Watching a building get built can be sublime. In Bologna, Italians use the word “umarell” to describe predominantly male retirees who wade time at the cusps of makeshift fences, hands clasped behind their backs, giving construction workers advice on how to do their jobs better.
What’s more awe-inspiring than witnessing a building go up, however, is watching one move.
This week in northern Scandinavia a large, wooden 20th-century church—once dubbed “the most beautiful building in Sweden”—was lifted up in the city of Kiruna and relocated 3 miles across town. The whole endeavor took two days to finish, and gathered thousands of spectators on the streets and online.
That’s a lot of umarells…
Kiruna Church was designed by Swedish architect Gustaf Wickman, and built between 1909 and 1912. Mammoet, a Dutch engineering firm that specializes in lifting heavy objects, coordinated the 700-ton building’s relocation with civil engineering firm Veidekke.
In attendance to watch Kiruna Church’s relocation was the King of Sweden, Carl XVI Gustaf. King Gustaf often weighs in on architecture projects within his domain. In 2016, for instance, he spatted with David Chipperfield over a new home for the Nobel Center in Stockholm.
The church’s relocation was warranted, local officials said, because a local iron-ore mine owned by LKAB, one of Sweden’s oldest industrial corporations, which Kiruna Church neighbored, is expanding. A live feed of Kiruna Church’s relocation was available on YouTube.
But Kiruna Church isn’t the only building on the move in the Swedish city 125 miles north of the Arctic circle. LKAB founded its Kiruna mine in 1900. Today, it produces 80 percent of the European Union’s total iron-ore supply.
For years, LKAB’s mine has been expanding and there are cracks in the foundations of schools, hospitals, and apartment blocks due to the seismic movements induced by the mine’s growth. Now, the mine threatens to swallow up the city, unless entire buildings like Kiruna Church are moved. Sami reindeer herders have been greatly impacted as well.
Kiruna Church’s relocation, coined by a local broadcasting station as “the Great Church Walk,” was indeed impressive, but not unprecedented.
The heaviest building ever moved, according to Guinness World Records, was a mansion in Azerbaijan. And in Texas—where everything is indeed bigger—the Fairmount Hotel in San Antonio, weighing 1,600 tons, was relocated in 1985, giving it the accolade of heaviest hotel ever moved.
Eastern Orthodox priests in communist Romania relocated almost a dozen churches throughout the 1980s in Bucharest. This had to happen to make way for grand boulevards and Bucharest’s Palace of the People, grandiose vanity projects planned by Nicolae Ceaușescu.
Different means were employed to relocate Sweden’s Kiruna Church, although the penultimate end was similar—save the church from spoliation. Kiruna Church was jacked up 4 feet from the ground, and then placed onto steel beams supported by two trains of 28 axle lines.
The axle lines consisted of Self-Propelled Modular Transporters (SPMTs) developed by Mammoet for the job. The SPMTs ensured the church was stable in transport, allowing a maximum tilt of just 3 inches between sides.
To make way for the church, some roads were temporarily widened. Road tests were conducted by Mammoet using SPMTs to ensure they could handle the weight. The civil engineers spent over 1,000 hours planning the operation.
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