Biography | Lars-Ove Hakansson — The Twenty-Five Metre Spiral Cast for Skanska's Hundredth Year

The concrete tower that marked Skanska's hundredth year is gone.

Bernard Kirschenbaum's Spiral rose twenty-five metres in Malmö harbour in 1987.

The company cast it with a special pouring method and set it outside the Malmö office for the centenary.

Lars-Ove Håkansson was chief executive that year.

He had held the title since 1986.

The group had taken the short name Skanska in 1984.

The legal ancestor, Skånska Cementgjuteriet, had been formed in Malmö in 1887.

The anniversary therefore pointed back at this city even though the group headquarters had sat in Stockholm since 1914.

The sculpture was a public object, not a boardroom plaque.

Photographs from 1987 show a white helix against the harbour sky.

It was demolished in 2005 when the Citytunneln works needed the ground.

Nothing of the original pour remains for a visitor to touch.

What remains is the harbour edge and the documented date.

Håkansson's operating years were 1986 to 1992.

Vem är det, compiled while he was still group chief, already listed him as koncernchef from 1991 and as chairman of Skanska and of JM.

The Malmö pin is the vanished monument, not a current workplace.

Stand near the station approaches where the tunnel later cut, and the fact to hold is simple.

In the first full year of his chief-executive term the company put a twenty-five-metre concrete spiral on the harbour that had made it.

Photo: Jonn Leffmann, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons