Turning Torso
Santiago Calatrava’s twisting residential tower is completed in the Western Harbour, on the old shipyard site. It becomes the tallest building in Scandinavia.
The building became the symbol of Malmö’s journey from shipbuilding town to city of knowledge.
For much of the 20th century the Kockums shipyard dominated Malmö’s harbour area and the city’s self-image. The shipbuilding crisis of the 1970s and 80s hit hard, and when civilian shipbuilding ceased, a large part of the Western Harbour became an empty industrial area. The huge Kockums Crane, visible across the whole city, was sold to South Korea and dismantled in 2002, and many people in Malmö saw it as the end of an era. At the same time the city was building a new future with Malmö University, which opened in 1998, and the Øresund Bridge, completed in 2000. The Bo01 housing expo in 2001 began the transformation of the Western Harbour into a new district focused on sustainability and living by the sea.
The idea for the building came from a sculpture. Johnny Örbäck, the managing director of HSB Malmö, saw Santiago Calatrava’s marble sculpture Twisting Torso, an image of a human body in motion, and asked whether it could become a building. Calatrava, who is both architect and engineer and known for his bridges and stations, designed a tower of nine cubes of five storeys each, rotated in relation to one another so that the top one stands at right angles to the bottom one. The structure is a concrete core, and along one side runs an external steel skeleton that braces the construction. Construction began in 2001 and the inauguration took place in 2005. The lowest cubes contain offices, the rest flats.
The project became considerably more expensive than planned, and the debate about the costs was fierce. HSB had intended to sell the flats as cooperative apartments, but since there were not enough buyers they became rental flats with high rents instead. Critics argued that a housing company with roots in the popular movements should not be building exclusive housing, while others saw the building as a bold step. Over time Turning Torso has become a natural part of the cityscape and one of Sweden’s best-known buildings, visible from Copenhagen on the other side of the Sound. It was long the tallest building in Sweden, but in the 2020s the Karlatornet in Gothenburg has been built even taller.