Klas Anshelm: the dream house

Abstract

For Klas Anshelm, the house represents a place of refuge but also of contact with his surroundings. During 50 years he lived and worked in Lund, in a single one house with a large garden. A house which reflected his particular way of understanding life, and the architecture embracing it. In the late 1960s, the street where he lived was widened by the city council. This intervention affected his front garden and with it, the balance achieved during many years was lost. Anshelm begins then to search for a new place to live and work, the dream house of Arendala. It was never built. Anshelms archive allows us to reconstruct the journey of this project and reveal the real meaning behind the architecture of a man of reserved nature, who rarely wrote about his work or gave interviews, but strong ideals. The dream house gave shape to Anshelms vision of life, where the different elements, family, work, free time, are bound together in a indivisible, continuous and unique whole. A life to be lived in a discreet house, deeply rooted in its context, recovering the original link between Man and Architecture, between Architecture and Nature.