“I’ve always believed that every great movement in architecture has been born on the back of a structural innovation,” says Michael Green, a Vancouver architect who recently finished T3, a seven-story building in Minneapolis that is currently the tallest wooden structure in the US. The age of timber has officially begun, and it’s set to transform the way our cities look and feel. And Zaha Hadid’s firm recently won the commission to construct an undulating, all-timber soccer stadium in England. In Stockholm, plans for a 436-foot residential building-the tallest in the city-are in the works. Designers have proposed a scheme for an equally tall wooden skyscraper in London called Oakwood Tower. River Beech is just one of a handful of ambitious ideas that have popped up in the past couple of years. It's part of an ongoing research project between Cambridge University, architects at Perkins + Will, and engineers at Thornton Tomasetti that aims to answer lingering questions around how, exactly, architects and engineers might bring these massive timber towers to life. The concept building hasn't been constructed yet, and may never be. The River Beech Tower is a spindly, beechwood building whose 80 stories cut a blonde silhouette against Chicago’s dark, glassy horizon. Today, on a site along the Chicago River, architects are exploring a new kind of high-rise structure built entirely from timber. Chicago has always been a city defined by metal and concrete, but now, an ambitious new proposal promises to introduce a new material to Chicago's skyline, and to skyscrapers around the world: wood. Five years later, engineers did Hancock one better when they constructed the Sears Tower, a 1,400 foot skyscraper that used more than 176 million pounds of steel.
Even the sprinkler system, which in most buildings is usually powered by diesel, is powered by renewable energy.Įxcess energy from the building is passed on to other parts of the city or stored in the cultural centre’s on-site batteries.When Chicago’s John Hancock Center was built in 1965, it required 5 million pounds of aluminum, roughly enough metal to manufacture the equivalent of 96 tour buses. The building is equipped with solar panels, batteries and a heat pump that works with electrical, water and district heating. The building also houses six theatre stages, the city library, two art galleries, a conference centre, restaurants, and a hotel with 205 rooms that offer views of the surrounding city.Īpart from being one of the world’s tallest wooden buildings and a meeting place for the city’s residents, the building’s energy system tries to be as carbon neutral as possible. The cement industry currently accounts for about 7 percent of global CO2 emissions, per the International Energy Agency. The cultural centre, which takes up the lower four levels of the building, is built with columns and beams made of glued laminated timber and without the use of concrete.
Kreisel said the building was constructed from 12,200 cubic meters of wood from trees harvested from within a 60-kilometre radius of the city. “ It didn’t start as a 20-story house in Skelleftea, it started with a strategy which basically means that Skelleftea didn’t just want to survive but develop,” said Skelleftea head of urban planning Therese Kreisel, quoted by ArcticToday. The Sara Cultural Centre, designed by white arkitekter, houses venues for the arts, performances and meetings, as well as a hotel. In fact, until only a recent past that was mostly the case in Scandinavia, and we are starting to notice a trend of returning to those architectural roots. Given that Northern Sweden is home to vast forests and a booming timber industry it only makes sense to construct buildings out of this easily accessible, organic and cheap material.
Locally-sourced materials and carbon-neutral future That centre is one of the world’s tallest timber buildings, standing 75 metres high and towering over the surrounding landscape, it could even be described as a small skyscraper. Home to 33,000 people it is a typical town for the area, that is until last month when the Sara Culture Centre opened its doors there. Skelleftea is a community located in the far north of Sweden, only some 200 kilometres from the Arctic Circle. It is one the world’s tallest structures of this kind
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