Olle Lundberg - Architect, Author

On a Thursday in October when we were finalizing the What’s in My Basket for Olle Lundberg, Tim, who is the brain child behind the series was finalizing the edits with Olle and got a thumbs up from Olle. Then Olle made lunch plans with Josh and I for the following Monday, Of course this was only to hear the next day that Olle had passed away. It was a shock to us all and we will miss him very much. I wrote a piece of prose tribute to Olle and I’m including it here.

If you did not know Olle or the legacy he leaves behind, he was a force in the world of architecture and design and in the lives of people that know him, designed some of the most iconic restaurants in San Francisco, The Slanted Door, Mourad, and Flour + Water. We were over-the-moon-excited to work with him and his particular skill with creating workshop spaces. Olle was our architect for the 69 Dubuce building where we are installing our production facility. He leaves a brilliant legacy, talented team and friends and family behind.

A Member of The Order of the Unified Heart is a reference to Leonard Cohen’s “society” of people that are of the arts and are likemindedly kind and generous. It was never a formal society, of course, but rather an idea for Cohen who really knew who his people were. Olle Lundberg was my people. 

A Member of The Order of the Unified Heart 

Remembering Olle Lundberg, a good friend to Bernal Cutlery, who is gone too soon.

I am a devout agnostic. Sometimes I will jokingly offer up an explanation to this by saying, “just in case there is a god out there, I don’t want to piss it off.” This way, I’m sort of safe, and I get to be vain in maintaining my intellectual integrity to those who might judge me. But as I have gotten older, less vain, and accrued life and time under my belt, I am ready to square with someone, should they ask what I really mean by this position.

I will level up that it comes from a deep sense of humility that I have been afforded in life, which I am so grateful for. The longer I am here, the more life I experience, but the less I know. Life has shaken most of the ‘knowing’ out of me.

The term agnostic was coined in 1869 by British biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, combining the Greek a (“without”) and gnosis (“knowledge”). This is the simple etymological definition, but one can easily get lost in rabbit holes looking at its epistemic and philosophical roots around the lack of knowledge or the absence of quantifiable answers to way too many questions. For me, however, my position fits well with describing the human experience. I think this is the space where art and culture are born.

If I were pressed to guess where what god is by pointing my finger, I would point at that which can most often be seen in art, poetry, music, and the many expressions of our human experience. It’s the art that doesn’t have words to describe it; the song that you never get tired of hearing; the painting you are moved by; or the utter awe of how, as humans, we can build great things. It’s just too much to know; the totality of it is immense. David Hickey,  one of the greats, who passed away in 2021, frequently pointed out that art's greatest ability is to exist where language fails. But this phenomenon also seems to fall under simple, everyday almost cliche experiences like great meals with friends and family, stopping for sunsets, being in nature, holding babies, and eating cake. It’s hard to describe in words what it was about Olle that was so wonderful, but I can say that it is between these things and then also all of them at once, almost as if he had these things on his fingertips.

I’ve been thinking about this recently because, right before Olle passed away, he sort of dropped the statement that, at the, time felt a little awkward and personal; he said he was an atheist. This was in context of a casual conversation about an old and rather large wood plank Josh and I noticed while walking out of his conference room. He told Josh and me about the project it belonged to: a church redesign he was planning. The large splayed tree plank had been sitting in his studio for a very long time, and he referenced that he had probably held onto it way too long. He said it was a significantly older tree, and that although he was an atheist, he was very excited to work with this church design exactly because the altar would be made of it. Moreover, it would be the centerpiece for the people both inside and outside of the building and the most interesting grain and presentation would be facing the people outside. At the time, I thought, ‘fucking brilliant’. I left there thinking to myself that he was telling us that he wasn’t a believer, but that he did believe in that tree and the people that it bears witness to in all its iterations. He put his whole body into talking to us about this part of the project and showing us the wood plank as we walked around it in the Lundberg workshop. 

I thought about this and many other conversations I had with Olle, and I realized that most atheists that I know talk about what I suspect god to be a lot—and do so with such intimacy and native language as their main currency. Artists. Writers, poets or those that really hear and see deeply, like my friend Mario, who lets me know he’s an atheist any chance he gets, but is a prolific storyteller of beautiful sunsets, reports of crying at the symphony, and loves his people with such passion, integrity, and care. This language is how I know my people.  Olle was this way too, so enthusiastic, with all the lights on behind his eyes. We are heartbroken that such a larger than life leader in our creative community is gone too soon. Olle was a San Francisco treasure and will certainly be missed by all of us here at the shop. 

"Enthusiasm" comes from the Greek entheos—en (in) and theos (god). It literally means "possessed by a god" or "god within."