Volvo Photo Locations Part 380
1962 – Volvo PV 544 on Kungsportsavenyen 23 in Göteborg, Sweden 🇸🇪.
1962 – Volvo PV 544 on Kungsportsavenyen 23 in Göteborg, Sweden 🇸🇪.
1962 – Volvo PV 544 on Kungsportsavenyen 23 in Göteborg, Sweden 🇸🇪.
(Photo by Bernt Lindström from the book Med Volvo i fokus)
2021 – Kungsportsavenyen 23 in Göteborg (Google Streetview)
Kungsportsavenyn 23 is located in Göteborg. It was built in 1960 in the modernism style, architect was Helge Zimdal.
On this building on Avenyn 23, Olle Niklasson wrote an article in Göteborg Posten:
There are houses that you can not get rid of. Which you can never help but stop in front of, look up at the facade and wonder what it is like to live there. So it is with Kungsportsavenyn 23.
The house was built in 1960 and designed by Chalmers professor Helge Zimdal, and it is not difficult to imagine that he wanted to reflect the wastefully decorated 1880s houses across the street in its irregular facade.
With an entire window wall from floor to ceiling in one of the rooms, you live like in a shop window a few meters from the 5th stop and for those who regularly wait for the carriage, it is not difficult to create a picture of life inside. For many years one could admire a collection of blue and white Chinese porcelain, like one in an exhibition stand in one of the windows: smaller pieces placed around two magnificent practice towers. There now lives a tenant who is not a collector. Or maybe just do not care, who knows?
If you look in through the glass doors of the entrance and past the slatted wall in guaranteed red-listed rainforest wood, you see that the walls are clad in a kind of relief mosaic in several kinds of rough-hewn marble. It looks expensive. But it is not just any house, nor is it any street, and Helge Zimdal took the task seriously.
Stora Teatern had been inaugurated in 1859 and with it a street from Kungsportsplatsen in whose extension the English Quarter was then built in 1872–73. The street name was still the subject of controversy, however, there were no differences of opinion regarding the plans for the new avenue: a residential area for the affluent. The houses that were built had large apartments, eight to ten rooms, and facades that signaled abundance, many times even boasting.
Except for small market cellars on the cross streets, shops were not allowed. It was not until 1914 that the exclusive furniture store Boet opened, very discreetly signposted and housed in an ordinary apartment on the ground floor at number 24. After that, the pressure to commercialize the street increased and more and more floors on the street level were converted into shop premises.
In 1932, Göteborg got a new city planning manager, the functionalist Uno Åhrén, who advocated for a modernization of Avenyn. The patrician houses should be demolished and replaced with new and higher ones in six to seven storeys. In 1934, No. 29 was demolished, followed by numbers 4, 14 and 25 a few years later. The houses were then just over 50 years old and began the demolition era in Gothenburg, 30 years before the working-class districts Annedal and Vegastan fell for the excavators. From the mid-1950s, another 15 of the 34 houses built along the Avenue during the late 19th century were demolished.
The apartments in number 23 are built on the floor and a bit like the L-blocks in a Tetris. If an apartment has an upper floor with a kitchen and two rooms and a lower one with four, the next mirror is in height. Floor seven is a single large roof terrace floor. The property then extends across the block with eighteen one-room apartments and four twos stacked as huts on top of each other in two rows towards Teatergatan.
At the site where Avenyn 23 and the office building at number 21 were to be built, two four-storey 1880s houses were demolished. The demolition was preceded by some discussions, but more about Zimdal’s proposal than about the original houses, which were fairly ordinary purely architecturally.
The avenue has endured a lot over the years, but you make it easy for yourself if you say that everything was better before. There was a dozen architectures then just like now, Avenyn also has its fair share, but that does not include number 23.
More information at www.gp.se.
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