Embassy of Sharing
Embassy of Sharing is a mixed-use precinct of seven buildings in Hyllie, Malmö, organized around principles of sharing economy and resource efficiency. The masterplan won Malmö's land allocation competition for the last central plot in the district and is developed with Granitor Properties in close collaboration with the city. Each building has its own identity and material expression, arranged around a green public stretch with planted facades, vegetated roofs, and cyclist and pedestrian precincts at ground level. The precinct holds around 300 apartments, offices, a hotel, retail, startup spaces, small-scale industry, and a public library, with the mass-timber Fyrtornet, Sweden's tallest wooden office building, completed first.
The story of the Seven
Hyllie, winter 2016.
The last central plot at the station. Wind off the Sound, no vegetation, no buildings to break it. The ground is clay. It is being used as a vast, half-improvised car park. The railway to Denmark runs along the southern edge.
To the north sit Emporia shopping centre, the arena and The Point: large volumes with open ground between them. Nobody stops here. People pass through.
A year earlier, people had stood on this site and waited. Border controls had made Hyllie the first station from Denmark into Sweden, and thousands passed through with nothing on offer: no shelter, no waiting hall, nowhere to be.
That was the background.
In January 2017, the City of Malmö launches a land allocation competition for the Härbärget block, the last central plot at Hyllie station.
The task is set out under three themes: cosmopolitan Öresund, record-green, a living centre. Behind the themes lies the Malmö Commission’s 2013 report, the study that showed people in eastern Malmö live, on average, seven years shorter lives than in other parts of the city. Social sustainability is not an appendix in the brief. It is part of the task.
The field is strong: Snøhetta, Tham & Videgård, Gehl Architects, Baumschlager Eberle, among others. Most respond with one or two large buildings.
We start somewhere else.
The Malmö Commission’s data was abstract. To make it workable, we broke it down. If Malmö were a hundred people, who are they? They come from different parts of the world, are at different stages of life, have different economic circumstances.
It is a way of turning statistics into people, and then asking the question: what does this block need to deliver so that each of them actually gets something?
From that analysis came fifteen concrete demands: something for everyone, mixed uses, places for creativity, Hyllie around the clock, meeting places, cooperation and symbiosis, robust structures, energy efficiency.
Fifteen points, all in place before a single building was drawn
Seven buildings, not one
The tools shaped the structure. One large building could not deliver on fifteen points. Two could not either. The answer was seven.
Seven buildings with four sides each gives 28 possible public frontages. More edges towards the city. More entrances. More spaces between, where shelter and a sense of place can take hold in a setting otherwise defined by large volumes and open ground. Stortorget and Lilla torg. The grand and the close. That was the parallel. Hyllie station square had the grand. The green corridor through the block could be the close: tighter, more intimate, sheltered.Seven buildings also gave us seven chances to do something architecturally. The ambition was to give form to the values Malmö wants to stand for: a designed diversity in which each building has its own identity, its own materials and its own logic. Not variation for its own sake, but as a rational response to the conditions of the site and the demands of the programme. A first-rate location asked for architecture in the same class.
Something simpler was also missing: a place to stay. An outdoor environment sheltered from the wind, where people actually want to linger, with room for outdoor seating and unprogrammed presence. Something Hyllie station square does not offer today. In a district shaped by infrastructure and large facilities, the real architectural task was to bring in intimacy, greenery and sensory experience
Fyrtornet – The Light House
At the station: Fyrtornet. Not offices, not retail, but a public living room — a foyer for the whole of Hyllie, open to all. In the competition we sketched a bakery that opens when the first trains start running, and waiting-hall functions that keep the place alive around the clock.
What was actually built is a district library with long opening hours, a restaurant and a foyer accessible to anyone passing through. The principle is the same. It is the anchor.
Drivbänken – The Seedbed
Drivbänken opens up with public terraces from ground to roof. The entire facade is walkable, a green route up through the building. In the central atrium, work, learning, culture and meeting places gather around an event staircase open to everyone.
Droppen organised small rental flats with shared spaces that activate the building on several levels.
A gym on the roof. On the ground floor, a long communal table for homework with a clear view over Hyllie Stationsväg: the laundry not as a service but as a meeting place. Commercial premises form a social interface with the surrounding district.
Basaren & Fabriken – The Factory & the Bazaar
Along the railway, Basaren is planned: a low structure with three purposes. It creates shelter on one of Hyllie’s most exposed sites. It breaks the scale; a one-and-a-half storey building beside the taller houses lets the whole environment read as small-scale despite the block’s overall size. And it makes commercial space possible: restaurant, market hall, in a cost-effective single-storey form that does not have to carry housing above.
The public bicycle parking sits here, integrated into the Basaren structure along the railway. Fabriken is connected to small-scale food production, ideally in symbiosis with Basaren’s restaurant and market hall. The position is strategic: between the inner green corridor and the visible frontage towards the railway, with direct delivery access from the local street off Hyllie Stationsväg. It places production where it is visible without being disruptive, and reachable without detours.ble without being disruptive, and reachable without detours.
Skogslunden – The Grove
Skogslunden is planned as housing in timber, organised around a green courtyard with a micro-forest, greenhouse and cultivation.
Levnadskonstnären – The Epicurean
Levnadskonstnären brings housing, hotel and services together in one building, with shared functions tying them to one another.
Droppen – The Drop
Droppen organises small rental flats with shared spaces that activate the building on several levels: a gym on the roof, and on the ground floor a long communal table for homework with a clear view over Hyllie Stationsväg — the laundry not as a service but as a meeting place. Commercial premises form a social interface with the surrounding district.
Linked in every sense
The seven buildings are also linked technically. Energy is produced, stored and distributed between them according to demand: offices that need cooling by day share with flats that need heating at night. The block works as a system, not as seven separate buildings.
Hyllie is the centre that southern Malmö never received. The post-war housing programmes built homes but not city; the southern districts still lack the kind of central environment found elsewhere in Malmö. Embassy of
Sharing is intended to be more than a destination for those passing through the station square. It should be a place that links districts, somewhere southern Malmö residents come to because there is something there for them.
Embassy of Sharing was not just the name. It was the description of how the block is meant to work. Every part solves more than one problem. The sharing is what makes that possible
Grassroots: fifty letters of intent
We approached around fifty actors. Restaurants, associations, producers, cultural organisations.
They wrote letters of intent to the developer
Granitor, signalling that they could see themselves becoming part of the concept. This was not an illustration of diversity. It was a strategy that mirrored the political goals and strengthened the economics of the land allocation.
Three material strategies
Each building in Embassy of Sharing is optimised for its own conditions. The heterogeneous expression is not a composition but a rational outcome; each building carries its own sustainability logic, in structure as well as facade.
The material question was not given. Timber or concrete: at the time it was not clear which carried the lower climate impact. We decided to test both, with the same developer and conditions as comparable as we could make them.
Fyrtornet was built entirely in timber. It was more complex to deliver, not because timber is difficult in itself but because the industry is unused to handling it as a building material. Skogslunden is planned with the same structural system, allowing knowledge and experience to be compared across time and scale.
Droppen takes a third path. The facade is clad in reused heat-exchanger plates from Alfa Laval: industrial reuse at full scale. Not timber, not concrete, but a material that has already served its purpose in another setting. It is a different way into the same question of resource use, and it shows on the building.
LTH is now researching Fyrtornet, on strength performance in large-scale timber construction. Linnaeus University is studying timber as a carbon sink. What began as a practical experiment has become research.
The result
The proposal won the competition in September 2017. Fyrtornet stands at the station. It won the Årets Bygge prize in 2025 and is nominated for the Kasper Salin Prize in 2026. Drivbänken and Droppen are completed. Levnadskonstnären and Skogslunden are planned for 2028, Basaren and Fabriken for 2030.
What was a muddy car park by the railway now has rooms, education and content. The ground floors are in use. Basaren takes noise and wind and turns them into space. Fyrtornet takes the flow from the station and turns it into a place to be.
Embassy of Sharing was never intended as a finished block. It is an ongoing structure, a testbed that continues to generate knowledge about materials, energy sharing and what a city can become when it builds for everyone. In 2017, social sustainability was rarely the starting point for architecture. It appeared in competition briefs and sustainability reports but seldom steered the actual work.
Here it was the other way around. The Malmö Commission's data, the recently adopted UN Sustainable Development Goals, and the experience of a refugee crisis that exposed exactly what the site lacked: all of it was translated into fifteen concrete tools, a spatial structure and a sharing system that could be built and evaluated.
The result is architecture that wins prizes, research that is under way, and a place that has changed Hyllie's role in Malmö. It got better for starting with the question. Embassy of Sharing points forward.
The path it opened for Malmö has become the path for more. It is a platform to build on, one that shows how, with the right approach, sustainability can be made tangible, enjoyable and measurable. Starting from what is best for everyone produced, in the end, a result that went beyond what was expected.
