Sweden inaugurates world's tallest wooden skyscraper
The new cultural center in the small Swedish town of Skellefteå built in wood.
It reaches a height of 80 meters and has 20 floors.
© White Arkitekter / Twitter
Text by: RFI Follow
1 min
The era of wooden skyscrapers has arrived.
This is particularly the case in Skelleftea, in northern Sweden, where a 20-storey tower was inaugurated this week, and which reaches 80 meters high.
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With our special correspondent in Skelleftea,
Frédéric Faux
The small Swedish town has just inaugurated an exceptional building: a new cultural center, topped by a hotel, which reaches a height of 80 meters and has 20 floors.
For an all-wood tower, this is a world first.
“
In 2015, when we proposed such a wooden building, people thought we were crazy,”
says 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.
"
Wood, cut from the surrounding forests, is everywhere.
In the very structure of the tower, visible for miles around.
In the 1,200-seat performance hall, the library, the exhibition halls, even the elevator shafts.
"
It's a 21st century building
"
On the upper floors, the hotel rooms are all-wood prefabricated modules that were erected as is by a crane and whose assembly took only a few hours.
You can see and touch the simple metal plates fixed by screws that hold this assembly.
It's quite confusing, but for Oskar Norelius, it's part of the experience.
“
It's a 21st century building, and that's one of the reasons to come here to see that it holds up, that it doesn't move.
Another advantage of wooden buildings, and not the least: they allow carbon in the atmosphere to be fixed for a very long period.
Fri-yay!
Today at 1:30 pm architects Oskar Norelius and Robert Schmitz are holding the final key note at International Wood Construction Conference in Garmisch-Partenkirchen - about Skelleftea Cultural Center and the future of timber construction # IHF2017: https://t.co/hg4xa3ERxn pic .twitter.com / vhtKjPunYw
- White Arkitekter (@whitearkitekter) December 8, 2017
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