Blog 3

Tändstickspalatset

Ivar Tengbom – now there’s a name that you rarely hear in architectural circles. Once Sweden’s most successful architect (1878-1968) at a time when the competition included both Gunnar Asplund and Sigurd Lewerentz. Tengbom’s breakthrough project was the palatial Enskilda Bank (1912-15) which survives on Kungsträdgården in the centre of Stockholm, but his most famous work is the Concert Hall in Stockholm (1920-26) in which he combined an attenuated sandstone portico with a rather shocking bright blue shoebox auditorium. 

In 1925, he was commissioned to design the headquarters for the Swedish Match Company in Stockholm. This relatively modestly-named organisation was in fact one of the wealthiest companies in the world in the 1920’s, led by the charismatic Ivar Kreuger who firstly established a monopoly in Swedish match manufacturing before going on to create a property empire throughout Europe, finally becoming the lender of choice to the French and German governments. Tengbom provided him with a classic Scandinavian design in which a frankly drab exterior to the street gives way to a horseshoe courtyard of sumptuous luxury. It is treated as a forest clearing, complete with a bronze wild boar and deer who look onto the central pool which is topped by a statue of Diana the huntress, by Carl Milles. 

As in his earlier concert hall, the interiors are exquisite and provided an entirely suitable backdrop to Kreuger’s empire until its total collapse, following the Wall Street Crash. Kreuger shot himself in his Paris apartment in 1932, but fortunately, his extraordinary office survives to this day.