Our trip to Gothenburg, Sweden started over the weekend we arrived in Europe. We had Sunday free to explore the city – I walked around during the day with some of my group, exploring neighborhoods and parks in the pretty city. I got a monster cinnamon bun in the neighborhood of Haga, climbed some old ramparts to reach a scenic viewpoint of the city, and ended the day with a picnic on the roof of our new Swedish friend’s student apartment. We’re lucky that we had a chance to partner with the Swedes on our project, because it certainly helped to know some locals while visiting!
On Monday, we traveled to Hammarkullen and started the Dare2Build workshop with Swedish architecture students. The workshop centered around beautifying an existing repair shop built for the residents of Hammarkullen and installing a new recycling center, both of which are made out of large shipping containers. The first day brought lots of planning and design and even a little bit of demolition. We checked out the job sight, had a tool container delivered, and broke into teams to develop a vision for the project.
On Tuesday, we started work on the site. While the team leads finalized the plan for the project, I helped to organize the tool container and prepare the landscaping area. In the afternoon, we had the opportunity to peek inside of Fixoteket, the workshop in the connected red containers half of the project is centered around. It serves as a valuable purpose in the community, to help them repair and repurpose belongings to help the underreasourced community save money and collect tax benefits. Inside the containers, we found lots of hand tools and materials necessary to rebuild everything from broken bicycles to pieces of furniture.
Wednesday was Sweden’s national holiday (think July 4th), so we had the day off! We spent it with our Swedish friends, going to Gothenburg’s nearest natural splendors – the archipelago. After taking the ferry past many of the islands, we arrived at the beach house of one of our new friends. We spent the day braving the cold Scandinavian water and relaxing – the latter was very easy to do on the island.
Thursday starting in Hammarkullen again, where Nick, Juan, and I worked on getting the Fixoteket ready for a fresh coat of paint. After wrapping up work on the job site, we headed over to the Living Lab for the awards ceremony that night. It was really interesting to finally get to see the Living Lab after hearing so much about it throughout the year, and we were thrilled to deliver our prototype to its new home.
Finally, on Friday we were back at the work site in Hammarkullen. After finishing up the prep work from Thursday of scraping away the chipped paint, we got started on applying a coat of primer to the shipping container. Below you can see our progress behind the wonderful invention that is kebab pizza. It felt good to leave the project in Hammarkullen looking much better than we found it, and I look forward to hearing from our friends in Sweden about how it turns out at the end of the summer.
