Eric Gunnar Asplund (1885-1945) was a leader of modern design whom the magazine "Architectural Review" called the "high priest of functionalism in Sweden."

Gunnar Asplund was born in Stockholm. He studied at the Technical High School and then at the Academy of Art, graduating in 1909. That year he entered an architectural competition for the Swedish Church in Paris, basing his design upon Swedish traditional architecture. He also used this approach in two competitions for schools, one at Karlshamn (1912) and the other at Hedemora (1913); the latter was not built, being considered insufficiently monumental. In 1913 he won the competition for an extension to the Town Hall in Göteborg and toured Italy and Greece.

Returning to Sweden, Asplund won, in collaboration with Sigurd Lewerentz, a competition for the South Burial Ground within a wooded area of Stockholm. Asplund's First Mortuary Chapel for the Burial Ground has the plan of...