Erik Gunnar Asplund

I've long been fascinated by the architectural style of the 1920's -30's.

When I read about Asplund's existing buildings in Stockholm, one of them being a hotel/apartment, I immediately booked. We're staying in a lab room at the former National Bacteriological Laboratories

Erik Gunnar Asplund (1885 – 1940) was a Swedish architect, mostly known as a key representative of Nordic Classicism of the 1920s, and during the last decade of his life as a major proponent of the modernist style

Although far less famous than his Woodland Cemetery, Stockholm City Library or Gothenburg Law Courts, Gunnar Asplund's National Bacteriological Laboratories at Solna occupy a special place in his work, epitomising his short-lived functionalist phase. Dedicated, in the period before antibiotics, to the elimination of dangerous diseases and the production of anti-serums, the laboratories also reflect the general concern with health and hygiene that so deeply imbued modernist thinking. But after his long exposure to history and search for appropriate style, Asplund's interpretation could not avoid tacitly embracing social and symbolic issues alongside the purely technical and, for an architect so sensitive to contextual issues, nor could it avoid engagement with the landscape.