Stockholm University, Frescati, 1987–91

"It is easy to imagine that antiquity should have been left far behind when Stockholm University in the 1970s left the inner city and moved out to Frescati on Norra Djurgården. From the city's stone facades and historical layers to a new campus landscape characterized by modernism's straight lines and functional ideals.
But antiquity came along.
It remains at Frescati – sometimes visible, sometimes hidden – and appears in the most unexpected places.

Perhaps that is precisely why Sivert's art fits so well here. His sculptures move between the recognizable and the abstract, between myth and modernity. In his hands, the ancient figures do not become museum relics, but living forms that continue to speak to our own time.

The commission at Stockholm University's campus in Frescati was one of the most extensive in Sivert's career. Together with Marianne Lindblom, he developed a cohesive artistic program for the area during the years 1987–1991. Colonnades of brick, cast iron, and bronze form parts of a larger scenography, together with four allegorical sculptures: Adam, Eva, Herkules, and an abstract figure.

Here are man, the hero, and the seeker.
Herkules is one of antiquity's great figures. Son of Zeus and the mortal Alcmene, demigod and hero, he became famous for his superhuman strength and his twelve great deeds. In Sivert's work, the anatomical perfection of the classical body is not retained. Instead, the figure has been simplified and broken down to its most characteristic features. The enormous wooden club is enough for us to recognize him.

Achilles, however, reminds us of human vulnerability. He was the foremost warrior of Greek mythology and the main figure in Homer's Iliad. Although he was almost invulnerable, he had one single weak point: his heel. From this comes the image of vulnerability that can exist even in the strongest.

The abstract figure seems not yet to have received its name. As if it is in a searching movement, on its way towards something that cannot yet be defined.
This is typical of Sivert's relationship with antiquity. He does not reproduce it – he reshapes it. The classical sculptural tradition remains as a memory in the works, but meets a modern world of forms and an architecture from a completely different era.
Perhaps Frescati was, from the very beginning, a place where these times could meet.

Antiquity before campus
When the university's operations moved out to the Swedish Academy of Agriculture's old experimental field, there were already traces of an older world here.
Blom's house stood here, erected in antiquity-inspired Empire style, and Villa Bellona was named after the Roman goddess of war. Antiquity was thus present long before today's campus began to take shape.

Even the name Frescati carries the memory of Italy. Together with the nearby Albano, the name dates back to Gustav III's Italian journey in 1783–1784. The model was Frascati outside Rome, the ancient town in the Alban Hills where the Roman statesman Lucullus traditionally owned a magnificent villa.
Also at Frescati, there is a villa connected with this period. The oldest building on campus was erected in the 1790s in neoclassical style according to drawings by Louis Jean Desprez. An obelisk was also here. The obelisk itself is gone, but the foundation remains – a material memory of something that no longer exists.
Perhaps this is how antiquity functions at Frescati. It is rarely complete. It remains as fragments, allusions, and names – as forms that are recognized without immediate explanation. As an echo rather than a reproduction.

A modern Olympus.
This is also how antiquity emerges in Sivert's and Marianne's installation Terrakotta.
Right next to the Universitetet subway station, a place opens up that almost feels like a stage. Twelve twisted brick columns form a ring around a bronze sphere. One stops and begins to wonder: What is it exactly that we are seeing?
A possible interpretation is that the sphere represents the Earth and that the twelve columns refer to the twelve Olympian gods – the pantheon that, in Greek mythology, populated Olympus.
Perhaps that is why the place takes on the character of a stage set: a kind of modern Olympus, built of brick, bronze, and air.
Even the trees around the artwork can lead one's thoughts back to the classical world. The oak was Zeus's sacred tree. It is a small detail, but at Frescati, it is precisely such details that make the landscape begin to speak.

Here, by the subway, we thus seem to have ascended to the world of the gods.
But as we continue along the pathways towards the university, the narrative changes. Olympus is left behind, and from the world of the gods, we move towards that of humans.

From gods to humans.
Along the path towards Södra huset, we encounter more of Sivert's sculptures. One of them depicts Herkules. The body is abstracted, almost dissolved, but the wooden club remains and is enough to evoke the memory of the hero.
It is a strange shift. Herkules is no longer the perfect ancient body in marble. He has been reduced to a few forms: a silhouette, a gesture, an attribute.
What remains is not the historical Herkules, but the image of him – and perhaps also our own conception of the hero.
Further on, Terrakotta concludes with constructions that bring ruins to mind. Here, something seems to have broken. The columns, forms, and fragments suggest a world that has both existed and already been lost.
But the ruin is simultaneously the beginning of something new.
Perhaps this is where Sivert's interest in antiquity becomes most interesting. Antiquity is not used to create an illusion of the past. Instead, it becomes a language for speaking about our own time.
The old figures receive new bodies. The old symbols receive new contexts. What was once myth becomes form, and the form once again becomes open to interpretation.

Multiple eras in the same place.
At Frescati, therefore, multiple eras meet in the same place: the 18th century's Italian dream, the 19th century's neoclassicism, the 20th century's modernist campus, and Sivert's contemporary interpretation of the classical tradition.

History does not lie in straight layers one after another. It penetrates them.
Perhaps one can therefore see Frescati as more than just a place where a university happened to be built. It is a place where conceptions of antiquity have survived through centuries – sometimes as buildings, sometimes as names, sometimes as ruins, and sometimes as sculptures.
And when one walks there today, it can be difficult to determine where antiquity ends and our own time begins.

Sivert's interest in antiquity also extended far beyond Frescati. It reappears, among other things, in his scenography for The Mediterranean Museum and in the work with the placement of the San Marco horses at Blasieholmstorg."
/JÖ

"For Statens fastighetsverk and Akademiska hus, Sivert and Marianne received the commission to design the campus area. This became their project "Terrakotta". The sculptural design consists of brick, cast iron, bronze, and Vånga granite (Vånga granite, or Oppmanna granite, is a red granite found in the three old quarries in Gullyckeskär, two kilometers from Oppmanna towards Vånga in Skåne). Paving of concrete slabs and paving bricks."
1. Column rotunda in front of the subway station entrance
2. Colonnade between Allhuset and the Arrhenius Laboratory
3. Three sculptures with allegorical motifs
(Project manager was Gösta Wallmark)

Jan Åman conducted an interview with Sivert for the Humanities Association, Stockholm University 75 years.
The Public Art Agency Sweden has, for its annual publication 22, had Inga-Maj Beck describe the design,
Nina Weibull has written about Sivert & Marianne's designs on Centralfältet
and
A doctoral text on the subject is available from Elis Wibacke's publication – "Traces of Antiquity at Stockholm University".
In: Medusa. Swedish Journal of Antiquity, ISSN 0349-456X, Vol. 46, no 3, p. 26-33
https://liu.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2%3A1996985&dswid=-5784
or go directly to the article in Medusa, Swedish Journal of Antiquity, Vol. 46, no 3, 2025, pp. 27-33

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