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 Hårbärget block, the last central plot at Hyllie station. The task is set out under three themes: cosmopolitan, record-green, a living centre.
Behind the themes lies the Malmö Commission's 2013 report, which showed that people in parts of Malmö live, on average, seven years shorter lives than in others. 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.
If Malmö were a hundred people, who are they? From that question 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 — all in place before a single building was drawn.
Seven buildings, not one
One large building could not deliver on fifteen points. Two could not either. The answer was seven.
Seven buildings with four sides each give 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.
Seven buildings also gave seven chances to do something architecturally: a designed diversity in which each building has its own identity, its own materials and its own logic.
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.
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. And it makes commercial space possible: restaurant and market hall, in a cost-effective single-storey form that does not have to carry housing above.
The public bicycle parking sits here, integrated along the railway. Fabriken is connected to small-scale food production, ideally in symbiosis with Basaren's restaurant and market hall.
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.
Each building is optimised for its own conditions. The material question was not given — timber or concrete — and decided to test both, with the same developer and conditions as comparable as possible. Fyrtornet was built entirely in timber. It was more complex to deliver, but because timber is difficult in itself, the industry is unlikely to handle it as a building material. Skogslunden is planned in the same structural system, allowing knowledge and experience to be compared across time and scale.
The result
The proposal won the competition in September 2017. Fyrtornet stands at the station; it won the Årets Bygge prize in 2023 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.
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 while it builds for everyone.
