The Scandinavian Airlines/SAS Group head office is in Frösundavik, Solna Municipality, Sweden, near Stockholm.[1][2]
The head office was built from 1985 through 1987 by the Norwegian architect Niels Torp. SAS intended to build its head office in the lake Brunnsviken area, near an exit to Stockholm Arlanda Airport. The plans caused controversy since the municipal and regional planners wanted the area to be used for recreation purposes. The Swedish government was about to sell land in the Brunnsviken area, and was interested in SAS has its main office in the area of Stockholm. So SAS took a plot of land, while the beaches and scenic elements of the area were retained. In 1984 SAS held a competition amongst nine architects to determine who would get to design the head office. Niels Torp won the competition and a 55,000-square-metre (590,000 sq ft) complex was built.[3]
The building has seven separate building blocks with a street, covered by a glass roof, connecting the corridors. The street is lined with shops and cafes.[4] Susie McKellar and Penny Sparke, authors of Interior Design and Identity, said that the SAS building, which opened in January 1988, said that the building "refashioned entirely the traditional notion of office life by creating a giant complex with shops, restaurants, and coffee bars lining a solar-heated internal 'main street'" running through the facility's spine. Jan Carlzon, a company president, explained that the concept was to promote SAS senior managers promenading through the corridor and meeting staff members informally. McKellar and Sparke added that the building "moved as far away from Taylorism in aesthetic and organisational terms as one could get."[5]