In Scandinavia, wooden buildings reach new heights

As Scandinavia utilises its wood resources to lead a global trend toward creating eco-friendly high-rises, a sandy-coloured tower glint in the sunlight and dominates the skyline of the Swedish town of Skelleftea.

The Sara Cultural Centre, fashioned entirely of spruce and rising 75 metres (246 ft) over rows of snow-dusted dwellings and the surrounding forest, is one of the world’s tallest timber buildings.

In the northern town of 35,000 inhabitants, the 20-story timber edifice, which incorporates a hotel, a library, an exhibition hall, and theatre stages, opens at the end of 2021.

Much of northern Sweden is covered in forests, the majority of which are spruce, and building dwellings out of wood is a long-standing tradition.

Swedish architects now want to spearhead a revolution and steer the industry towards more sustainable construction methods as large wooden buildings sprout up in Sweden and neighbouring Nordic nations thanks to advancing industry techniques.

“The pillars together with the beams, the interaction with the steel and wood, that is what carries the 20 storeys of the hotel,” Therese Kreisel, a Skelleftea urban planning official, tells AFP during a tour of the cultural centre.

Even the lift shafts are made entirely of wood. “There is no plaster, no seal, no isolation on the wood,” she says, adding that this “is unique when it comes to a 20-storey building”.

– Building materials go green –

The biggest advantage of working with wood, according to proponents, is that it is more environmentally friendly.

Cement, which is used to build concrete, and steel, which are two of the most prevalent construction materials, are two of the most polluting industries because they generate massive volumes of carbon dioxide, a major greenhouse gas.

Wood, on the other hand, generates very little CO2 during production and maintains the carbon absorbed by the tree even after being cut and employed in a structure.

It’s also lighter, so it doesn’t require as much of a foundation.

Wood can be up to 30 times less carbon-intensive than concrete and hundreds or even thousands of times less carbon-intensive than steel, according to the UN’s IPCC climate panel.

According to Jessica Becker, coordinator of Trastad (City of Wood), an organisation advocating for greater timber construction, global efforts to reduce emissions have generated an uptick in interest in timber construction.

According to Robert Schmitz, one of the project’s two architects, Skelleftea’s tower “showcases that it is possible to build this high and complex with timber.”

“When you have this as a backdrop for discussions, you can always say, ‘We did this, so how can you say it’s not possible?’.”

Only an 85-metre tower recently erected in Brumunddal in neighbouring Norway and an 84-metre structure in Vienna are taller than the Sara Cultural Centre.

A building under construction in the US city of Milwaukee and due to be completed soon is expected to clinch the title of the world’s tallest, at a little more than 86 metres.

– ‘Stacked like Lego’ –

According to Schmitz’s co-architect Oskar Norelius, building the cultural centre in spruce was “far more demanding,” but “has also opened openings to truly explore in new ways.”

The hotel rooms, for example, were built as prefabricated modules that were then “stacked like Lego pieces on-site,” according to him.

Several awards for wood architecture have been given to the structure.

Wood has several advantages, according to Anders Berenson, a Stockholm architect who prefers the material.

“If you missed something in the cutting you just take the knife and the saw and sort of adjusting it on site. So it’s both high tech and low tech at the same time”, he says.

In Stockholm, the construction of Cederhusen, a wooden apartment building with unique yellow and red cedar shingles on the facade, is nearing completion.

Byggindustrin, a Swedish construction industry publication, has already named it the Construction of the Year.

“I think we can see things shifting in just the past few years actually,” says Becker.

“We are seeing a huge change right now, it’s kind of the tipping point. And I’m hoping that other countries are going to catch on, we see examples even in England and Canada and other parts of the world.”