Willhelm Klemming was the son of bleckslagerifabrikören Wilhelm Leonard Klemming and Margareta Elisabeth Burman. He studied at the Royal Technical University until 1881 when he abandoned his architecture studies which he found to be dry and uninteresting. Instead, he studied at the Technical School from 1882 to 1884 where the education was more practically oriented.

Klemming and Adelsköldska

In 1884, he was employed as a draftsman at Magnus Isæus and Carl Sandahl’s architecture office and participated in the design of the Stockholm General Telephone Company’s building, erected from 1885 to 1886 according to his designs. At the office he also worked on the drawings for Sturebadet. In 1884 he started his own business and was responsible for Adelsköldska villan in Villastaden, built between 1887 and 1888. Towards the end of the 1880s, he was commissioned to design a renovation for Klara Baths and soon came to lead the construction. However, the construction funds ran out and the owner decided to flee to the USA from the impending bankruptcy. As Klemming had a debt in the baths, he called them up for executive auction and became its director. With new management and renovations, the importance of the baths increased in the following years.

Stockholm Central Station

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Klemming was forced to sell the baths to Statens Järnvägar, which needed the land for an expansion of the railway station around Stockholm Central Station. Klemming then designed Centralbadet in 1904. In addition, he designed Götgatan 12-14 in 1911 and Götgatan 7 in 1912 in Stockholm, all in Art Nouveau style. He also designed several swimming pools, school baths, public baths, workers’ baths, barracks baths and bathroom fittings around Sweden such as Gothenburg, Sandviken and Karlskrona. Klemming lived at Hårlemanska malmgården on Norrmalm and was an influential member of Stockholm Fastighetsägareförening.

An architect like many others

Like many other architects and urban planners, Klemming was also involved in extending Sveavägen from Kungsgatan southward. In the 1920s he launched a radical proposal with five to six skyscrapers in American fashion along an extended Sveavägen all the way up to Gustav Adolfs torg. He argued that “…you could get much better space for air and light and planting by going up like this here and there and filtering out some buildings.”

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