Where billionaires live underground

-

 


Furillen made a huge impression and by chance, our next big discovery was yet another abandoned and beautifully renovated limestone quarry, which lies just next to our house in the north of Gotland.


The large 160-hectare Bungenäs quarry was for many years off-limits as it was  used by the Swedish armed forces for military training.


When the military left the area, the plan was to erase all the industrial buildings and the military installations and build a golf resort with 300 identical houses.




The entreptreneur Joachim Kuylenstierna, whose father had worked at the garrison, hated the idea and bought the site with a bold plan. 

 

He wanted to have houses on Bungenäs that were adapted and almost subordinated to the wildly rugged landscape and contacted a young, local architectural firm, Skälsö architects, which made a master plan for the area. 

 

When you now buy a plot at Bungenäs, you can't build a pre-fabricated house and you are not allowed to fence in your property nor grow a garden. And as all cars have been banned on the peninsula, you have to park outside and commute by foot or by bike.

 

 

Even though the restrictions are numerous, many wealthy Swedes have now built summerhouses on the Bungenäs.




When you walk the area, scarred by the deep holes left from the excavated limestone and the many concrete bunkers and trenches built by the military, you hardly notice the buildings even though the architecture is often exquisite, using timber, weathering steel plates, and massive concrete slabs.

 

 



It took some time to finally discover one of the most famous buildings in the area - the Udden 6-7, which is built by Skälsö Arkitects for one of the billionaire owners of the Hennes&Mauritz fashion company.


Above ground, you see a nice, minimalistic, concrete bungalow, but this is just the tip of the iceberg. Below ground, the building stretches down into a four stories deep, massive former military bunker as you can see on this architects’ site


What a fantastic idea!

 


 


The last couple of days, we have walked for hours in the area. During the summer months we heard  it is lively, with some restaurants and bars in the old industrial buildings, but now Bungenäs is void of people and the stunning landscape seems completely barren. 


At least on the topside. We have no ideas, what the billionaires are doing deep below!





Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Night under the full moon: A unique Parisian gathering

-
Image
  The other night I was invited to a so-called Full Moon Party in the center of Paris. The host was a guy Rita and I met, when we, a couple of years ago, stayed on his houseboat a bit up the Seine. He arranges these casual parties at the middle of the Pont des Arts and he has done so, come rain or come moonshine, every month for the last many years. As I approached the iconic bridge, now mercifully devoid of its plague of "love locks," I was greeted by a cacophony of excited chatter in a United Nations potpourri of accents.  French people as well as expats from many corners of the globe mingled freely, their laughter and chatter forming a symphony of human connection that was actually quite infectious. As I accepted a glass of wine from a beaming Spanish astrophysics student, I pondered the curious phenomenon before me.  Here we were, a motley crew of strangers, united by nothing more than our shared presence in this city and our willingness to gaze skyward toge...
Read more

Stumbling into serenity: The secret garden of Saint-Serge

-
Image
The other day I walked the streets of the edgy, regenerated Villette area of Paris, and here, on one of its busy streets, I stumbled upon what seemed like a portal opening into another time. Entering through an unassuming gate, and going down a narrow,  semi-private alley, I was transported from the frenetic present into a hidden,  quiet garden that turned out to be the garden of the  Saint-Serge de Radonège Russian Orthodox Church.    Photo: SortirAParis Before me unfolded a scene that could have been plucked from a 19th-century Russian novel: Long-bearded orthodox priests wearing flowing black robes and cylindrical kamilávka hats, moved unhurriedly among the flowerbeds, and a group of elderly parishioners sat in the garden, on rickety chairs, chatting in a melodic blend of Russian and  French. The abrupt transition from bustling street to  tranquil sanctuary was so jarring that I half-expected to find my smartphone transfor...
Read more

Entering the Boros bunker - A mind-altering artistic journey

-
Image
Walking into the massive Boros bunker in Berlin's Mitte is like walking into an ancient, alien tomb. This forbidding concrete monolith, built by the Nazis in 1942,  is now the home of an eccentric private art collection.  Inside the building's almost anthill-like network of  underground corridors and crypts, numerous swirling shapes and colors spark the walls into lurid illuminations.   A flood of phantasmagoric images washes over the senses - kinetic sculptures twisting with reptilian menace, multimedia installations flickering with layered meanings. Each new room opens like a portal into a new creative artistic mind - and the story about the building is as exciting as the art which is  displayed inside it. During the war, the bunker sheltered several thousand  civilians from the massive, nightly bombings that hit Berlin. In 1945 the Red Army repurposed the building for prisoners of war and it later became an East German warehouse. After the wall tumble...
Read more