Sweden Syndrome
This is the interior of the famous 1923 city hall in Stockholm, Sweden, where they host the annual dinner awarding the Nobel prize in Economics. A lovely arts and crafts/National Romantic building, we toured it as part of the International Preservation Trades Network conference last Friday. This Friday (today) I am going to my 25th college reunion at the University of Chicago.
So here is the connection. Monday my sister Clare shows me a flyer her son Michael received from the University of Chicago. He is a well-adjusted kid but that didn’t stop U of C (über-geek central) from soliciting. The flyer was hilarious – the cover showed Nobel prize medals, an IKEA store, and the pop group ABBA. When you open the flyer, it reveals that these three things are all Swedish, which you should already have figured out if you are U of C-worthy. It even noted that one ABBA member was technically Norwegian, as all incoming U of C students know. The kicker was to show how many Nobel prizes U of C people had won. So geeky. Continue Reading
Falun Facts
At the Falun World Heritage Site in Sweden you can see a stunning strip mine that was the world’s largest source of copper for most of the Industrial Revolution. I suppose a huge whole in the ground surrounded by piles of slag and refuse might strike some as a horrible thing, but it is really beautiful, colors glancing off each other through literal layers of history as your eye descends hundreds of feet down and hundreds more across.
They translated it as “open-course” mine but of course we call it “strip” mine because the word is harsher and more satisfactory for our environmental impulses, those impulses that make us compost and recycle and buy compact fluorescents. Of course there is always a problem with such purisms and asceticism, like the fact that until we buy a smaller house, all of our efforts do little beyond making us feel good. Continue Reading