the architecture of Léonie Geisendorf (1914-2016)
by João Manarte
I recall the encounter with Léonie Geisendorf's architecture in the early days of 2019 while touring Stockholm for the last time. I was immersed in the strong feeling that remains today of its construction, in the form of a latent image triggered by the singular material perception, never lessened by the physical and temporal distance that followed it. As if by chance, I came across the former St Göran Gymnasium, a building now converted into student residences, where my memory could immediately identify the affinities with Le Corbusier's work, perhaps, seduced by the modest, ordered, and rational clarity of the forms that seemed to denounce an intimate relationship with the city. A memory that persists because it is in a relationship of deep complicity with the apprehension of the matter built in a permanent transformation – the city of Stockholm. A place, simultaneously, revived by the dynamic movement of the people who live there, induced by the existing freedom in the act of walking, more to do with a state of seduction than with mere orientation. The gaze guided by the camera lens traveled through the building's exterior and interior, giving an account of an architecture that wanted to become a city by refusing to act as a gratuitous invention and by embracing form and function in what is identified as a collective purpose – the opening of space to life.
I.
Léonie Geisendorf was born in Warsaw on April 8, 1914. She took up the profession, which she wanted to embrace from a young age, with the true sense of responsibility of knowing how to take risks, recognizing the challenging didactic role of architecture, bringing it closer to painting and sculpture in the constant search for beauty. As a French-speaking student at the Zurich Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in the 1930s, it is immediately noticeable the strong bond she established with the thought of Le Corbusier – with whom she had the opportunity to do an internship in 1937 and work within 1938. She has adopted the creative force and tireless spirit of her mentor, who presented himself as an indispensable figure for a generation confronted with the idea of modernity: "[Le Corbusier] attacked each problem at the root, reducing it to its essence, freeing it from fallacies, prejudices or conservative opinions, always looking for the solution that corresponded to the just poetic form - 'an architecture that touches the heart'. (...) Uncompromising, unwavering, convinced of his ideas, he was passionately committed to everything he undertook and taught us a lesson for life – to have courage in one's convictions, being able to assume responsibility without giving in to adversity".[1]
Among other projects, she contributed to the completion of the Pavillon des Temps Nouveaux for the 1937 Universal Exhibition in Paris, and the mounting of the retrospective exhibition of Le Corbusier's paintings, organized by the Museum of Modern Art in Zurich in 1938.
The exhibition would provide her with the opportunity to collaborate with the Swiss master in the future, partly motivated by a caricatured episode - which would enunciate the then young student's manifestly daring posture – that she would remember fondly. During the painting's assembling process and a few hours before the inauguration, a fellow trainee accidentally spilled paint on a canvas that was, temporarily, on the floor. Le Corbusier's relaxed reaction to the colleague's apparent distress is recalled in Le Corbusier's own words: "Bon, bon, there are several paintings. Remove this one, enfin, do something. The remotion of the painting from the exhibition would cause a strange void on the wall that would not go unnoticed. Geisendorf didn't recognize the particular notability of the canvas in question. Therefore, she boldly decided to paint a flower from the paint stain left on the canvas and hang it immediately afterward. The flower, which also did not go unnoticed by Le Corbusier, was received with a sense of humor: "As he walked past the painting again, he noticed the 'flower' immediately, laughed and waved in my direction. I confessed to her that I was responsible, adding that, under the circumstances, there was no other choice. She thought I had shown some initiative and invited me to stop by her studio whenever I was in Paris: "Pour travailler?" I asked her shyly.[2]
Her second collaboration with Le Corbusier's studio, though intense, proved to be short-lived, ending in the summer of that same year. At that time, none of the collaborators received a salary (not even Junzô Sakakura or Charlotte Perriand, who worked for ten years in the studio). And working unpaid in Paris seemed an unaffordable reality .Despite this, Léonie Geisendorf remembered the experience as "an encounter with a genius, with the most prestigious architect of all times," highlighting the legacy he shared with everyone – from the works he built to the full publication of Œuvre complète –, and emphasized the guiding role he played throughout his academic and professional career. He even stated that "an architect who cannot find the answer to his problem in the Œuvre complète, certainly, has not looked hard enough" [3] as he felt it contained everything an architect could be confronted with.
Her return to Stockholm in the summer of 1938 coincided with the arrival of other professional colleagues, such as the English architect Ralph Erskine, a close friend of the same age, who was moving to Sweden attracted by the political climate, the then famous social democracy. Between 1938 and 1949, she collaborated in some leading Swedish modern architecture offices, such as architect Sven Ivar Lind and architect Paul Hedqvist. In 1950, she opened her own office in Stockholm, in partnership with her husband Charles-Édouard Geisendorf, and together they held a series of successful competitions, and in 1951 built their first major project, the villa Ranängen in Djursholm. Her work began to attract public interest in the late 1950s for its expressive and meticulous treatment of different building materials, primarily brick and exposed concrete. The Riksrådsvägen townhouse project in Bagarmossen (1953-1965), the St Göran Gymnasium high school building in Stockholm (1954-61), or the villa Delin, located in Djursholm (1968-70) are examples that illustrate the principles of his architecture, which can be perfectly fitted within the Scandinavian brutalist movement.
II.
The St Göran Gymnasium is the project that best expresses the affinity with Le Corbusier's ideas, directly quoting the Unité d'Habitation in Marseille in the alternating composition of light and dark elements that make up the building's exterior elevations. The location of the gymnasium on the roof is, also, a solution that establishes a clear parallel with the program of the Unité d'Habitation, having been previously developed during his collaboration with Le Corbusier in 1937. The impressive degree of perfection of the finishes and construction details, whether in the modular sections of the facades clad in laminated tempered glass or the positioning of the reinforced concrete pillars of the triple-height entrance hall, demonstrates the bold, accurate, and demanding character of his work. Inside, the inhabitant faces a meticulously detailed architecture, whether in the design of the curvilinear beams of the gym's roof, slightly lowered towards the floor, or in the distinctive composition present in the floor design of the entrance hall, with the introduction of subtle material changes. A project that values the deep knowledge of form in its intimate relationship with matter, in the tension between the expressiveness of the raw texture of the exposed concrete and the regulated composition of the fenestration of the elevations.The dynamic composition present in the variable pattern of the elevations is responsible for introducing a certain lightness in the great vertical mass of the building. The great majority of the materials used exhibit a textured surface without any additional coating, highlighting this valorization of the natural expression of the building material. As Léonie and Charles-Éduard Geisendorf remind us, "to be able to capture the ephemeral freshness of the raw building while preserving the purely expressive power of its master lines will presumably remain forever the architect's unattainable dream."[4]
Few modern buildings in Stockholm will be able to manifest the same material forcefulness, and with such structural consistency as to contribute intensely to that aspect.
This building, which initially constituted a high school dedicated to domestic activities and sewing, was part of a complex composed of important assembly space, planned next to the high school's central courtyard, which was, in the end, never built. Firstly, one envisioned an administrative building, a student residence, and a nursery school, later granted to residential buildings. Time, however, would change it. And despite a certain programmatic continuity in the rehabilitation proposal by the Södergruppen Architects collective, which proposed conversion of the various floors into student apartments, the building would end up, according to Léonie Geisendorf, being distorted: "the site is now deeply mutilated."[5]. And if the years passed over Léonie – one hundred at the time of this violent declaration –, it warmed and softened the perspective cast on the early days of her work in an overloaded desire for protection or inevitable nostalgia. The truth is that the reconversion would prove to be not only framed in the original purpose of the building, which has always been open and vibrant, but also particularly attentive and sensitive to the reciprocal dialogue between natural lighting and the textural presence of the exposed concrete.
Léonie Geisendorf's insightful attitude and persistent character demonstrate how – over more than half a century of activity – she has been able to conduct her professional practice always with determination and a firm hand. Her courage and apparent intransigence have certainly contributed to combating the gender inequality existing within the profession, and to getting many of her exceptional works built. An architect with a daring, conscientious, and sensitive body of work, and an equally fearless character that one recognizes, and which she identified as having been relevant in a demanding, male-dominated profession: "I was very aware that I was uncompromising and, at times, even undiplomatic. Maybe I pushed one or two people away from me from time to time. Perhaps, that's a female trait - wanting to get things done and trying to reach a good port".[6]
Footnotes
[1] - Leónie Geisendorf, "Chez Le Corbusier" in Upwind: the Architecture of Leónie Geisendorf, Stockholm, Arkitektur Förlag, 2014, p. 44. We are responsible for the translation of all excerpts.
[2] - Idem, Ibidem.
[3] - Léonie knew that Le Corbusier was fully aware of the importance of the publication Œuvre complète. Because by then, he realized that the architect valued his books and writings above all else, even seeing them as the main reason he could be awarded the Nobel prize. Idem, p. 48.
[4] - Léonie e Charles-Éduard Geisendorf "Arkitektur nº. 9" (1960), in Idem, p. 36.
[5] - Idem, p. 5.
[6] - Idem, p. 12, italics ours.
Author: João Manarte
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