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A Trip to Sweden's Coast

Yesterday was quite eventful. We left at 7:30 am to go to Sweden. We saw architecture up and down the coastline and towns along the way. Our first stop was Helsingborg. Every other year, Sweden hosts a housing exhibition, a way to showcase new technologies, new designs, and new styles to the public and architectural community. Helsingborg was host to the 1999 exhibition and showcased a number of buildings along the harbor of the town. There were about 10 buildings in all, each done by a different designer or firm.

We then continued to wonder around little villages and towns, looking at new ways that architects have been influencing Swedish housing projects. However, around noon we came to one of Sweden's tallest "mountains", which is still only a hill by any other countries standards. We climbed to the top, and came down the steep side of the hill, down towards the sea. Along the coast, tucked away is a large art installation piece. All the driftwood that had collected in the area over hundreds of years was turned into a beautiful landscape of logs and sticks, lashed together with nails. The result were towers that shot up out of the rocks along the cliff side with paths that led from one another along the rocky shore. Everything was made by one man, and took him 4 years to finish it. It was really something to see, the pictures as you can imagine do not to it justice to how beautiful the site really was.

The trip after that was cold since snow had penetrated even the smallest of areas of every piece of clothing we had on. We were soaked, and tired, and we wanted to go home. However, our professor had a trick up his sleeve in Malmo, Sweden. When we thought we were going to yet another housing project, that none of us would like, the bus stops outside of this small clearing with a large parking lot. We look out the window and right there is Calatrava's "Turning Torso" skysraper building right in front of us. It was an amazing sight. At nearly 50 stories tall, the footprint of the building is rather small. You can walk around it in less than a minute, yet looking at the building, it seems it would fall over if a wind came. The structure is amazing, and it was really cool to see one of the most recent buildings in contemporary architecture to be finished. It was, again, an amazing feeling being there.