A sunken 1960s plaza of glass and concrete towers, and the street Lisbeth Salander walked in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.
What Norrmalm looks like
sits below street level, its floor laid out in black and white triangles that give the plaza its local name, Plattan. Escalators lead down from the surrounding streets and from the entrance to T-Centralen, and a 37 metre glass obelisk stands at the centre. Fountains run along the south edge in front of Kulturhuset, a long building of pale concrete piers and glass, its curved roofline rising above the trees and flagpoles.
Five towers stand in a row along Sveavägen at the plaza's northwest corner, each nineteen storeys and seventy two metres tall, faced floor to ceiling in glass curtain wall over a shared colonnaded base. Shops and a cinema fill the ground floor arcade beneath them, the glass curtain wall running unbroken from one tower's base to the next.
Kungsgatan runs north from the plaza under a stone footbridge slung between two towers, its shopfronts strung with lights each winter. runs along the top of a ridge above it, a row of bank and office buildings dating from 1877 to 1976, with a granite staircase connecting the two levels partway along.
is a separate square east of the plaza, at the southern end of Kungsträdgården, with a bronze statue of the king on a granite plinth and four captured mortars chained together around its base. Below Klarabergsgatan, the renovated corridors of Stockholm Central Station carry passengers between platforms under tiled walls and steel ceiling grids, part of the same underground network that runs beneath the plaza above.
Shot in Norrmalm
In The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Lisbeth Salander calls her guardian from the top of the Malmskillnadstrappan stairs and continues down onto Kungsgatan below. The same stretch of Kungsgatan also shows up on screen two decades earlier, in Ingmar Bergman's 1973 television series Scenes from a Marriage.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, 2011
Lisbeth Salander calls her court appointed guardian from the top of Malmskillnadstrappan. The granite staircase connects Malmskillnadsgatan to the street below. She walks down it onto Kungsgatan and continues along the pavement toward the stone footbridge slung between the Kungstornen towers. Street View
La Défense's glass tower plaza sits over a lower deck of pedestrian walkways and underground rail platforms, the same layered arrangement as Sergels torg over the metro concourse. The scale of the towers and the open paved plaza between them are close matches for the Hötorget group. La Défense's towers run taller and its plaza is wider, so a frame that crops the skyline and holds close to one or two towers keeps the comparison believable. Try searching glass tower plaza underground now.
Lijnbaan in Rotterdam, Netherlands
Rotterdam rebuilt its postwar centre with the same low modernist blocks and curtain glass shopfronts, and the Lijnbaan's pedestrianised shopping street reads close to Sergelgatan's arcade level. Long runs of glass shopfronts under repeating concrete bays give both streets the same planned, uniform look rather than a mix of separate buildings. Rotterdam's blocks run lower and its infill panels are a warmer colour than Norrmalm's glass and concrete, so a tight frame on the glazing line holds the match better than a wide one. Try searching postwar modernist shopping street now.
Croydon's 1960s concrete office towers share the height and the repeated curtain wall bays of the Hötorget group, on streets built wide enough for the same volume of traffic. The match works best around the older tower blocks rather than the newer glass additions further south. Many of Croydon's towers have been reclad or replaced since, so a scout needs to check a building's current facade against period photographs before relying on the match. Try searching 1960s concrete office towers now.
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