[1] Until the turn of the century in 1900, Sweden's foreign representation had only one own building and it was the Swedish Palace in Constantinople where the envoy for the Sublime Porte resided.

In 1912, the legation house in Berlin was purchased by the Swedish state through Consul General Rudolf von Koch for SEK 530,000.

The house was built in 1880 and was transformed by architect Fredrik Lilljekvist into a baroque pastiche whose facade was crowned by the Swedish coat of arms.

The deal went awry and instead they had to buy a 10 meter wide strip of land from the neighboring plot to at least prevent the back of the legation building from being obscured if a larger house was built on the site.

[2] Under Hitler's Germany, the legation house was in danger of being demolished because Tiergartenstraße was to be widened and also partly moved to make way for a huge new building for the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht.

[2] During the last days of the final battle, the artillery fire was so intense that the legation staff were practically trapped in their bunker.

The operation of the legation continued even after the arrival of the Russians, despite the Wehrmacht capitulating on 8 May 1945 and the Nazi Germany ceased to exist and Sweden declared that diplomatic relations had been broken.

Before the Interbau exhibition in Berlin in 1957, the city was concerned that the old diplomatic quarters would be rebuilt and already in 1953 there were plans to rebuild the Swedish legation house and use the preserved outer walls.

Here, secret East-West talks were held in the garden in 1966 between Berlin Mayor Willy Brandt and Soviet Ambassador Pyotr Abrassimov.

The talks were mediated by the then consul general Sven Backlund and became the first steps on the road to Brandt's famous Ostpolitik.

[6] In 1970, the National Board of Public Building (Byggnadsstyrelsen) paid for a general overhaul of the legation plots and the old air defense room.

After the reunification of Germany, there were plans for a new government center in the capital and at Spree the old idea was to gather the foreign embassies at Tiergartenstraße and both the city of Berlin and the Federal Republic were happy to see Sweden and Finland return to their old plots.

Sweden therefore began negotiations with the city of Berlin to buy back the old legation site, and in June 1995 the Swedish state took over Tiergartenstraße 36 again.

The Austrian architects Alfred Berger and Tiina Parkkinen won an international architectural competition on how the acquired plot would be used with the proposal to let the embassy complexes be held together by a copper band that encloses two sides of the triangular block.

Common denominators were also that all houses would have four storeys, flat roofs and facade directions that continue into the neighboring building.