St. Mark's Church (Markuskyrkan)

Stockholm, Sweden

1960

St. Mark's Church is a testament to Sigurd Lewerentz's radical and almost obsessive exploration of a single material: brick. The entire building is a tectonic manifesto, where the brickwork is deliberately crude and irregular, with mortar joints often appearing wider than the bricks themselves. This technique dissolves the traditional sense of precise masonry units into a continuous, monolithic, and deeply haptic surface. The resulting interior is cavernous and dimly lit, a primal space of sanctity. Here, light enters through simple, frameless openings that feel less like windows and more like surgical cuts into the massive shell. It is treated not as a means of general illumination but as a tangible presence—a focused beam that grazes the rough walls, activating the texture and creating a dynamic interplay of shadow and luminance that guides the spiritual experience.