Helgo Zettervalls arkitektur

Helgo Zettervall (1831–1907) was one of Sweden’s principal architects and design talents. He was professionally active for 40 years, from the late 1850s to the mid-1890s – a period of intensive building activity in Sweden. For the first twenty years of his career, he had his practice in Lund, and in the subsequent twenty years he lived in Stockholm as head of Sweden’s state authority for public buildings. Zettervall was very productive. His portfolio contains 281 projects, of which 160 were executed, ranging from large cathedral restorations with thousands of detailed drawings and large public buildings to porch extensions and smaller residences. This dissertation highlights Zettervall’s works by putting them in a context and by analysing their qualitative aspects. Carried out as a historiographical case study, the framework for the dissertation is the architectural monograph. The individual architectural projects are the core of the presentation, assembling and making archive material readily accessible, and the method is leaning towards that of an oeuvre complète raisonné. The method includes three distinct approaches: a factual accounting of documents and drawings, a context-setting frame story that provides the conditions, and an architectural analysis. Zettervall belonged to the first generation of architects who could receive a well-planned and broad training in Sweden. All of this training took place against a backdrop of what a specific assignment demanded in terms of responsiveness and understanding. Zettervall developed a special talent for utilizing new construction methods and materials. Each assignment was a challenge to investigate new design principles and new spatial ideas. The investigation shows that every project was unique for Zettervall, and that his various solutions depended on the specific situation, regarding site and program. Zettervall was a distinct pragmatic. Every assignment had its unique conditions, and thus had a unique solution.QC 20170511