Biography | Ulf Widerström — The Degree Taken in Lallerstedt's New Court at KTH

People file Ulf Widerström as a Skanska name from the 1960s. The first stamped paper is a civil-engineering diploma from 1937.

Ulf Emanuel Widerström was born in Stockholm on 8 June 1914, son of Consul General Karl Widerström and Ellinor, born Wrangel.

Swedish biographical handbooks, including Vem är det 1981, give the city and the date. They do not name a parish or a hospital, so the pin is not a birth house.

The place that can be stood in is this courtyard.

Erik Lallerstedt's main building at Kungliga Tekniska högskolan was inaugurated on 19 October 1917, on the ridge above Valhallavägen.

By the time Widerström sat his exams, the brick court had already been the school's public face for twenty years.

He left as a väg- och vattenbyggnadsingenjör, a roads-and-water engineer, the Swedish title that fed both the state works boards and the private concrete contractors.

The next three years were not spent on a site. AB Vattenbyggnadsbyrån, the Stockholm consulting house founded by J. Gustaf Richert, took him on from 1937 to 1940.

That firm designed dams, waterworks and towers. Its 1930s street address is not pinned here, because the surviving office trail leads to later Sweco floors, not to the rooms he used.

What the record does fix is the campus that trained him and the year on the diploma.

From this court a consul's son walked into the wartime state works board, then into AB Skånska Cementgjuteriet, the Malmö-born contractor that had moved its head office to Stockholm in 1914 and would later take the name Skanska.

The building is still the school's front. Visitors come in from Drottning Kristinas väg and Osquars backe. The brick and the courtyard are Lallerstedt's, even after the 1990s renovation.

Photo: I99pema, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons