Skellefteå (pronounced similarly to “she left you”) is not a well known town.
Skellefteå in Sweden has wooden schools, bridges, even car parks; and now it has one of the world’s tallest timber buildings. The town 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.
Rising above the low-rise skyline is a 20 storey building. 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.
The mayor, Lorents Burman “When I saw the competition proposal, I didn’t think it would be possible to build, 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”.
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