Hans Asplund (16 August 1921 – 8 January 1994) was a Swedish

architect An architect is a person who plans, designs, and oversees the construction of buildings. To practice architecture means to provide services in connection with the design of buildings and the space within the site surrounding the buildings that h ...

. His work was part of the architecture event in the art competition at the

1948 Summer Olympics The 1948 Summer Olympics, officially the Games of the XIV Olympiad and officially branded as London 1948, were an international multi-sport event held from 29 July to 14 August 1948 in London, United Kingdom. Following a twelve-year hiatus cau ...

. Hans Asplund was married in his second marriage to Anne Asplund (born 1937). He is buried at

Skogskyrkogården (; ) is a cemetery located in the Gamla Enskede district south of central Stockholm, Sweden. It was inaugurated in 1920 and was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1994. Its design, by Gunnar Asplund and Sigurd Lewerentz, reflects th ...

in Stockholm.

Biography

Hans Asplund trained as an architect at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm from 1944 to 1947 and, in the same year, won first prize in a competition for a community centre in Eslöv. He was employed at the United Nations architectural office in New York 1947–1948, at the architectural office of Kooperativa Förbundet 1948–1950 and Nordiska Kompaniet 1951–1953. He was a professor of architecture at Lund University of Technology from 1964 to 1987. Hans Asplund was the son of the architect

Gunnar Asplund Erik Gunnar Asplund (22 September 1885 – 20 October 1940) was a Swedish architect, mostly known as a key representative of Nordic Classicism of the 1920s during the last decade of his life. At this time, he was a major proponent of the mode ...

and Gerda Sellman (born 1892). His father had distinguished himself early on as a classicist, and later as one of the pioneers of Swedish functionalism. Hans Asplund spent much of his life as a modernist, both a practising architect and a teacher. He designed the Medborgarhuset in Eslöv and an extension to the Nordiska Kompaniet department store in Stockholm 1963. Hans Asplund is said to have coined the term neo-brutalism in a joking comment in 1950 on the

Villa Göth Villa Göth is a house on the street of Döbelnsgatan in the Kåbo neighborhood of Uppsala, Sweden. Completed in 1950, the home is listed as having a special architectural interest in Sweden ('' byggnadsminne''). Architects Bengt Edman and Lenn ...

in Uppsala, designed by Bengt Edman and Lennart Holm. The term spread through English colleagues visiting Sweden and was taken up there by some younger architects. Over time, Hans Asplund became increasingly critical of modernism and, in 1980, published the book ''Farväl till functionalism'', which systematically reviewed what the author considered to be the shortcomings of modernist architecture. Hans Asplund's second marriage was to Anne Asplund (born 1937). He is buried at Skogskyrkogården in Stockholm.

References

1921 births 1994 deaths 20th-century Swedish architects Art competitors at the 1948 Summer Olympics People from Haninge Municipality Burials at Skogskyrkogården {{Sweden-architect-stub