DN Skrapan (The Dagens Nyheter Tower)

DN-Skrapan (The Dagens Nyheter Skyscraper)–is blåmärkt, meaning it is an officially designated historic landmark.The high rise, built to house the offices of the newspapers Dagens Nyheter and Expressen, is built to look like a printing press. Vertical rows of windows fall in font-suggestive lines, with an enclosed fire escape whose spiral staircase emulates the mechanism of a press. The top of the building is the truly programmatic feature: a line of letters on rotating boards, seeminging rolling out of the "press" below, swiveling between the titles of the newspapers, "Dagens Nyheter" and "Expressen", all through the night. Or at least they did until recent years, standing still in tandem with the slow disappearance of paper news.

There are several cities whose skylines have unique or idiosyncratic signs, giving residents and visitors alike a sense of place. In Boston, the Citgo sign, which flashes over the Charles river in its endlessly repeating red triangle of logo lights has been saved several times by stalwart townies, and the older of two John Hancock insurance buildings still sports a light at its Zenith that turns red or blue depending on the weather, with its fortune telling rhyme: Solid Blue, skies of blue; flashing blue, clouds in view; steady red, rain ahead; flashing red, snow instead. In Stockholm there is the electronically animated, fluorescent Stomatol toothpaste sign, in early 1900's design, endlessly squeezing white, fluorescent toothpaste onto a red, fluorescent brush. Then, there is the DN building, its spinning letters now frozen. DN's editorial offices have been gone since the 1990s; the programmatic image of a printing press becomes more anachronistic by the hour. These are the architectural stalwarts of the accidental realm that is sense of place, gossamer and nocturnal. 

 


The DN building is silent, of course, but if one sees it with the memory of the sound of printing presses, or even imaginary memories of those machines–with the understanding that one of the country's two major newspaper companies was based there for decades–the serene late-night switch-back of "Dagens Nyheter/Expressen" at its zenith fills the night sky with the churning click-clack of the world running through its courses. The ghost-history of a whole genre of Swedish language writing is flung out across the sleeping city. The front pages of the papers are posted each day in the windows of tobacconists and convenience stores, so the once-twirling letters send their signal to everyone running in to get cigarettes, coffee, chocolate or snus. In recent years, when the letters stood still on “Dagens Nyheter”, another layer of ghost memory is added, of the slow motion stoppage of presses in the face of the new digital age. The DN sends a silent signal of imaginary news over the night.