaren AB New science centre and aquarium Invited competition. Motto: Laterna Magica First prize. Completed 2001 Published in Arkitekturtävlingar /1998; Mama 22/1998; Arkitektur 3/2000, 6/2001 and 4/2004; Arkitektur i trä – träpriset 2004 (2004); Form 5/2001; Forum Närmiljö 1/2002, 2/2002; Trärevolutionen (2003)

116.

Ericsson Lindholmen, Gothenburg Ericsson New office development Two-stage invited competition. Motto: Redundans. Unrealised

114.

109.

106.

102.

102.

112.

104

110.

108.

103.

105.

109.

115.

114.

113.

112.

109.

Tändstickan Precinct, Gothenburg Eklandia Fastighets AB New office development. Invited competition Motto: Living Filter Unrealised. Published in Arkitekturtävlingar /1999 Ericsson European HQ, St James’s Square, London (UK) Ericsson Interior architecture and rebuild in association with Thomas Sandell and Allies and Morrison assignment. Completed 1999 Published in Wallpaper 1999; Arkitektur 1/2000; Architecture in Detail, Staircases, work conception (2002) SAAB retail, worldwide SAAB Exterior and interior design concept for SAAB dealers. In association with Anders Wilhelmson Unrealised SAAB SACC, Trollhättan SAAB

107.

107.

Interior architecture. Completed 1999 Published in Arkitektur 5/2002 111.

Viking Ship Museum, Ale Municipality of Ale New museum. Unrealised

110.

Sjövikskajen, Stockholm Project 1. Futurum, Sjövik project Conversion of industrial building (Vin & Sprit) to science centres. In association with Berg Arkitektkontor. Unrealised Project 2. Own office in bottling hall (Vin & Sprit). Completed 1998 Project 3. Urban development, JM (several schemes and undecided parallel assignments) 1999–2000 Project 4. Liljeholmskajen Precinct 4, multi-family housing, JM. To be realised 2001– Published in Arkitektur 3/2003 Project 5. Brohuset multi-family housing, JM, 2001 Project 6 Berghuset multi-family housing, JM To be realised 2001–2008

105.

109.

108.

Swedish Pavilion, Expo 2000, Hanover (Germany) Swedish National Property Board New expo pavilion Invited competition. Motto: Interplay. Unrealised Published in Forum 2/2000 Hamah adventure baths and aquarium, Gårdsten, Gothenburg Gårdstenbostäder New baths and aquarium complex. Unrealised

107.

East African School of Economics, Nairobi (Kenya) Skanska New school. Unrealised

106.

Loen Precinct, Stockholm Swedish National Property Board New office development for the Ministry of Culture. Unrealised

105.

Visby University Library, Visby Visby University

105.

New library building Competition. Motto: 1997/98:117. Unrealised 104.

Wingårdhsvillan, Mörtnäs, Nacka Åke Larsson Byggare New detached housing development Assignment. Completed 1999 Published in Nordic by Nature (2001)

103.

Tigern Precinct, Stockholm Swedish National Property Board Alteration and further development of a Government office, plus interior architecture: Furniture design in association with Thomas Sandell. Assignment completed 2000 Published in Arkitektur 1/2001 pp. 18–21; Rum 1/2001 pp. 54–63

102.

Allgon, Rönninge, Täby Åke Larsson Byggare New office development and interior architecture First prize. Completed 2000. Published in Mama 24/1999; Nordic by Nature (2001)

98.

96.

92.

89.

89.

101.

101.

98.

92.

89.

98.

89.

98.

1997

101.

City Väst, Stockholm City of Stockholm Local development plan, offices and hotel Parallel assignment in association with Berg Arkitektkontor. Motto: Den klara hallen Unrealised

100.

Fornebu, Oslo (Norway) Ericsson New office development Parallel assignment. Unrealised

99.

98.

Ricklundagården, Vilhelmina Ricklundagården New art museum. Unrealised Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg Chalmers Fastigheter 1999–2001 alteration and new development, student union building Parallel assignment. First prize Published in Arkitektur 7/2001 and 8/2006; AT 12/2001; A+D (India) July–August 2003; U+A Urbanism and Architecture (China)

4/2007, p. 31; Arkitektur I Sverige 2000–05 Kasper Salin Prize 2001 Scheme 1. New student and postgraduate housing, tower block, 2000. Unrealised Scheme 2. New student housing in 2 high-rise blocks, 2002. Unrealised Scheme 3. New student housing development Chabo. Completed 2003–06 97.

96.

School of Economics, Jönköping Invited competition. Motto: Trägårn (The Garden). Unrealised Hyllie, Malmö Project 1: Scandinavian Tower, Öyer Invest Project 2: Hyllie centre and arena, Parkfast Urban development, civic centre and arena Parallel assignment. First prize Project 3: 2002–08 Hyllie arena Parkfast New ice hockey arena. In association with Mats Matsson and Evata (interior) 2002–10: Hyllie Hotell, Öyer Invest New hotel development 2007–10: Emporia, Sten & Ström

Ericsson Local development plan and new office development Scheme 1. Parallel assignment. First prize, Unrealised Scheme 2. 2000. Unrealised

New shopping centre, office and housing development Invited competition. Motto: Spaces. First prize To be realised 2007–10 Published in Arkitektur 2/2004, p. 5; 2/2006 95.

94.

Telinor, Bareum Telinor New head office building. Invited competition with Lund Hagem Unrealised Travel Centre, Borås Borås New travel centre Parallel assignment with MA arkitekter Unrealised

91.

90.

89. 93.

Expo 98, Lisbon (Portugal) Swedish National Property Board Swedish pavilion Invited competition with Thomas Sandell, Fredrik Wretman and Svante Berg. Unrealised

92.

Ericsson EMW, Mölndal

Ryaverken, Gothenburg Ryaverken External environment Parallel assignment. Unrealised Akzo Nobel, Eka kemi, Bohus Akzo Nobel New office development. Unrealised AstraZeneca, Waltham, Massachusetts (USA) AstraZeneca Greenfield development, research centres Parallel assignment. First prize Stage 1 in association with Jacobs, Phil. Completed 2000 Stage 2 in association with Wilson Architects, Boston. Completed 2003

87.

83.

80.

77.

87.

76.

85.

82.

84.

82.

82.

1996

88.

Fornebu master plan, Oslo (Norway) Municipality of Oslo Local development plan Parallel assignment Unrealised

87.

Härnösand City and University Library, Härnösand City of Härnösand New library building Open competition. Motto: A bookwork orange Third place

86.

Villa Vehagen, Stenungsund Vehagen family New house Unrealised

85.

Verkmästargatan, Gothenburg Bostadsbolaget Conversion and new construction, ecological apartments Completed 1997 Published in Arkitektur 5/1998

84.

Maskinkajen Eriksberg, Gothenburg Bostadsbolaget New multi-family housing development Parallel assignment. Unrealised

83.

Nordic Watercolour Museum, Skärhamn Akvarell i Väst New museum Open competition. Motto: Ett vitt papper Unrealised

82.

Nybodahöjden, Stockholm Folkhem Local development plan; new terrace house development and conversion of school to housing Assignment. Completed 1998. Published in Mama 17/1992 and Arkitektur 7/1998

81.

Ericsson HF, Telefonplan, Stockholm Ericsson Local development plan New office development and interior architecture

Parallel assignment. First prize 1996–98. Office interior design in building 03, phase 3 1998–99. Office interior design in building 03, phase 4 2000–01. Office interior design in building 03, phase 5c 1999. Area development plan. Parallel assignment. First prize Continued work on area development plan and internal design of building 01, department CRE 80.

Swedish Embassy in Berlin (Germany) Swedish National Property Board New embassy building Invited competition. Motto: Carl-Philip First prize. Completed 1999. In association with Pysall & Ruge Published in Arkitekturtävlingar 5/1996, Mama 17/1997 och 21/1998; Arkitektur 8/2000, Bauwelt 42/2000; Forms22 6/99; AIT 12/99; Forum 1/00; Domus 828/2000; DAM Architektur Jahrbuch 2000; Arkkitehti 6/99, Living Architecture 17/2000; Arkitektur

DK 1/2000; l´architecture d´aujourd´hui 329/2000; Architectural Review March 2000; Frame March/April 2000; Architectural Record (USA) 7/2001 p 78, Centras 2001:4; Fourteen Swedish Embassies built 1959–99 (2001); Framtidsformer, Sveriges handlingsprogram för arkitektur, formgivning och design (2001); Trärevolutionen (2003); Statens konstråds årskatalog (2000) Kasper Salinpriset (1999). Nominerad till Kasper Salinpriset 1999 79.

VTDC (Volvo Truck Demonstration Center), Gothenburg Volvo lastvagnar AB New demonstration facility Unrealised

78.

Rättscentrum, Luleå Vasakronan Rebuild Parallel assignment. Unrealised

77.

Villa Olson, Sollentuna

75.

75.

71.

71.

74.

71.

72.

71.

1995

Olson family New house. Unrealised 76.

Kvarnhuset, Västra Karup, Båstad Johan Dieden Conversion and enlargement of former agricultural property Building 1. Greenfield development, Poolbaracken in association with Per Friberg, Completed 1997 Building 2. Conversion of Stables to dining room and dance hall Stallet. Completed 1998 Building 3. Conversion of Sheep Pen to kitchen, Completed 1998 Building 4. Conversion of Hay Barn to guest rooms and fitness training facility. Completed 1999 Building 5. New house, Kvarnhuset Completed 2000 Published in Residence 10/2000; Arkitektur i trä – träpriset 2004; Country Modern, 2001; House and Garden, March 2004; Konstvärlden & disajn 5-2001; Lofts of Scandinavia, (2004); Plaza Interiör, 11/2003; Ville o

Casali, 2/2004; Arkitektur 5/2004; Small Spaces (2005); Spas for Your Home (2005); Häuser modernisieren, 3/2005; Dagbladet, 16.10.2005; Nordic reach, 14/2005 och Arkitekternas villor (2004, 2007) 75.

Victoria Olympic arena, Stockholm City of Stockholm New national arena Invited competition. Motto: Victoria In association with Berg Arkitektkontor First prize, unrealised Published in Tävlingsbladet 6/1997

74.

Arlanda TWR, Stockholm Swedish Civil Aviation Authority New control tower Parallel assignment. First prize. Completed 2001 Published in Mama 11/1995; Den stora skalan, Statens konstråd (2001); Arkitektur 5-2001; Casabella 698, Form 3/2001 and Arkitektur i Sverige 2000–05

73.

Stockholm expo, Expo 97 Expo 97 Local development plan, concept design Unrealised Pavilion, Hjärnan (The Brain). Unrealised Pavilion, Astra. Unrealised

72.

Liseberg, Gothenburg Liseberg Stage 1. Area A1, Jakobsdal, completed 1996 Stage 2. Area A2, Kållerado, completed 1996 Stage 3. Hang Over roller coaster, completed 1997–2003 Stage 4. Detailed development plan, south of Liseberg

Stage 5. Uppskjutet (Postponed/Launched), completed 1999 Stage 6. Magasinet, completed 2000 Stage 7. Spindeln Precinct Stage 8. Höjdskräcken (Fear of Heights), completed 2004 Stage 9. Balder roller coaster, completed 2005 71.

Hogia, Hakenäs, Stenungssund Hogia Stage 1. New office development, completed 2000 Stage 2. Office block enlargement, completed 2003–06 First prize. Published in Nordic by Nature (2001)

70.

Kode, Kungälv Sverigehuset AB Ecological sheltered housing development Unrealised

69.

Volvo S80 Identity and Emotional Charisma, pilot study of Volvo model S80

67.

65.

62.

60.

64.

65.

59.

59.

61.

61.

63.

63.

57.

1994

68.

Hackholmssund Skanska New house Parallel assignment. Unrealised

67.

Växelmyntsgatan, Högsbohöjd, Gothenburg Poseidon Rebuild, multi-family housing Completed 1998 Published in Mama 18/1997; SAR.s guide till Arkitektur i Sverige 1995–1999

66.

Knutpunkt Hjalmar, Hjalmar Brantingplatsen, Gothenburg Göteborgs stad New traffic intersection Parallel assignment. Unrealised

65.

Villa Andersson, Näset, Gothenburg Andersson family New house Completed 1997 Published in Casas Internacionales CP 67 (1999)

64.

Lindholmen Research Campus, Gothenburg Lindholmen utveckling AB Local development plan, science centre Parallel assignment. Unrealised

63.

Ericsson ECS, Lund Ericsson New R&D complex Assignment Stage 1 completed 1998 Stage 2 completed 2000 Stage 3 completed 2002 Published in Arkitektur 1/2003, SAR:s guide till arkitektur i Sverige 1995–1999 Nominated for the Kasper Salin Prize 1997

1993

62.

Copenhagen Concert Hall, Copenhagen (Denmark) City of Copenhagen New concert hall International open competition in association with Anders Wilhelmson. Motto: 27628 Unrealised

59.

Helsinki Museum of Modern Art, Helsinki (Finland) City of Helsinki New art museum Competition in association with Anders Wilhelmson. Motto: 1234 Honourable mention Unrealised

61.

Ericsson EMW, Borås Ericsson New factory building Parallel assignment, first prize, completed Stage 1 halls 6, 7, 8: 1995 Stage 2 halls 9, 10, 11: 1997 Stage 3 dining room: 1998 Stage 4 new entrance: 2003 Stage 5 rebuild, hall 5 and Ryda Terminal: 2006 Published in Nordic by Nature (2001)

58.

Reimersholme, Stockholm Rebuild of Precincts Räkenholmen 8 & 12 and Kronoljan. Completed 1994

57.

Ale Arts Centre and Compulsory School, Nödinge, Ale Municipality of Ale New school building Completed 1995 Published in Arkitektur 8/1995; Schulen in Deutschland Neubau und Revitalisierung (2004)

Sommarhus Wikström, Fångö Wikström family New second home Unrealised

56.

Partille – Härryda Fire Station Beställare New fire station building completed 1995

60.

53.

53.

55.

49.

55.

53.

53.

52.

49.

1992

55.

Börjesson weekend cottage, Tjuvkil Börjesson family New second home. Completed 1999 Published in Fritidshuset (2000)

54.

Spreebogen, Berlin (Germany) City of Berlin Urban development International concept competition. Unrealised

53.

Tofta 1:10 (Soldattorpet Sand), Kungälv Gert and Karin Wingårdh Rebuild and enlargement of private residence (late 17th-century soldier’s croft) Stage 1. Addition of 2 wings, completed 1993 Stage 2. Rebuild of kitchen and library, completed 1997 Stage 3. Demolition of 1986 addition, raising of ceiling and extension of house volume, new veranda and glass dome, completed 2007 Published in Arkitektur 2/1995, Nordic by Nature (2001), One Hundred Houses for One Hundred European Architects of the Twentieth Centurry (2004)

1991

52.

Verktummen Precinct, Stockholm Skanska New ecological housing Assignment. Unrealised

51.

Villa Berthelius, Särö, Kungsbacka Berthelius family New single-family dwelling Completed 1996

1990

50.

Hamnparken, Jönköping Municipality of Jönköping New museum building Concept design for exhibition at county museum

49.

Museum of Modern Art, Stockholm Swedish National Property Board Alteration and construction of museum complex Open competition, purchased. Motto: Karin Unrealised

45.

45.

48.

45.

45.

45.

45.

45.

45.

46.

45.

45.

44.

45.

44.

45.

1989

48.

47.

46.

45.

Villa Nilsson, Varberg Rolf Nilsson New house Assignment, completed 1992 Published in Arkitektur 2/1995; Images 6/1994; Experimenta 25/1999; Casas Internacionales CP 67/1997; Residence 3/2000. Addition of garage 2002 Ostrowski terrace housing, Gothenburg Stefan Ostrowski Attic conversion Assignment. Completed 1990 Scandinavium, Gothenburg Scandinavium New entrance and extension for box office Parallel assignment. Unrealised AstraZeneca R&D Mölndal (Hässle 1992, Astra 1992–98) AstraZeneca Pharmaceutical research centre Parallel assignment 1989. First prize

Master plan, new buildings and alterations Published in Arkitektur 2/1992, 2/1995, 5/1996 and 1/2004; Architectural Review September 1995; Bauwelt 38/1995; Experimenta 25/1999/; Intelligent Buildings, Architecture in the 20th Century: Part IV: Sweden (1998); Northern Factor – New Generation of the North (1996); Hur bra hus blir till och förvaltas (2000) Exhibited in the Nordic pavilion at the 6th Venice Architecture Biennale 15.9–16.11.1996 and as part of the permanent collections of the Swedish Museum of Architecture, 1998– Awarded the Kasper Salin Prize 1993 1989–90: Building LC: two-storey laboratory extension 1990–92: Building AB: bioanalytical laboratory 1990–93: Buildings KH and KJ; medicochemical laboratories 1990–93: Building MD: central unit and underground culvert system 1990–93: Building FG: link building 1990–94: Buildings HB, HE and HF:

biochemical and pharmacological laboratory 1990–94: Building LD: pharmacological laboratory 1991–95: Building MA: Paul G. Nordström Conference Center, restaurant and central service unit 1992: Building HC: new entrance and underground link 1993–95: Building HA: laboratory rebuild and enlargement 1993–98: Building HH: animal storage building 1993–98: Building HG: animal storage building 1994–96: Building KC: offices 1994–97: Building SC: laboratories, structural chemistry 1997–99: Building HC: reconstructed laboratories 2000–01: Building MA: extension, kitchen and dining room 2000–03: Building AE: offices and recycling 2000–03: Building LE: pharmacological laboratory 2002–03: Building CA: indoor car park

2002–04: Building KD: office building 2002–06: Building HK: animal storage building 44.

Second home, Resarö Enlargement and rebuild Unrealised

37.

41.

35.

34.

43.

39.

36.

33.

40.

38.

1988

43.

Kompassen, Gothenburg Department store rebuild and assignment in association with Anders Wilhelmson Completed 1990. Demolished by stages (not the over-glazing)

42.

DC, Domus City, Malmö Department store interior Assignment. Completed 1990. Demolished by stages

41.

Second home, Dyngön Svanborg Family New summer house Assignment, completed 1991 Published in Träpriset 1993; Casas Internacional 71/1998; Nordic by Nature (2001)

40.

Villa Kjellberg, Näset, Gothenburg Kjellberg family New building Unrealised

38.

1986

39.

38.

Öijared Executive Country Club, Lerum Jonas and Monica Brandström Club house and landscaping Assignment, completed 1988 Published in Arkitektur 3/1988 and 2/1989; A+U 1990:07; Architecture (USA) September 1989; Costruire 89/1990; MODO 132/1991; Experimenta 25/1999; Groundscapes, Ilka & Andreas Ruby (2006) Kasper Salin Prize 1988 and Swedish Stone Industry Award 1990 Scheme for addition of a hotel 2004. Unrealised Överkikaren Precinct (Scandic Crown Hotel, later Hilton), Slussen, Stockholm Client All internal planning, fixtures and furnishings included Assignment in association with Anders Wilhelmson and Urban Pihl. Completed 1989 Published in Arkitektur 8/1989 and Designers’ Journal (UK) June 1990

32.

35.

1985

1984

37.

NK Trend, Stockholm Nordiska Kompaniet Interior Assignment in association with Anders Wilhelmson. Completed 1985. Demolished Published in Arkitektur 5/1986

34.

Hotel Kramer, Malmö Hotel Kramer Rebuild and interior design of reception and 36 hotel rooms and suites Assignment completed 1985. Subsequently altered. Published in Arkitektur 5/1986

36.

Marc O’Polo boutique, Southampton Street, London and Cutter Mill Plaza, New York City, (UK and USA) Marc O’Polo Interior Assignments in association with Anders Wilhelmson. Completed 1986. Subsequently demolished

33.

NK Takterrassen (Roof Terrace) restaurant, Gothenburg Nordiska Kompaniet Interior and enlargement Completed 1985. Subsequently altered

32.

Stadsbad (Town Baths), Östersund Open competition in association with Anders Wilhelmson Motto: Whate’er befall. Unrealised

35.

Good Life Exhibition, November, Swedish Exhibition Centre, Gothenburg Co-operative movement in partnership Entrance and concourse And, in association with Anders Wilhelmson, Homes of the Future, concept for residential tower block in the Port of Gothenburg, for the Riksbyggen housing co-operative association

27.

31.

24.

20.

30.

25.

28.

29.

26.

1983

31.

30.

29.

28.

Laura Ashley, Stockholm Laura Ashley Shop interior Assignment in association with Anders Wilhelmson. Completed 1983. Since demolished Stallet, Särö HB Residencia Conversion of stables to five terrace houses Assignment. Completed 1987 Telebutiken in NK department store, Gothenburg Telia Shop interior Assignment in association with Bo Molander, Completed, since demolished Published in Arkitektur 5/1986 Vasa Museum, Stockholm City of Stockholm New museum building Open competition in association with Anders Wilhelmson. Motto: Leopold. Unrealised

23.

22.

1982

27.

Säffle Parish of Säffle Church tower Invited competition. Third prize

26.

Yoko Yap, Gothenburg Kjellbergs Skor Footwear store interior Assignment. Completed 1982 Demolished 2007 Published in Arkitektur 5/1986

1981

25.

Peking, Gothenburg Peking Restaurant interior Assignment. Completed 1981. Since demolished Published in Forum Närmiljö 3/1983 and Arkitektur 5/1986

24.

Laura Ashley, Gothenburg Laura Ashley Shop interior Assignment. Completed 1981 Since demolished Published in Arkitektur 4/1982

23.

Gulins, Sweden Gulins Shop interior and Aluvitt concept for 38 stores Completed. Since demolished

22.

Villa Waldenström, Jönköping Waldenström family Rebuild and enlargement of existing house Assignment. Unrealised

1980

21.

Kjellbergs footwear store, Gothenburg Kjellbergs Skor Shop interior Assignment. Completed 1980. Since demolished

20.

Solna Parish of Solna New cemetery Open competition in association with Anders Wilhelmson. Motto: Gabriel. Unrealised

19.

13.

15.

12.

10.

15.

9.

14.

8.

13.

1979

19.

Bootshafen, Kiel (Germany) Open competition in association with Anders Wilhelmson. Motto: 212 345. Unrealised

18.

Marmite restaurant, Åre Marmite Interior Assignment. Completed 1979

17.

16.

15.

Pysar och Sländor, Gothenburg Shop interior Assignment. Compleated 1979 Since demolished Halmstad City Library Municipality of Halmstad Open competition Unrealised Villa Johansson, Gothenburg Johansson family Rebuild of 1930s house Assignment. Completed 1980 Published in Paletten 3/1981

1978

14.

Housing in Mogadishu (Somalia) Jan Wallinder and Somali Prefab Building Materials Housing Realised in several stages during the 1980s

13.

La Jolla, Gothenburg Cujab Shop interior Assignment completed 1979. Since demolished

12.

11.

Villa Nordh, Gothenburg Nordh family Greenfield development Assignment, completed 1981 Published in Arkitektur 4/1981 and Paletten 3/1981 Shown at the Louisiana Museum in the exhibition The house as Picture, 1981, and at The American Scandinavian Art Foundation, New York City, USA as part of New Dimensions in Scandinavian Architecture, 1982 Senior housing at Långbro and Hornstull, Stockholm City of Stockholm Housing Open competition in association with Lennart Assmundsson, Stefan Ostrowski and Anders Wilhelmson. Mottoes: Bella notte for Hornstull and Via Vidablick for Långbro. Unrealised

1977

10.

University Library and Faculty of Arts, Gothenburg Göteborg University Open competition in association with Lennart Assmundsson and Stefan Ostrowski. Motto: Grönmura. Unrealised

9.

Leonis, Gothenburg Cujab Restaurant interior Assignment in association with Lennart Assmundsson and Stefan Ostrowski Completed 1978. Since demolished Published in Arkitektur 4/1982

8.

Kofoten Precinct, Stockholm Senior housing Open competition in association with Lennart Assmundsson and Stefan Ostrowski Motto: Après vous. Second prize Published in Tävlingsbladet 9/1977

7.

Nordens Hus, Torshavn, Faeroes, Denmark Norden Association

2.

1.

4.

7.

1.

3.

5.

1976

New meeting house Nordic competition. Motto: 51234. Unrealised 6.

5.

Hemön, Vestmanna Islands, Iceland Client Master plan for part of the island Nordic competition. Fifth prize. Motto: 12354. unrealised Villa Hansson, Gothenburg Hansson family Greenfield development Assignment completed 1978. Enlarged 1992 Published in Nordic by Nature (2001)

4.

Cemetery and chapel, Växjö Diocese of Växjö cemetery Open competition. Motto: Era Unrealised

3.

Ballhausplatz, Vienna, Austria New office building European competition. Unrealised

1975

2.

Årekärr, Gothenburg Diocese of Göteborg cemetery Open competition. Motto: Vilkor. Unrealised

1974

1.

Hovshaga Church, Växjö Diocese of Växjö Church Regional competition. Seventh place Motto: Vitt ljus, vitt hus (White light, white house) Unrealised. Published in Tävlingsbladet 6/1974

CV, Awards, Exhibitions, Selected bibliograpy

552

CV, Gert Wingårdh

Adjunct, non-tenured professor of Architecture at Chalmers University of Technology, 2007 The Prince Eugen Medal, 2005 Chairman of the board of directors at Chalmers University of Technology, School of Architecture, 2000–01 Ph.D HC at Chalmers University of Technology, 1999 Member of the Royal Academy of Engineering and Science, IVA, 1999 Chairman of the board of directors at Arkitekturmuseet, the Swedish Museum of Architecture, 1997–2005 Member of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, 1992 Founded own practice Wingårdh, Gothenburg, 1977 Member of SAR, National Association of Swedish Architects, 1975 Employed at Olivegrens Arkitektkontor AB, Gothenburg, 1975–77 Masters of Architecture, Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden, 1975 Born in Skövde, Sweden, 1951

Awards

Kasper Salin Award for Aranäs Upper Secondary School, 2006 Helge Zimdals Award for Villa Astrid, Gothenburg, 2005 Träpriset (the Swedish Wooden Award) for Universeum, Gothenburg, 2004 ECSN European Award for Excellence in concrete for Arlanda TWR, 2002 SAR´s Housing Award 2001 for Kajplats 01, apartment building at the Bo01 Housing Expo in Malmö, 2001 Best Contemporary Building. First prize in Swedish public election for Universeum, Gothenburg, 2001 R&D Magazine´s 2001 Laboratory of the Year for AstraZeneca R&D Waltham site, phase 1, 2001 Kasper Salin Award for the Auditorium and Student Union at Chalmers University of Technology, 2001 Kasper Salin Award for AstraZeneca R&D Mölndal site, 1993 The Stone Prize for Öijared Country Club, Lerum, 1990 Kasper Salin Award for Öjiared Country Club, Lerum, 1988

Exhibitions

554

The Eighth Belgrade Triennial of World Architecture, 2006 London Architecture Biennale. A World in One City, A sketch for London, 2006 La Biennale di Venezia, the 9th International Architecture Exhibition. Metamorph, 2004 Sölvesborgs Konsthall, Saltarvet, Fiskebäckskil and at NK, Gothenburg, Objekt; with Jens Thoms-Ivarsson and Mats Nilsson Arcitectural models, 2003 Arkitekturgalleriet, Stockholm. WARK WORK. Exhibition about the 25th year, 2002 Galleri Dunér, Gothenburg. Monumentala Byggnader. A meeting between the sculptor Claes Hake and Gert Wingårdh, 2001 Arkitekturgalleriet, Stockholm. På höjden med Gert Wingårdh, 2001 Skissernas Museum, Lund. Airport Architecture, 2001 Hillside Forum, Tokyo, Japan. New Trends of Architecture in Europe and Japan 2001, 2001 Le Centre Culturel Suédois, Paris, France. La Suède Construit, architecture en Suède, 1995–2000, 2001 Pavillon de l´Arsenal, Paris, France. Panoramas Européens, 2000 La Biennale di Venezia, the 7th International Architecture Exhibition. Less aesthetics, more ethics, 2000 Deutsches Architekturmuseum, Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Architektur im 20. Jahrhundert: Schweden, 1998 Galleri Grå, Stockholm. 20. Twenty-year retrospective showing twenty projects. Also shown at Formdesign, Malmö, 1997

La Biennale di Venezia, the 5th International Architecture Exhibition. Sensors of the future, 1996 Designgalleriet, Gothenburg. Flanör, 1994 Arkitekturmuseet, Stockholm. Aspekter, 1991 Galleri Leger, Malmö. Aspekter X om 90; Excerpts also shown in Copenhagen and Århus, 1990 Scandinavian Art Foundation, New York, USA. Scandinavia Today, 1982 Louisiana Museum, Humlebæk, Denmark. Huset som billede, 1981

Selected bibliograpy

Arkitektur i trä – träpriset 2004 [Arvinius förlag], 2004 The Phaidon Atlas of Contemporary World Architecture [Phaidon Press Inc], 2004 Cool architecture, designing for cold climates [Images publishing group], 2003 Ilka & Andreas Ruby; Groundscapes [Editorial GG], 2002 Carlos Broto, Arian Mostaedi; Architecture in Detail, Staircases, work conception [Loft Publications], 2002 Hedvig Hedqvist; Fourteen Swedish Embassies built 1959–99 [Byggförlaget], 2001 Wingårdh Arkitektkontor. Organic High Tech [lárcaedizioni], 2001 Ostrowski, Stefan; Nordic by nature [Natur och Kultur / LT], 2001 Wærn, Rasmus; Gert Wingårdh, architect [Birkhäuser – Publishers for Architecture], 2001 Bergqvist, Mikael, Hur bra hus blir till och förvaltas [Statens Fastighetsverk], 2000 Sommar, Ingrid; Ø-design [Wahlström & Widstrand], 2000 Matter and Mind in Architecture [Alvar Aalto Foundation, Building Information Ltd], 2000 Thurell, Sören; Fritidshuset [Byggförlaget AB], 2000 Hultin, Olof; Arkitektur i Sverige, Architecture in Sweden 1995–99 [Arkitektur Förlag AB], 1999 Caldenby, Claes ed. ; Architektur im 20. Jahrhundert, Schweden [Prestel Verlag], 1998 Riewoldt, Otto; Intelligent Spaces. Architecture for the information age [Laurence King Publishing], 1997

556

Collaborators

Ulrika Ahlberg, Therese Ahlström, Mikael Andersson, Tove Andrée, Lars Anfinset, Lena Arthur, Leila Atlassi, Jörgen Backman, Mats Bengtsson, Claes Berglöf, Sanna Bergman Svärd, Martin Bergqvist, Ewa BialeckaColin, Christine Björkman, Idun Bäck, Magnus Börjesson, Jeannette Cervell, David Christofferson, Vanessa D`Hooge, Dan Danielsson, Ulrika Davidsson, Aron Davidsson, Pedro De Sousa E Brito, Nisani Demirel, Björn Dufva, Jonas Edblad, Peter Ejvegård, Johan Eklind, Charlotte Erdegard, Pål Ericksson, Lena Fagle, Tobias Fasth, Susanne Flinck, Carina Frickeus, Daniel Frickeus, Ola Frödell, Per Glembrandt, Tuva Gotte, Fredrik Gullberg, Lennart Gullberg, Ingrid Gunnarsson, Jannika Gustafsson Wirstad, Anne Gustavsson, Emma Görander, Foued Hajjam, Chaker Halila, Kajsa Halldén, Sara Helder, Bengt Hellsten, Robert Hendberg, Andreas Henriksson, Gustav Hult, Anna Höglund, Cecilia Hörngren, Johan Israelsson, Maria Ivarsson, Liselott Jademyr, Gabriella Jonsson, Rickard Karlsson, Josefine Kastberg, Karolina Keyzer, Vanja Knocke, Konrad Krupinski, Taito Lampinen, Pilutaq Larsen Ström, Jessica Lindblad, Jakob Luttinger, Fredrik Lyth, Joakim Lyth, Maria Lyth, Petter Lyth, Jannice Magnusson, Vendela von Malmborg, Anna Mitrolios, Gunilla Murnieks, Madeleine Müller Lightner, Sven Nejstgaard, Danuta Nielsen, Stefan Nilsson, Björn Nilsson, Anna Nyborg Lafveskans, Linda Näslund, Thomas Ocklund, Anders Olausson, Maria Olausson, Sebastian Olsson, Anna Palm, Andreas Pehrson, Monika Pitura, Alexandra Pripp, Fredrik Prytz, David Regestam, Filip Rem, Per Riihiaho, Susanna Ringnér, Charlotta Rosell, Mikael Rücker, Jacob Sahlqvist, Hanna Samuelsson, Henrik Schulz, Pieter Sierts, Sören Steffensen, Anna Stenberg, Birgitta Stenvaller, Madeleine Stoops, Henrik Strandhede, Cecilia Ström, Andreas Stålnacke, Helena Toresson, Rasmus Wærn, Martina Wahlgren, Viktoria Wallin, Elin Wallinder, Frida Wallner, Johan Wegbrant, Henric Wernefeldt, Jens Vilhelmson, Gert Wingårdh, Karin Wingårdh, Marikka Wingårdh, Maria Zalecka, Jacek Zalecki, Wanda Zubillaga, Leif Ödman, Peter Öhman

558

Previous collaborators

Pia-Cally Ahlgren, Håkan Albeman, Leila Alves-Bonnier, Anna-Karin Andersson, Elin Andreassen, Gustav Appell, Anna Artelius, Lennart Assmundsson, Anna Barne, Kia Bengtson, Ulrika Bergström, Elin Björling, Fabian Blücher, Lisbeth Bohman, Jenny Bornstein, Åke Boustedt, Louise Brant Lövenstierner, Inger Broberg, Eva Bähr-Turndal, Claudius Bäuerle, Anneli Carlsson, Annika Carlsson, Johan Casselbrant, Claude Christensson, Kima Ciftcioglu, Christine Cleve Aponno, Kajsa Crona, Astrid Cronwall, Göran Dalhov, Stefan Dallendorfer, Pawel Druciarek, Josef Eder, Torbjörn Edgren, Georg Edström, Jonas Eliasson, Pär Eliasson, Elin Emsheimer, Anders Enerbäck, Mats Ericsson, Poul Erik Sörensen, Eva Eriksson, Ulrika Eriksson, Caroline Fernfors, Anna Figelius, Mikael Frej, Niclas Frenning, Christian Frisenstam, Joel From, Markus Furby, Maria Grunditz, Nils Gulin, Kristofer Gullberg, Sarah Gunnarsson, Oskar Götestam, Jan Hammargren, Tomas Hansen, Linda Hansson, Per Hansson, Linda Hedin, Jessica Hedlund, Helena Hemminger, Susanne Hodne, Monica Horniak, Dan Idehed, Jenny Johansson, Roger Johansson, Anna Järvenpää, Joakim Kaminsky, Magnus Kardborn, Paula Karlander, Emma Kaudern, Harald Keijer, Fredrik Kihlman, Ola Kjellander, Henrik Kjellberg, Fredrik Kjellgren, Vera Knihova, Jerry Kopare, Taiga Koponen, Carina Krantz, Shamiram Kucukkaplan, Karin Larsson, Karolina Leijonberg, Petter Leyman, Markus Lidfeldt, Hanna Lidström, Carina Lind, Ingegerd Lind, Carola Lindholm, Germund Lindunger, Erik Linn, Tomas Lundberg, Torbjörn Lundell, Mia Lundin, Andreas Lyckefors, Anna-Klara Lövenberg, Chatarina Malmquist, Henrik Markhede, Erik von Matern, Klas Moberg, Bo Molander, Pierpaolo Moramarco, Molly Möller, Olle Netzell, Trung NguyenViet, Jesper Nilsson, Milott Nilsson, Patrik Nilsson, Torgny Nordin, Josefina Nordmark, Johan Norén, Bitte Nygren, Åsa Nyvall, Anna Odlinge, Ann Olausson, Catrin Olsson, Anna Ornered, PO Oskarsson, Stefan Ostrowski, Birgitta Persson, Martin Persson, Fredrik Pettersson, Rikard Pettersson, Anna Pihl, Jennifer Pihl, Urban Pihl, Filippa Pyk, Jens Ragnarson, Anna Rehdin, Tobias Rosberg, Jacob Rose, Kristoffer Roxbergh, Christian Rusch, Alexandra Rylander, Anders Ränk, Nina Salomonsson, Yvonne Schmidt, Anneli Selling, Mike Shanahan, Stefan Sjöberg, Johanna Sjögren, Sven-Magnus Sjögren, Mikael Sonnsjö, Paula Stalfors, Helena Stangenberg, Martin Steen, Smajo Stender, Katarina Sundén, Christine Svensson, Tove Svensson, Per Söderberg, Tord-Rikard Söderström, Solveig Sörman, Ulf Thorbjörnsson, Raymond Tollbom, Lena Tormund, Svante Wagenius, Mathias Wagmo, Anna Wallerstedt, Walter Wangler, Jan Vasilis, Lotta Wennerberg, Lotta Werner Flyborg, Susann Wessely, Henrik Wibroe, Greger Wierusz, Anders Wilhelmson, Erik Williamsson, Annika Wingårdh, Rasmus Wingårdh, Tomas Voghera, Niklas Zetterberg

560

Editor: Mikael Nanfeldt Production: Henrik Nygren Design AB Translation: Roger Tanner and Angela Barnett-Lindberg All project descriptions written by Mikael Nanfeldt. Photographs by Andreas Ackerup (pp. 2–49, 204–217, 322–331, 430–441, 482–491), Björn Breitholtz, Ulf Celander, Magnus Cimmerbeck, Bengt Ericksson, Dennis Gillbert, View, Stefan Hallberg, Patrik Gunnar Helin, Åke E:son Lindman, Michael Perlmutter, Thomas Quiggle, James Silverman, Nils Olof Sjöden, Henrik Wannfors, Thomas Yeh, Wingårdh Arkitektkontor AB. Renderings, sketches, drawings and illustrations by Wingårdh Arkitektkontor AB. Printing and binding: Fälth & Hässler, Värnamo, Sweden 2007 Letterpress printing: Norrbacka Tryckeri Printed on acid-free paper produced from chlorine-free pulp. TCF ∞ Paper: Lessebo Design Natural 150 gsm from Vida Papers The Röhsska Museum would like to thank Sparbanksstiftelsen Första, Estrid Ericsons Stiftelse och Förvaltnings AB Framtiden for their great generosity shown in this project. Library of Congress Control Number: 2007937775 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.d-nb.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 data bases. For any kind of use permission of the copyright owner must be obtained. © 2008 The Röhsska Museum © 2008 Birkhäuser Verlag AG Basel · Boston · Berlin P. O. Box 133, CH-4010 Basel, Switzerland Part of Springer Science+Business Media ISBN-13: 978-3-7643-8646-7

Contents

Preface, Ted Hesselbom, 50 Some introductory words about Gert Wingårdh, Mikael Nanfeldt, 52

2000–2007 Sensualism articulate, Lena From, 74 Projects: Hyllie Centre, 98 SMOT, 102 The Karolinska Institute Auditorium, 106 Citadellbadet, 108 Kallis, 116 Glaskasten, 120 Housing at Arabia Beach, 126 Ease, 132 Müritzeum, 134 House of Sweden, 140 VillAnn, 152 K:fem, 156 Björntand, 160 Sign, 166 Villa Astrid, 170 Dalsland Lodge, 178 Aranäs Upper Secondary School, 184 Culture house, 190 Polarportal, 192 Mimers House, 194 Mölndalsbro, 198 An architectural chameleon, Harri Hautajärvi, 218

1990–1999 “Fight”, Mark Isitt, 226 Projects: Sergels Tower, 252 Kajplats 01, 254 Universeum, 264 House at Amundön, 274 Ericsson St James, 278 The Mill House, 280 Auditorium and Student Union at Chalmers, 284 Scandinavian TWR, 294 Sweden’s embassy in Berlin, 296 Victoria Olympia Stadium, 306 Arlanda TWR, 310 Ale Upper Secondary School and Culture Centre, 314 A flaneur, but a romantic withal, Mikael Nanfeldt, 332

1980–1989 Success and maturity, Johan Linton, 354

Projects: Villa Nilsson, 376 AstraZeneca, 388 Scandic Crown Hotel, 400 Öijared Country Club, 406 Laura Ashley, 414 Vasa Museum, 418 Yoko Yap, 422 Peking, 426 The experience, Mikael Nanfeldt, 442

1970–1979 Becoming an architect, Claes Caldenby, 450 Projects: Marmite, 466 Villa Nordh, 468 Leonis, 472 Villa Hansson, 476 A time of change, Mikael Nanfeldt, 492

List of works, 498 CV, Awards, Exhibitions, Selected bibliograpy, 552 Collaborators, 558