I grew up with generations of architects in London who were very influenced by Lewerentz. Adam, you’re partly responsible for this, due to your time teaching. They’d travel to Sweden to see the projects, and they kept a huge passion for his work alive. His name was everywhere when I was first learning to be an architecture critic and journalist, but there was also a mystery about his work. As I write in the exhibition catalogue, there were architects, especially overseas, for whom Lewerentz felt like their own discovery. It was like, Wow, I’ve found this practitioner, and he’s doing all these things that mainstream modernism doesn’t do. The architects’ use of the natural landscape created an extraordinary tranquil beauty environment that had a profound influence on cemetery design throughout the world.The basis for the route through the cemetery is a long route leading from the ornamental colonnaded entrance that then splits, one way leading through a pastoral landscape, complete with a large pond and a tree-lined meditation hill, and the other up to a large detached granite cross and the abstract portico of the crematorium and the chapels of the Holy Cross, Faith, and Hope. Although most of the Woodland Cemetery was completed by 1940, Lewerentz continued to be involved with architectural and landscape projects there until finishing the Remembrance Garden in 1961.

Skogskyrkogården is authentic in its location and setting, forms and designs, materials and substances, spirit and feeling, and use and function. Its buildings and landscape are maintained and restored in accordance with the original design concept, atmosphere, and use and function as a cemetery, and the living material in the pine forest as well as other plantings are carefully regenerated. Every development concerning modern demands on burial service is done with utmost consideration. In the mid 1940s Lewerentz oversaw the completion of the Chapels of St. Knut and St. Gertrud, and the Malmö City Theatre – two projects that he had worked on for many years. His notoriety came with the late churches, however: St. Marks in Björkhagen (1960), and St. Peters in Klippan (1966). When Lewerentz died in Lund in 1975, he was regarded as a legend of Swedish architecture. Long, Kieran, Johan Örn, and Mikael Andersson, editors (2021). Sigurd Lewerentz. Architect of Death and Life. Zürich: Park Books AG, 2021. (ISBN 9783038602323)a b James Codrington (April 1976). "Sigurd Lewerentz 1885–1975". The Architectural Review. CLIX (950): 223. In the end, it is the solemn aspect of Lewerentz that most defines him. With St Peter’s, Adam Caruso has said: “He is compelling us to confront the condition of our existence, all of the time.” But without his sensuous and playful side, Lewerentz’s spirituality would become ponderous and his solemnity tedious. For, after all, frivolity is also part of existence. A publication was prepared to accompany the exhibition edited by Professors Matt Hall, Hansjörg Göritz (University of Tennessee) and Nathan Matteson (Depaul University) Hall’s role involved inviting all the major scholars on Lewerentz’s work as well as new emerging critics and historians. He also authored the introductory essay, curated and collected the archival material and provided all of the new photography from over ten years of documenting the architect’s work.

MFI was wondering whether Asplund’s death, in 1940, might have freed up Lewerentz’s imagination in some way?Ridderstedt, Lars.(1998). Adversus populum: Peter Celsings och Sigurd Lewerentz sakralarkitektur 1945-1975: (the religious architecture of Peter Celsing and Sigurd Lewerentz 1945-1975). Uppsala: Uppsala University, 1998. Kieran Long, Director of ArkDes and Editor of Sigurd Lewerentz: Architect of Death and Life, said: “This monograph is a long-awaited addition to contemporary architecture publishing. There is no Swedish architect with more influence on contemporary architecture today, or with more passionate advocates across the globe, than Sigurd Lewerentz. His work was ubiquitous in the education of all the best architects I had grown up with in my twenty years of writing about, curating and teaching architecture.”