The Swedish city of Skellefteå is dedicated to wooden construction, and it now has a wooden skyscraper

Stockholm – The city of Skellefteå in northern Sweden could be considered a global mecca for wooden constructions, as not only residential buildings and schools have been built from wood here, but also a bridge, a parking garage, and recently, a wooden skyscraper. The cultural center with a twenty-story hotel aptly named Wood is one of the tallest wooden buildings in the world, wrote The Guardian.

"We're not the Taliban of wooden constructions. We allow other building materials as well,” says Bo Wikström from the local tourist agency, which attracts visitors with a "wooden safari," that is, a tour of the local wooden buildings. However, he believes it would be a shame not to utilize wood when the city is surrounded by 480,000 hectares of forests.

The city is trying to minimize emissions and reduce its carbon footprint as much as possible. Among other things, it derives all its energy from renewable sources thanks to hydro and wind power plants and recycles up to 120,000 tons of electronic waste every year. The largest European factory for manufacturing batteries for electric vehicles is being built in the suburbs, where they will also be recycled.

The new symbol of the city's ecological thinking is also the aforementioned 75-meter wooden skyscraper. "When I saw the conditions of the competition, I thought it wouldn't be possible to build. A twenty-story wooden building? In Skellefteå?" described his former skepticism Mayor Lorents Burman. However, architects and engineers ultimately convinced him that, thanks to innovations, it is a feasible project.

The combination of glued laminated timber construction and cross-laminated solid wood panels, according to the designers, has a higher load-bearing capacity compared to its weight than steel and concrete. Moreover, wooden constructions are much quicker to build, as they are assembled on-site from prefabricated modules. And architects assure that it is also safe: glued wood burns very poorly and is also coated with a protective layer that can smother or slow down the fire in case of an emergency. Sophisticated fire protection is a given.

It might seem that the wooden skyscraper will remain a rarity, showcasing the strength of the local wood processing industry in a city amidst forests, but architects from the office White Arkitekter believe that this concept can be applied elsewhere as well. And even in places where there are no forests. "We are calculating how far the building could be transported without destroying the emission savings. And it turns out that we could circumnavigate the planet twice with it and still be carbon neutral,” says Robert Schmitz, who participated in the project.