In 1915 two architects in their twenties won the competition to design a new cemetery in southern Stockholm. Their entry was submitted under the motto Tallum — from tall, the Scots pine that covered the site. The architects were Gunnar Asplund and Sigurd Lewerentz, the cemetery became Skogskyrkogården, and in 1994 it was made a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
A century after the competition, the Swedish architect Johannes Norlander took the same word for a furniture company. Tallum produces, under licence from the architects’ families, the furniture Asplund, Lewerentz and Bernt Nyberg drew for their own buildings — pieces that were made in small numbers for one room and then never made again.
Why it exists
Norlander runs an architectural practice and came to the furniture the way architects usually do, by looking for something that already existed and failing to find it. The designs were documented, the drawings survived, the families held the rights, and nobody was producing any of it.
Putting it back into production turned out to be archaeology as much as manufacture. The machines that made the originals had been scrapped. The period fittings — screws, hinges, ball knobs — were no longer made in the sizes the drawings called for. Each piece had to be worked out again from the surviving objects and documents. The office and the workshop occupy different floors of the same building, and Norlander assembles and packs the furniture himself.
Three architects, one line of thought
Asplund (1885–1940) is the best known: the Stockholm Public Library of 1928, chief architect of the Stockholm Exhibition of 1930 that introduced functionalism to Sweden, the Woodland Crematorium finished in 1940, the year he died.
Lewerentz (1885–1975) outlived him by thirty-five years and got stranger as he went. St Peter’s at Klippan and St Mark’s at Björkhagen are brick buildings of almost brutal directness; the flower kiosk at the Eastern Cemetery in Malmö is a concrete box with a single window. He also ran a factory making steel windows and fittings, which is to say he had already done once what Tallum is doing now — designed something and then built the means to manufacture it.
Bernt Nyberg, the youngest of the three, worked in Lund and was close to Lewerentz in his last years. His furniture is the least known of the three and the most direct.
The collection
The Stockholm chair and its table were Asplund’s outdoor furniture for the 1930 exhibition — the chairs visitors sat in while being shown what modern Sweden was going to look like. They are painted steel and slats, and they were designed to be seen in large numbers at once.
Töreboda was drawn by Lewerentz in 1974, when he was eighty-nine, and is the last thing he designed. Nyberg’s Lund studio table was made for working at, with the proportions that follow from that and nothing else. The collection also includes the DIN ball knobs, which are hardware rather than furniture and belong there for the same reason everything else does.
All of it is manufactured in Sweden.
Where else the work turns up
Asplund’s furniture has a second life at Källemo, which produces the GA-1 and GA-2 chairs of 1930. Mats Theselius made his Hommage à Sigurd Lewerentz for the same company. Between them the two Swedish manufacturers have put a body of architect-designed furniture back into production that was, until recently, only visible in photographs of buildings.
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Photo Credits:
Stockholm Exhibition 1930. Photo by Gustaf W:son Cronquist, cropped.
Bernt Nyberg. Photo by Lennart Olson, cropped.
Image from the original Töreboda product catalogue