Erik Gunnar Asplund was born in Stockholm in 1885 and completed his education at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH). After exposure to classical architecture on a tour of Greece and Italy, Asplund’s style began to develop beyond his early National Romanticism through the use of classical motifs in a restrained manner. Early projects such as Villa Ruth (1914) and Villa Snellman (1918) demonstrate this synthesis of ideas. The design for Stockholm’s Woodland Cemetery (1915) in partnership with Sigurd Lewerentz, together with the Woodland Chapel (1919) established Asplund as one of the most significant architects of modern Scandinavian architecture. During the late 1920s Asplund was working in the so-called ‘Swedish Grace’ style, using a refined classical vocabulary. The Stockholm Public Library (1928), with its monumental rotunda and abstraction of classical motifs into pure geometry, is a notable example of this. Later works however were not so strictly modernist. The scheme for the Stockholm Exhibition of 1930 demonstrated Asplund’s confident move towards functionalism. In the design for The Law Courts Annex in Götheborg (1936) and State Bacteriological Laboratories (1937), Asplund combined modernist vocabulary with historical reference, demonstrating the enduring influence of his idiosyncratic path from National Romanticism, through Nordic Classicism into modernism. Asplund died in 1940 at the height of his career.

Gunnar Asplund died long before Robin Boyd’s first visit to Sweden in 1950, but Boyd was well informed about his importance to Swedish Modernism. During his time in Stockholm, Boyd visited Asplund and Lewerentz’ Woodland Cemetery and photographed Asplund’s famous Crematorium there.