Architectural firm Sweco and sculptor Pål Svensson intersperse the granite slabs with spread brass strips containing civic data
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Usually, when a city celebrates a birthday, the celebrities from there commemorated and their monuments are polished. For the 4th centenary of the founding of Sweden’s city of Gothenburg in 2021, the architectural firm Sweco, together with sculptor Pål Svensson, came up with something different for the redesign of the Nordstan shopping center: there, small brass strips with the first names and birth dates of people were commemorated in the floor – people who had seen the light of day in the city but never became famous.
The idea was nominated for the Swedish Natural Stone Award of the Year 2021.
So, these commemorative strips were all about the Little People. And the architects also deliberately did NOT want to highlight them as the very important and very big ones in reality. Rather, only the first names and years of birth are mentioned.
Nevertheless: they are real citizens who had been identified from the city archives. “A way of celebrating people who formed the city,“ writes Margareta Diedrichs of Sweco, who oversaw the project and realized it together with PeGe Hillinge.
The 350 brass strips are grouped on the floor by centuries. Surrounding the strips are floor tiles made of two types of natural stone, the light granite Tossene Grå from the surrounding area and the dark gabbro Nero Assoluto, the latter with two different surface finishes.
Particularly striking are the areas designed where the paths intersect with the strips through the shopping center: here the architects play with the trapezoidal shape. The random distribution repeatedly gives rise to larger units in which, whoever wants to, can see the major events where people’s small paths crossed.
The design has since gained notoriety under the name “Gothenburg floor.“
Photos: Sweco
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(29.03.2022, USA: 03.29.2022)
