Wooden architecture

[wjfox]

A place for news and talk about wooden buildings, towers, and infrastructure.

Probably the oldest known building material, but it seems to have made a comeback in recent years, due to its sustainability and other qualities.

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Isn’t it good, Swedish plywood: the miraculous eco-town with a 20-storey wooden skyscraper

Thu 14 Oct 2021 06.00 BST

As you come in to land at Skellefteå airport in the far north of Sweden, you are greeted by a wooden air traffic control tower poking up from an endless forest of pine and spruce. After boarding a biogas bus into town, you glide past wooden apartment blocks and wooden schools, cross a wooden road bridge and pass a wooden multistorey car park, before finally reaching the centre, now home to one of the tallest new wooden buildings in the world.

“We are not the wood Taliban,” says Bo Wikström, from Skellefteå’s tourism agency, as he leads a group of visitors on a “wood safari” of its buildings. “Other materials are allowed.” But why build in anything else – when you’re surrounded by 480,000 hectares of forest?

If you are wondering what a climate-conscious future looks like, small subarctic Skellefteå (pronounced “she left you”) has some of the answers. In a clearing on its outskirts, Europe’s largest battery factory is currently under construction. The next generation of electric vehicle batteries will not only be produced here, but recycled too. Electric helicopters will soon be able to shuttle visitors to the gargantuan Northvolt gigafactory, while longer-distance electric aeroplanes are being tested nearby.

Skellefteå runs on 100% renewable energy from hydropower and wind, and recycles 120,000 tonnes of electronic waste a year, with excess heat from the process fed back into the city-wide heating system. And now, nosing 20 storeys above the low-rise skyline, Skellefteå has a fitting monument to its carbon-cutting credentials. The Sara Cultural Centre and its towering Wood Hotel stand as beacons of what it is possible to do with timber – and store about 9,000 tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere in the process.

“When I saw the competition proposal, I didn’t think it would be possible to build,” says the mayor, Lorents Burman. “Twenty floors high in wood? In Skellefteå?” Thanks to three teams of structural engineers, and the region’s prefabrication expertise, the timber tower now stands as a blueprint for a new generation of “plyscrapers”.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesig ... ds-tallest



Jonas Westling

[Tadasuke]

I think it makes sense to use wood if it's in abundance. I'm not 100% sure about it, but looks like a good alternative to concrete, bricks and steel. I predict CLT and glulam to become more widely used as years go by.

[caltrek]

Entirely Wood Skyscraper and the Future of Cities
by Kurt Kleiner
October 15, 2024

Introduction:

(Inverse) At the University of Toronto, just across the street from the football stadium, workers are putting up a 14-story building with space for classrooms and faculty offices. What’s unusual is how they’re building it — by bolting together giant beams, columns, and panels made of manufactured slabs of wood.

As each wood element is delivered by a flatbed, a tall crane lifts it into place and holds it in position while workers attach it with metal connectors. In its half-finished state, the building resembles flat-pack furniture in the process of being assembled.

The tower uses a new technology called mass timber. In this kind of construction, massive, manufactured wood elements that can extend more than half the length of a football field replace steel beams and concrete. Though still relatively uncommon, it is growing in popularity and beginning to pop up in skylines around the world.

Today, the tallest mass timber building is the 25-story Ascent skyscraper in Milwaukee, completed in 2022. As of that year, there were 84 mass timber buildings eight stories or higher either built or under construction worldwide, with another 55 proposed. Seventy percent of the existing and future buildings were in Europe, about 20 percent in North America, and the rest in Australia and Asia, according to a report from the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat. When you include smaller buildings, at least 1,700 mass timber buildings had been constructed in the United States alone as of 2023.

Mass timber is an appealing alternative to energy-intensive concrete and steel, which together account for almost 15 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions. Though experts are still debating mass timber’s role in fighting climate change, many are betting it’s better for the environment than current approaches to construction. It relies on wood, after all, a renewable resource.

Read more here: https://www.inverse.com/science/is-thi ... of-cities