From this tower…

In the more than 30 years I’ve been living in Sweden I’ve only once been up inside Kaknästornet, a radio and TV tower and one of the highest structures in Scandinavia. I didn’t think the view from up there was particularly inspiring or helpful, and definitely didn’t appreciate the dizziness it triggered, especially since I was responsible for the welfare of my little godson the day I was there. So I’ve never been back.

Kaknästornet was built while I was still walking in the shadows of the Campanile on the Berkeley campus. It was built during the sixties, on the edge of a pasture in eastern Stockholm on the outskirts of the town, while politicians and architects were leveling more old buildings in the downtown area than all those that had been bombed out in Prague during the Second World War. The first time I visited Stockholm in the late sixites, it reminded me of a ground zero. Without the trauma and debt of the war, Sweden could afford to flaunt a ‘modern’ city more quickly than the rest of Europe. And to eliminate the critical housing shortage at that time, the same politicians and architects who dropped the bombs downtown raised enormous apartment complexes in the suburbs, edifices that I actually thought were military facilities when I first visited, although I later found these ‘folk homes’ to be well-planned and practical on the inside.

Sweden in the sixties had no beat generation, no anti-war movement, and no civil rights (very few blacks) or free speech movement. Intellectuals worked for the State. The Stockholm harbor didn’t open onto Asia, but was shielded from the Soviet by Finlandization. And I don’t suppose that Swedish engineering students were nerdy enough to build funky lighthouse sculptures out of fiber optic cables, the way they did in Berkeley. In Sweden they were still using wood, concrete, and scrap metal reinforcements to play.

According to one of the Kaknästorn architects: “there were so many strange words used then – modem, video – and we had no idea what they meant, but a sturdy, solid, concrete tower was needed to house all the technological poetry…I think it still works, like a timeless erection.”*

Perhaps needlesstosay, I experienced a profound cultural shock, though I've kept my mouth shut for years.
More on Swedish architectural poetry of the sixties, to be continued….

In the meantime, enjoy my friend and all-time favorite Swedish jazz singer Jeanette Lindström singing one of my absolute favorite songs of hers: From This Tower, music and lyrics by Jeanette Lindström. Better yet check her out live in Sweden!

* Video film (May 10, 2007) produced by Terracom for the the 40th anniversary of the opening of Kaknästornet.