Wood is good – and in Scandinavia, the supply is almost unlimited. In fact, the Swedish forest only needs 60 seconds to produce all the wood required to build a six-storey house in nature’s smartest building materials.
Wood is unique through its combination of high strength and low weight. Like no other supporting material it is renewable and requires less energy both in production, transport and in the energy consumption of the house.
All over Sweden, you can still find wooden houses that are more than 500 years old, standing as living proof of the building material’s robustness.
“At a time when the need for sustainable construction has become urgent, wood holds a huge potential.”
Sweden is in dire need of more housing. Building with wood offers an attractive equation: shorter construction time + lower cost = more housing, faster.
For decades, Sweden banned wooden houses higher than two storeys due to the risk of fire. Today’s wood is high tech and with lightweight construction technology, the risk of fire is almost negligible. With new building regulations, tall residential buildings are a fast growing construction trend.
For years, White has been at the forefront of the wood building revival. Our research is well recognised in the field and we partake in several projects to push limits and test possibilities. Working alongside with the country’s leaders in industrial and resource-efficient construction, we design growing numbers of environmentally-friendly residential buildings.
Among current examples is Frostaliden, a new garden town district emerging in the town of Skövde. Fully populated this summer, Frostaliden becomes one of the largest wooden projects in Sweden with its 1200 homes and 4000 inhabitants. Our contribution is two buildings with a total of 52 homes. Both floors and walls are built with CLT (cross-laminated timber) where cross-glued boards form a solid wood construction system.
Building with wood is both history and future!
On January 26, White Arkitekter will host a seminar titled “Housing construction in wood – municipalities showing the way, projects and wood systems”. We will share our experiences from ongoing wood projects, current trends in wood construction and the different wood systems we work with.
Jan Larsson is a partner and architect at White Arkitekter, specialising in housing architecture. He is a pioneer in the fast-growing field of sustainable wood construction and is conducting projects in many Swedish municipalities.