Sweco Brand Guidelines: Swedish Consultants, an Architects’ Firm of 1958 & VBB

A heating consultant, a water engineer, a road firm and four architects.

Sweco is younger than its roots. The company, whose name is a short form of Swedish Consultants, was formed in 1997, but it brings together Swedish engineering and architecture offices founded over the previous century. The oldest, the company says, is the installation consultancy that Hugo Theorell started in 1889 to design ventilation and heating systems; it was later acquired, and Sweco still awards a “Hugo prize” for energy-saving ideas in his memory. English Wikipedia says that office later traded as Sweco Systems AB.

The water engineer Johan Gustaf Richert opened a design office for hydraulic works in 1897 and in 1902 reorganised it as AB Vattenbyggnadsbyrån, later shortened to VBB, Swedish Wikipedia says. VBB became Sweden’s largest designer of non-state hydropower stations, according to the same source, and Sweco names the Forshuvudforsen plant among VBB’s works. It also worked abroad: Swedish Wikipedia says VBB was engaged on the water supply of Kuwait City from 1965, with the distribution system in service by 1976, and that VBB and the Danish firm Bjørn & Bjørn Design received the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 1980 for the water towers there, including the Kuwait Towers. English Wikipedia dates VBB’s first international project, in St Petersburg, to 1902, and Swedish Wikipedia says VBB already used the name Sweco for its work abroad in the 1970s.

A third root was VIAK, a Stockholm consultancy for roads, water and the environment whose name was a Swedish shortening of the Latin via et aqua, “road and water.” It was founded in 1930 as Ingenjörsfirman VIAK, Olsson & Jonsson and was later bought by VBB, forming VBB VIAK, Swedish Wikipedia says. The fourth was FFNS, an architecture practice founded in 1958 by Bertil Falck, Carl-Erik Fogelvik, Gunnar Nordström and Erik Smas, whose surnames gave it its initials; by 1996, the company says, it had more than 550 employees in 20 locations.

An architects’ firm buys an engineering group.

Sweco itself was formed when FFNS acquired VBB in 1997, bringing VBB VIAK with it, according to the company’s history and the English and Swedish Wikipedias. The new group took the name Sweco, which VBB had used on international projects. Its shares have traded on the Stockholm exchange, now Nasdaq Stockholm, since 21 September 1998, the company says, and it has made more than 130 acquisitions since the listing.

The largest step came from the Netherlands. In 2015 Sweco bought all the shares in the Dutch engineering consultancy Grontmij, which joined the group on 1 October 2015, Swedish Wikipedia says; the company calls the purchase “a big leap” that took it from a major Nordic company to a European one. Other businesses folded in over the years include the Swedish architects HJS and Aros, the transport consultancy Vectura and, in June 2025, PE Teknik & Arkitektur. In Sweden, eleven wholly owned subsidiaries with names such as Sweco Architects and Sweco Structures became divisions of a single company, Sweco Sverige AB, from 2021.

The project record reaches back decades. English Wikipedia lists among Sweco’s projects the relocation of the Abu Simbel temples in the 1960s, the Øresund Bridge between Malmö and Copenhagen, the City Tunnel in Malmö and the Stockholm City Line. Today the company groups its work into three areas: buildings and urban areas; water, energy and industry; and transportation infrastructure.

How engineering consultancies present themselves.

Engineering and infrastructure consultancies sell expertise rather than objects, so their identities have to stand in for work that is often invisible once it is finished: a tunnel, a water network or a power connection. Most of them present themselves with restraint. Their wordmarks tend to be short, set in a clean sans, and many are acronyms, founders’ surnames or invented names left over from mergers. Colour is usually limited to one strong tone, often a blue, an orange or a green, used against plenty of white space.

The pictures do much of the talking. Websites and reports in this field lean on project photography of bridges, rail lines and stations, water and wastewater works, energy plants and city districts, often taken wide and from the air so that the scale of the work is clear. People appear as teams on site or in the studio rather than as models, and diagrams, maps and drawings sit beside the photographs.

The structure of the websites is similar from firm to firm. Pages are commonly organised by sector, such as transport, water, energy, buildings and industry, and by service, such as design, engineering, project management and advisory work. Sustainability usually has a section of its own, and careers pages carry a large share of the message, since these businesses depend on recruiting architects, engineers and other specialists.

Much of the brand also lives in documents. Listed consultancies publish annual reports and sustainability reports, and many put out technical papers, research reports, indexes and case studies on individual projects. Typography in those documents is usually plain and functional, with charts and tables carrying the detail, so the identity has to work as well on a page of figures as on a hoarding around a building site.

The Sweco Model and a change at the top in 2026.

Sweco describes its organisation as decentralised. It calls its operating model the Sweco Model, which it says combines local entrepreneurship with collaboration across disciplines, and it says some 1,700 local teams take responsibility for clients, projects and people. In 2026 the company gave its size as 23,000 architects, engineers and other experts, and it describes itself as Europe’s leading architecture and engineering consultancy. Swedish Wikipedia says the group has a local presence in fourteen countries, carries out project work in some 70 countries and has offices in about 50 towns in Sweden.

The leadership is changing. On 2 October 2026 Sweco announced that Åsa Bergman, chief executive since 2018, would leave after 35 years at the company and almost nine as its head; she stays in post until a successor is in place, the company said. In the company’s third-quarter report, EFN reported on 29 October 2026, Bergman wrote that demand had stayed good in energy, water, environment and transport infrastructure, and that the market for public and commercial buildings had improved on investment in hospitals, defence and security, and data centres, while housing remained weak.

The name has kept its origin. Sweco began as the label VBB used for work outside Sweden and became the name of the whole group in 1997; its pages are organised by services, sectors and client projects, with separate sections for sustainability, investors and careers.

For a design guide, Sweco shows how a short export name can sit over many merged offices with very different histories. Compare Ramboll, another Nordic engineering group, and Arcadis, a Dutch consultancy with roots in land reclamation. For this guide we use a fjord blue, a deep ink and a pale lake mist with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Sweco’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.