Biography | Rudolf Fredrik Berg — The Drottninggatan Building Where He Took His Engineer’s Certificate

People who meet Skanska only as a modern contractor tend to start the file in 1984, when the name changed.

The man who founded the firm that became Skanska started earlier, and farther north, in a new school building on Drottninggatan.

Rudolf Fredrik Berg, called Fritz at home, was born in Stockholm on 31 May 1846.

Svenskt biografiskt lexikon records the date. A later company page that gives 3 May is wrong.

He was the son of Fredrik Theodor Berg, the physician and statistician, and Emma Stokoe.

On 26 May 1865 he sat his university entrance exam in Uppsala. On 4 September the same year he enrolled at Teknologiska institutet.

The institute had just moved. In 1863 it left cramped rooms at Modellkammarhuset and opened this purpose-built block at Drottninggatan 91–95, designed by Fredrik Wilhelm Scholander.

Berg took the chemical-engineering track. He left with his certificate on 10 June 1868.

The next four years were odd jobs by comparison: Finnboda tar works, the sawmill at Ljusne, then a short spell as manager of Liljeholmen’s vinegar factory.

The Drottninggatan years are the hinge. Without the certificate issued here, the twenty-six-year-old who walked into Skånska Cement AB in March 1873 would have had no claim on the job.

The building still stands. After KTH moved out to Valhallavägen in the 1910s, the old institute passed to other uses. Kungliga Skogs- och Lantbruksakademien occupies part of it now.

A visitor on Drottninggatan is looking at the same brick that framed Berg’s three winters as a student, not a later campus named in his honour.

Photo: Frans Gustaf Klemming, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait: unknown photographer, before 1907, public domain, Svenskt biografiskt lexikon via Wikimedia Commons.