After he finished his studies, in 1914 he went on his grand tour to France and Italy. A few years later, in 1918, he married Gerda Sellman, with whom he had four children. They lived in an apartment near Mossebacke in Stockholm. For a while, from 1917 to 1920, he also worked as an editor of the Swedish review of architecture: Arkitektur. In the mid-1930s he married Ingrid Kling, who had earlier been married to the architect Lars Israel Wahlman. They lived in an apartment at Stureplan directly connected to his office.
Asplund was appointed Professor of Architecture at the Royal Institute of Technology in 1931. He died in Stockholm, on 20 October 1940, at the age of fifty-five.
At international level Asplund is now one of the best known Swedish architects. However, he always worked in Sweden and in a Swedish cultural context. He belonged to the same generation as great modern pioneer architects, such as Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, and Le Corbusier, but he was never a pioneer in that sense. He was not a man of revolutionary thoughts, oppositional programs or avant-garde innovations. The greatness of his work is to be found in other qualities. One of them is the authenticity of all his work. During his architectural development, which started early during his education at the Royal Institute of Technology, he moved from romanticism and classicism to modernist architecture without losing a pragmatic, humanistic and sensible way of working with architecture. There is a solid ground of personal values, continuously under development, pervading all his works. He was not a pioneer, but an artist who completed and interpreted the intentional and accidental programmatic ideas and projects of his time, and transformed his experiences into durable architectural masterpieces which can be returned to time after time. Even if it is possible to see the influence of many other architects, from Palladio to Le Corbusier, the most important influences came from his teachers Östberg, Westman, and och Bergsten. Like many other northern architects, he travelled to Italy and France after graduation. His experiences, especially in Italy, influenced most of his work and are skilfully combined with northern conditions and Swedish culture. His early experiences from 1914, when he visited temples of Paestum, Pompeii, and pastoral landscapes in southern Italy are easily recognised in one of his latest works, the Woodland cemetery and the Woodland crematory.
What strikes us most here on arrival is the intimate scale and the welcoming view of the house and its site. Even from a distance we experience a sense of cosiness and an unpretentious simplicity. The house seems to be docked into the cliff to the north and opens up towards the entrance road and the lawn to the west, more than to the bay at the south. This exterior space, with the entrance and roofed deck directed to the west, immediately recalls vivid summer life with a large family and many visiting friends.
The facade is covered with narrow matched boards with a sharp, elegant profile. The boards are planed, smoothed off and painted white. The flat angled roof is made of wooden chips. The difference between the delicate, smooth surface of the facade and the raw, tough materiality of the roof gives the exterior a poetic quality. The house seems to adjust to the traditional rural houses in Sweden, despite being at the same time a highly refined and sophisticated piece of architecture.
The main entrance door, towards the west, is placed at the deck made of smooth wooden battens, which with the smooth panelled facade creates an almost interior atmosphere. The door leads into a space that connects the dining room and the large combined drawing, sleeping and study room. In that way the exterior and interior public and "social" parts are combined for meaningful use. In plan, the large room towards the south is drawn towards the west and turned in order to make a wide angle at the entrance terrace. This subtle arrangement is hardly noticeable. We "read" the house as if it was a right angle place. However, if it had been a right angle, the entrance place would probably not have been so clear and welcoming, placed as it is in the very corner. The drawing room, with its view over the water, is the largest room in the house, however small in scale. The complexity of space and function is quite astonishing. The room seems to be divided into several smaller ones. The most obvious of these is the wide tiled staircase in connection with the fireplace. The composition is very intimate, and it is not difficult to imagine the comfortable feeling of sitting in the staircase looking out onto the meadows and the bay, with a lit fire. This is a perfect vision of Swedish summers, which can be wet and chilly as well as gentle and warm. At the southern window is the space for the sofa and armchairs. At the windows to the west is the place for study and work, with fine built-in desks and surfaces for sketching and writing. The master bed, used as a sofa during the day, is placed beside the desk. The blankets and sheets are kept in the desk arrangement, hidden during the day in Japanese manner. Behind the fireplace is the basin and originally the whole eastern part of the room was separated by a curtain and used as a wardrobe. The room is a multipurpose place with rooms within the room, yet is also a powerful whole.
In a more hidden part of the house, north of the dining room is the children's bedroom and the room for the maid. At the very north end lies the kitchen, with an outdoor part for cooking and working in the open air. The original wooden cupboards are still in use. The organisation of the house, with the kitchen hidden away from the more public parts, shows that it was designed in a time when work and leisure were still separate.
A peculiar fact about the connection between the indoor and outdoor spaces is that the house is very much orientated to the west and the evening light. The northern side of the house is treated as the back, as is the east side, even though the contact with the sea is stronger on that side. It may be that the architectural organisation is related to the pace of the family - or of the architect himself. The walls and ceilings of the inside are made of rather rough panels without matching. The wood is not planed. The exterior is thus far more elegant, and in a sense more interior, than the inside. This is an exceptional choice, and traditionally it would have been the other way around. One interpretation could be that the interior should be more generous and more flexible. One should be allowed to put up hooks and nails for paintings, summer things, clothes etc. But the facade should be elegant and have a smooth finish, creating the intimate and interior outdoor places, like a drawing room in the summer landscape.
The whole site, in terms of both organisation of space and treatment of materials and details, has an air of delicacy and grace. One possible influence could be that of Arts and Crafts in England, which at the time was more than half a century old. Lars Israel Wahlman made the movement popular in Sweden, while it was also related to the ideas of the author Ellen Key, who she created a debate about domestic aesthetics in Sweden at the beginning of the twentieth century. Other important figures in this sense were the painters Carl and Karin Larsson, who created a famous home with many qualities of daily life, of beauty and of convenience. This was a discussion of great importance for many architects at the beginning of the twentieth century, and created a tradition that Asplund never abandoned.
The house and site in Stennäs communicates a vivid image of the good life, with private and social doings, with cosy evenings by the fire and with outdoor dinners in the light summer evenings.
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Gunilla Svensson, Finn Werne