Léonie Geisendorf

Explore digitised objects from the ArkDes collection, with a focus on the 2024–2025 exhibition period and the theme Léonie Geisendorf.

“Everything that engineers do, I can do too”

Few have made a greater impact on Swedish architecture than Léonie Geisendorf (1914–2016). The Polish architect arrives in Stockholm in 1938, shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War. She quickly becomes one of the country’s leading architects but is often working in difficult circumstances. Letters and newspaper articles of the time tell of Geisendorf’s long struggle for the architecture she believes in.

Towards the end of her life, she donates to ArkDes over 200 rolls of drawings, 260 boxes filled with documents, photographs, and nearly 50 models.

The collection not only portrays the ups and downs of her professional work but also reveals aspects of the person herself. This is the “Lola” who hung pictures of the ballet star Rudolf Nureyev in her large apartment in Östermalm, Stockholm, and who hosted regular life drawing evenings with her architect friends. Geisendorf designed many projects, some together with her husband Charles-Edouard Geisendorf, but only a few were built. Here, an elegant 1950s travel agency is presented, along with a proposal for prison cells from the 1970s, the vocational school that was both criticised and praised, and her dream project – a Catholic church in Stockholm that was never built.