The well-researched book is organized into three parts, beginning with an introduction by Long, followed by a description of the many artistic periods of Lewerentz’s career, which Örn breaks down chapter by chapter. The second section includes photographs of the built work, and the third part consists of selections from the ArkDes and other drawing archives, with notes by Andersson. Large-format, printed in full color, and more than 700 pages, the book weighs in at a hefty 8 pounds. Lewerentz was famous for allowing no cutting of the bricks on his jobsite, and a similar rule seems to govern this book.

Even the most ardent Lewerentz enthusiasts will find something new, learning perhaps for the first time that the architect designed—in addition to buildings—pianos, buses, wallpaper, luxury furniture, posters, logos, typefaces, neon signs, and headstones; and that he co-founded a company that produced steel windows, doors, and storefronts. The book includes insightful detail about Lewerentz’s research and working methods, such as the influence of ancient Persian masonry techniques on his work, or how he sketched over photographs of partially built works to refine the design. He was chronically late delivering projects to his (frustrated) clients, who sometimes wound up firing him. An anecdote about how one residential client “cut out pictures from interior-decorating magazines and sent them to Lewerentz as helpful suggestions on how to deal with particular details” will resonate with many designers today.

While the book does an excellent job of chronicling the shifting focus of Lewerentz’s long career—kick-started by a competition win for the Woodland Cemetery (with Gunnar Asplund) when he was just 30 years old—it is less successful in “connecting the dots” between periods and resolving the seeming contradictions of this complex figure. For example, how does one reconcile the young Lewerentz’s enthusiasm for flamboyant decoration—a desk he designed had 18 different woods, with inlays of silver, enamel, ivory, mother-of-pearl, and tortoiseshell, earning him the disdain of functionalists—with the almost monomaniacal focus on a single material of the late churches, in which even the altar, pulpit, and confessional are made of brick? How does an architect who once owned a steel-frame window factory and attempted to patent an innovative spring-loaded glazing assembly resort to crude metal clips and caulk to secure the windows in his most mature work? While the book contributes invaluable new information about and insight into this enigmatic figure, it is silent on these and other intriguing questions, leaving room for future scholarship.

What is prompting this fresh examination of Lewerentz now? What is it about his work that makes it particularly relevant? The first retrospective on Lewerentz opened in 1968, a time similarly turbulent to our own, when his work was held up as “a shining light in a time of decay.” The generation of Swedish architects who followed him saw a resistance fighter, an architect who swam against the tide of homogeneity, prefabrication, and devaluation of craftsmanship then inundating Scandinavian building culture. Perhaps the story of this architect of thoughtful “one-off” buildings from the land of IKEA, who elevated the handling of materials to an almost spiritual level, might help us understand how architecture might move forward in our own time.