Olle Lundberg, founder of San Francisco–based Lundberg Design, died on October 31. He was 71 years old.
News of Lundberg’s passing was shared by his eponymous office on social media. “For his wife Mary Breuer and his devoted team, countless colleagues, clients and collaborators and virtually anyone who met him, Olle was larger than life,” Lundberg Design said.
In 2024, Lundberg Design earned an AN Best of Practice Award. And after more than three decades in practice, a monograph indebted to Lundberg’s work was recently published by Princeton Architecture Press, edited by Dung Ngo. Olle Lundberg: An Architecture of Craft contains a foreword by Andy Goldsworthy.
Lundberg was born in Cincinnati in 1954, shortly after his parents had moved from Sweden. He spent his childhood years in Ohio.
In the early 1970s, Lundberg enrolled in the English program at Washington and Lee University in Virginia. A professor who specialized in sculpture and craftsman, Joe Blouin, inspired Lundberg his third year in college to pursue art.
After Washington and Lee, Lundberg started a Master of Architecture at the UVA. There, he discovered Alvar Aalto and Carlo Scarpa, and studied Scandinavian and postmodern architecture. He also worked as a model maker for Robert Vickery, a former professor.
Things changed in 1980 when Lundberg met UVA professor Bob Marquis, who ran a practice, Marquis Associates, in San Francisco. Lundberg went to work for Marquis after completing his MArch at UVA. He stayed there for almost four years.
In 1984, Lundberg designed a house for his sister in Connecticut. He moved to Connecticut for two years to complete the project, and returned to his job at Marquis Associates in San Francisco in 1986. Lundberg founded Lundberg Design in 1987, based out of the office at Marquis Associates.
The Chase House in Napa Valley followed, along with a series of other commissions such as the Ellison Residence, The Slanted Door, and the Rolling Wall Museum, all in San Francisco. His firm designed bus shelters with rippling rooflines still used by San Francisco public transit patrons today.
Lundberg credited William Stout Architectural Books with stocking his architecture library full of texts about vernacular residential design.
In 1996, Lundberg built himself a cabin for he and his wife, Mary, a mile inland from the Sonoma coast. That same year, Lundberg moved his seedling practice into an old mattress factory, built in the 1930s. The office would remain there.
Lundberg Design grew, garnering a reputation for high-caliber design with modest industrial materials like metal, stone, timber, and others. Lundberg was also known for using found objects like ship buoys, elevating these quotidian mediums into art forms.
Lundberg “had a unique take on the profession of architecture, and the ability to describe important ideas about the significance of design at any scale in a compelling way, influencing many practitioners and clients,” his office shared following his death. “His legacy of craft and material-focused architectural design work has made an indelible imprint on the practice of architecture which will be carried on by his firm.”
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