Architects and builders turn to ‘mass timber’—an engineered wood product similar in strength to concrete and steel—to build multistory buildings.
Guests at a new 20-story hotel and cultural center in Skellefteå, a former gold-mining community in northeastern Sweden, don’t have to step outside to feel immersed in the natural world. The floors, ceilings and support beams of the building—which also houses a museum and other facilities—are made almost entirely of spruce and pine harvested from nearby woodlands.
“When you come inside, the smell of the timber is almost like you enter a forest,” Robert Schmitz, a partner at an architectural firm in Stockholm and one of the building’s lead architects, says of the Sara Cultural Centre and Wood Hotel. “This is a really small city, and timber is something that everyone in this community has a connection to. They understand the material.”