Biography | Lars-Ove Hakansson — The Civil-Engineering Diploma Issued on This Hill

The hill south of Landala does not look like a start-up shed.

It is the campus Chalmers occupied after leaving Vasagatan in the 1920s.

Lars-Ove Håkansson took his civilingenjörsexamen here in 1961.

Vem är det 1993 records the degree as Civing CTH 61 — Chalmers tekniska högskola, the name the school still carried.

The same line says he was hired into the Skanska group that year.

The company was still legally Aktiebolaget Skånska Cementgjuteriet.

The Johanneberg buildings he walked through were already a generation old.

The eastern façade of the Origo block had been opened in 1926 to designs by Arvid Fuhre and colleagues.

Civil-engineering teaching sat on this campus, not on the later Lindholmen site.

A diploma from this hill was the ordinary ticket into a Swedish contractor's drawing office.

Håkansson used it that way.

He stayed inside the same group for the next three decades.

The handbook dates the steps: staff from 1961, deputy chief executive in 1980, chief executive in 1986.

The campus is still a public place.

Chalmersplatsen 1 is the published visitor address.

The pin is the Johanneberg hill, not a private room and not a later tower.

The career that followed was an employment history, not a founding myth.

It began when this school put a civil engineer's title on a farmer's son from Lund.

Photo: Göteborgs stadsmuseum, public domain (Swedish photograph before 1976), via Wikimedia Commons