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World Green Building Council states that globally buildings are responsible for around 39% of the energy-related carbon dioxide emissions. In largely populated states, this number increases to around 60% due to the use of carbon-intensive materials such as concrete, which uses up huge amounts of the Earth’s resources and puts more emissions into the atmosphere. Notably, to counter this challenge the construction industry is utilizing wood to construct buildings paving the way toward a greener environment.
In September 2021, Skellefteå, a city in Västerbotten County, Sweden, opened the Sara Cultural Centre, a 75-meter tall, carbon-negative building, one of the world’s tallest timber towers. This full timber structure with mixed uses, mixed volumetry, and a high-rise of 20 stories was designed by a Swedish architectural firm, White Arkitekter.
The city has a history of timber construction and a thriving local timber industry, which helped the city to walk in line with sustainable construction. However, many wood houses disappeared when the city was modernized. Thus, Sara Cultural Centre is an example of how the local timber tradition is combined with innovative technology to develop an eco-construction structure.
In November 2021, White Arkitekter built a timber-framed office building in Gothenburg. It is an upside-down structure that uses cantilevers, which allows the floor plates to incrementally increase in size from the bottom to the top of the five-story block. This gives the shape of an inverted pyramid to the building. Notably, this building is constructed with glue-laminated timber, also known as glulam, manufactured by the Swedish company Moelven.
White Arkitekter has become the pioneer of wooden structures, and the company intends to build all carbon-neutral buildings by 2030. It is said that wood is the only renewable and carbon-neutral building material. Therefore, this initiative is taken by the company to reduce the adverse effects on the environment since the conventional constructional materials used for products and for buildings are the major cause of carbon emissions.
Since climate change is the most important challenge for the future, the company had set a goal to have a minimum of CO2 emissions from materials and energy throughout the life cycle of every building. Also, the wooden structures balance all emissions with climate-positive initiatives.
Additionally, every cubic meter of wood used as a substitute for fossil and non-renewable building materials helps in reducing CO2 emissions to an average of 1.5 tonnes. Apart from these, wooden construction helps to build structures in much less time as compared to more site-intensive alternatives.
With the onset of the pandemic, people had started to stay indoors for a longer time span, and therefore, the indoor climate needs to be right. Studies state that wood has beneficial effects such as reducing stress, blood pressure, and heart rate. Consequently, this helps to use wood in maintaining the indoor climate in homes, offices, schools, or public buildings. Furthermore, evidence suggests that wood helps in improving thermal insulation in buildings. Notably, thermal ‘sensation’ is a parameter that reflects thermal comfort. Therefore, in order to build higher, stronger, and lighter buildings construction industry depends on wood, a raw material that is completely renewable, reusable, and recyclable.
