In Scandinavia, wooden buildings reach new heights

A sandy-coloured tower flickers in the daylight and dominates the skyline of the Swedish metropolis of Skelleftea as Scandinavia harnesses its timber resources to guide an international trend toward erecting eco-friendly excessive-rises.

The Sara Cultural Centre is one of the world’s tallest wood buildings, made typically from spruce and towering 75 meters (246 toes) over rows of snow-dusted homes and surrounding woodland.

The 20-story wooden shape, which homes a hotel, a library, an exhibition corridor, and theatre stages, opened at the end of 2021 in the northern metropolis of 35,000 humans.

Forests cover much of Sweden’s northern regions, most of it spruce, and building timber homes is a longstanding 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”.

The main advantage of working with wood is that it is more environmentally friendly, proponents say.

Cement — used to make concrete — and steel, two of the most common construction materials, are among the most polluting industries because they emit huge amounts of carbon dioxide, a major greenhouse gas.

But wood emits little CO2 during its production and retains the carbon absorbed by the tree even when it is cut and used in a building structure.

It is also lighter in weight, requiring less of a foundation.

According to the UN’s IPCC climate panel, wood as a construction material can be up to 30 times less carbon-intensive than concrete, and hundreds or even thousands of times less than steel.

Global efforts to cut emissions have sparked an upswing in interest in timber structures, according to Jessica Becker, the coordinator of Trastad (City of Wood), an organisation lobbying for more timber construction.

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

“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.

Building the cultural centre in spruce was “much more challenging” but “has also opened doors to really think in new ways”, explains Schmitz’s co-architect Oskar Norelius.

For example, the hotel rooms were made as prefabricated modules that were then “stacked like Lego pieces on-site”, he says.

The building has won several wood architecture prizes.

Anders Berenson, another Stockholm architect whose material of choice is wood, says timber has many advantages.

“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, a condo complicated product of timber, called Cederhusen which provides distinctive yellow and red cedar shingles at the facade, is in the completion of the final range.

It has already been named the Construction of the Year by the Swedish creation industry magazine Byggindustrin.

“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.”