A 20-story, 80-meter-high tower was inaugurated this week in Skellefteå, a town in northern Sweden. Its specificity: it is entirely made of wood. ” In 2015, when we proposed such an all-wood building, people thought we were crazy, tell RFI Oskar Norelius, one of the architects. The hardest part is showing that what works in theory also works in practice, because it had never been done before. Besides the structure, wood lines the 1,200-seat performance hall, the library, the exhibition halls, even the elevator shafts (see the image gallery below). The upper floors host a hotel, whose rooms are prefabricated wooden modules that were hoisted by a crane in just a few hours.
The wooden constructions have been on the rise in recent years. In July, the English football club Forest Green Rovers inaugurated a 5,000-seat wooden stadium, with an eco-friendly lawn without pesticides or weedkillers. The record for the tallest wooden tower in the world, however, still belongs to Mjøstårnet, Norway, which rises to 85.4 meters high. In Austria, the HoHo Wien, completed in 2019, is 84 meters high. A project of 350-meter wooden skyscraper is even under study in Tokyo! New construction techniques, such as glulam or CLT (panel made up of several layers of solid wood superimposed and crossed) now make it possible to build structures as solid as those in concrete, but with a much better ecological footprint.
.
