Biography|Bengt Haak — The Law Faculty on Norrtullsgatan Where He Took the Degree

People treat a construction chief executive as a man who rose from a site hut.

Bengt Haak arrived at the parent company as a lawyer.

He was born Bengt Bertil Oskar Haak in Stockholm on 10 October 1925, son of the insurance official Bertel Haak and Elsa Hagstedt.

Vem är det printed that parentage in 1981 while he was still in the chair.

The published record does not name a parish church for the birth, so this pin is not a birth house.

It is the building where the degree was taken.

Stockholms högskola opened a law and humanities faculty here in 1927, in Erik Lallerstedt's Nordic Classicist pile at Norrtullsgatan 2, against Observatoriekullen.

The faculty had already moved twice — Kungsgatan 30, then Kungstensgatan — before the city donated this site.

Haak took the jur. kand. in 1952, while the faculty still sat in this house.

The law department did not leave for Frescati until the early 1970s.

Before the degree he had already passed the reserve officer exam in the naval infantry in 1948.

After it he did court service, tingstjänstgöring, from 1952 to 1954, then a year as an assistant lawyer in private practice.

The sequence is the Swedish professional track of the period: exam, court year, then a firm.

The building is still there.

Since 1995 it has been a state-listed monument.

From 1998 it was run as Studentpalatset, a reading house for the city's students.

In 2022 Handelshögskolan in Stockholm took the keys.

A visitor now meets Ivar Johnsson's herms of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and Sophocles on the porch, not a vanished lecture hall.

The degree is the part of Haak's story that does not look like a contractor origin myth.

He would spend the next decade as company counsel before anyone handed him a profit-and-loss account.

Photo: Udo Schröter, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons