The furniture Erik Gunnar Asplund (1885–1940) designed for the conference room of Svenska Slöjdföreningen (the Swedish Society of Crafts and Design) on Nybrogatan 7 in Stockholm is now part of our cultural heritage, and not only because it is one of our best-preserved entire 1930s modernist interiors. Together with Sigurd Lewerentz (1885–1975), Asplund is one of few Swedish architects who has risen to indisputable international fame, and whose oeuvre is the object of untiring study and contemplation among contemporary practitioners and researchers. In that sense, the furniture pieces described here are iconic in the modernist tradition.
The seating for the conference room – a chair and an armchair – deserves attention for other reasons, too. The two items were designed immediately after the seminal Stockholm Exhibition in 1930, of which Asplund was the head architect. He was offered this assignment after having designed the Stockholm City Library, a classicist building that drew criticism from his more modernist-inclined colleagues. The Stockholm Exhibition, however, earned him disapproval from the opposite camp, for being too modern. The year he was working on this furniture saw the publication of the modernist manifesto acceptera, one of few Swedish publications on architectural theory to have sparked major international interest. It was a team effort, but some claim that Asplund was the mastermind. Among the five authors was the young Uno Åhrén (1897–1977), who had condemned the antiquated style of the Stockholm City Library three years earlier. Thus, the furniture for Svenska Slöjdföreningen marks a pivotal point in Asplund’s practice, where he adopted a new approach to the modern era. He now utilised steel tube structures, albeit less radically than the modernist pioneers. The chair still has traditional armrests, but they are attached to a steel frame, and the armchair retains a rounded club style but rests on softly curved metal legs.
How can we describe the value of these almost century-old pieces, if we disregard cultural history and what they represented at the time of their origin? Asplund’s colleagues and students have said that he never looked back as an architect, that he never reused old solutions but instead focused on the current, the contemporary. So, would he have wanted his own furniture, if he had been alive today? Or, to put the question differently, how should furniture quality be understood in general? How can we understand the unfathomable number of ever-new ideas on how to deal with the incredibly basic need to sit down?
As a teacher, Asplund is said to have focused on practical issues, such as dimensions and purpose, economics and building law. On some occasions, he supposedly claimed that the (main) purpose of a chair is to be comfortable to sit on. And yet, it is obvious that his ambitions as an architect embraced other qualities, beyond the purely functional, and that those qualities are paramount. He was known as a hard worker who set high standards for himself and others, he was absorbed, uncompromisingly aiming for something beyond pure function, characteristics that had more to do with the sensation, with grace. Once, he said that some buildings had an “inherent strength”, something that must also have applied to furniture. Maybe it would be apt to say that he was enamoured with, and strove for, a kind of poetry.
The enduring interest in Asplund may be partly down to a desire to understand how he could accomplish an oeuvre that conveys something so sensitive, precise and engaging.
However, despite all the studies and essays, there is nothing that can fully explain it. Nothing that compares to experiencing the beautiful and enigmatic creations themselves
Johan Linton
Architect, Civil Engineer, Docent
