Kiruna City Hall

Contemporary civic landmark built for a mining town physically moving to safer ground

Kiruna City Hall, known as Kristallen, is the public face of one of Europe's strangest urban projects: a town centre being moved because the iron mine beneath it has made the old ground unsafe. The building's angular, crystalline form is deliberately symbolic, but it also works as a useful orientation point in the new centre.

The most interesting reason to stop is not only the architecture. Inside and around the building you can read Kiruna's relocation as a lived civic story rather than an abstract engineering problem, with the old clock tower preserved as a link to the demolished former city hall.

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