The church in the Swedish village of Gårdstånga has a proud design heritage, from its origins in the 13th century to the early 17th century, when the Danish sculptor Jakob Kremberg carved its pulpit, altarpiece, and font. In 1928, when the young, ambitious Swedish theologian Erling Eidem left Gårdstånga after four years as its vicar to take up a prestigious post in the nearby city of Lund, he decided to commission a silver box as a parting gift for the church.
Eidem asked Wiwen Nilsson, the son of Lund’s foremost silversmith, Anders Nilsson, to make it. Anders Nilsson was an exceptionally skillful silversmith, who held the prestigious post of Sweden’s Royal Court Jeweler. Yet Eidem, who went on to become an archbishop and head of the Church of Sweden, favored Wiwen’s subtly modern style of silver smithery with simple geometric shapes and impeccable finishes.
The box was a fine example of the obsessively refined metal objects that Wiwen described as “plain silver,” emphasizing the contrast between their formal simplicity and the ornate silverware that was popular at the time. Other Swedish churches began ordering pieces from him too. Over the years, the Lund workshop supplied his singular silverware to churches throughout Sweden and elsewhere. Eidem’s farewell present to the Gårdstånga church had begun a fascinating design experiment in modernizing a traditional aspect of Swedish daily life: religious worship.
Wiwen Nilsson’s “plain” aesthetic stemmed from his early education in traditional silver smithery at the prestigious Zeichenakademie in the German city of Hanau. As well as being rigorously trained in traditional techniques, Wiwen was encouraged to experiment by Hugo Leven, a teacher who pioneered the application of the values of craftsmanship to industrial design. Having enrolled at the school in 1913, Wiwen went back to Sweden the next year after World War I began but insisted on returning to Hanau in 1919. He befriended a German student, Wilhelm Wagenfeld, who shared his vision of modernizing design and craftsmanship. They continued their discussions by letter after Wiwen returned to Sweden in 1922 and Wagenfeld enrolled at the Bauhaus, where he established himself as one of Germany’s most influential industrial designers.
Back in Lund, Wiwen continued his experiments in Anders’s workshop. But his “plain silver” proved bafflingly austere to Swedish design critics. Luckily for him, their taste changed, and Wiwen won praise and a gold prize for his entries to the 1925 International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts in Paris. He was invited to exhibit internationally, and made his US debut at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1927. And so when Erling Eidem left the church at Gårdstånga in 1928, Wiwen was a compelling choice of craftsman for Eidem.
Wiwen’s success encouraged Anders to put him in charge of the workshop. Most of its output continued to be commissioned by longstanding clients, such as the Swedish royal court and local schools and councils, which ordered meals and trophies. Wiwen introduced new products, including cutlery and cocktail shakers, as well as the altar crosses and candlesticks ordered by churches. He designed them in his favorite geometric forms of the circle, cone, cube, and cylinder, but was equally passionate in ensuring that everything was made to the highest possible quality of craftsmanship.
Wiwen also continued his Hanau experiments in improving the efficiency of objects. Among his innovations were the strainer he placed inside a cocktail shaker to discreetly prevent ice cubes from slipping out and spoiling the drink, and a set of candlesticks shaped to ensure that each one created a different lighting effect. He was equally innovative with ecclesiastical objects, proudly patenting a communion chalice designed in the shape of an octagonal pyramid so it could be safely passed from worshipper to worshipper without having to be cleaned in between.
By his death in 1974, Wiwen had supplied hundreds of pieces of impeccably made ecclesiastical silver to over 260 churches in Sweden and elsewhere. By combining his beloved craft traditions with a modern sensibility, he fulfilled his youthful ambition to design and make objects that enriched daily life for millions of people.
Alice Rawsthorn is a London-based writer on design. Her books include Hello World: Where Design Meets Life published by Hamish Hamilton, Design as an Attitude published by JRP|Ringier, and, most recently, Design Emergency: Building a Better Future, co-written with MoMA curator Paola Antonelli and published by Phaidon. She and Antonelli are co-founders of the Design Emergency podcast.
Wiwen Nilsson, with text by Flavia Frigeri, Teresa Kittler, Clare Phillips, and Alice Rawsthorn, is a new monograph from Rizzoli.
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