Gunnar Asplund’s Collection

In the museum’s archive are more than 27,000 drawings, sketches and documents that offer a unique and compelling insight into the life and work of architect Gunnar Asplund.

The World Heritage Site Skogskyrkogården, Gothenburg City Hall and Stockholm Public Library are among the many buildings designed by Gunnar Asplund (1885–1940). His extensive body of archival material was donated to ArkDes in the late 1980s and provides a rich picture of an architectural practice that introduced several of the twentieth century’s most influential stylistic ideals.

In Djursholm, in 1917, in the midst of the First World War, a seemingly modest and light-filled villa was built, an early example of Nordic Classicism. The material reveals how Asplund worked with built-in perspectives and shifted window axes to break the building’s symmetry. At the same time, he was engaged in designing emergency housing for less affluent residents, temporary homes intended to alleviate the acute housing shortage during the war years. The wooden houses Asplund designed in Södermalm were demolished in the 1960s, but the drawings and sketches are preserved in the museum’s archive on Skeppsholmen.

As early as 1913, Asplund won the competition for the extension of Gothenburg City Hall, a commission that would occupy him for more than twenty years. The museum’s collection contains thousands of sketches, drawings and photographs from this long process, allowing the development from strict classicism to the softer functionalism that characterises the interior in particular to be traced. When the building was completed in 1935, it was furnished with furniture and lighting designed by Asplund himself. The distinctive design also took shape through collaboration with others, including textile artist Elsa Gullberg (1886–1984), who designed the carpets.

Work on Stockholm Public Library extended over nearly a decade and provides a clear picture of Asplund’s methodical and exploratory working process. The ArkDes collection includes sketches showing how the library’s spatial ideas emerged through drawing, revision and refinement. One sketch depicts the staircase that leads visitors from the narrow entrance up to the circular book hall, a motif Asplund first sketched in 1921 and which would become decisive for the experience of the building. When the library opened in 1928, the book hall, with its even lateral light and its generous sense of space, appeared as a radical yet inviting space for knowledge and public life.

Another significant collaboration was with fellow architect Sigurd Lewerentz (1885–1975). Together they won the competition for Skogskyrkogården in Stockholm in 1915, planned as a modern cemetery without individual mausoleums and with equal gravestones for all. The intention was to leave nature largely untouched, something that still characterises the unique site where Asplund himself was buried in 1940. Asplund and Lewerentz also collaborated on the Stockholm Exhibition, the major showcase of modern housing architecture and design held at Djurgården in Stockholm in the summer of 1930, where a new stylistic ideal later known as functionalism was presented to four million visitors.

Today, Gunnar Asplund’s archive is one of the museum’s most highly regarded and frequently requested collections. Interest in his work has been strong since the 1980s. With funding from the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, ArkDes was able to digitise the collection in 2014, and large parts of it are accessible on DigitaltMuseum. More recently, thanks to the museum’s Friends association, ArkDes acquired an original sketch for the interior of the Skandia Cinema in Stockholm (1922–1923). Through this donation, another part of our shared cultural heritage is preserved for the future and made accessible to the public.