Sara Cultural Centre
A cultural centre and a twenty-storey hotel open, with a structural frame made entirely of timber. It is one of the tallest timber buildings in the world.
Timber is back as a material for large buildings – for climate reasons, and because Sweden has the forests.
For more than a hundred years, Swedish building regulations prevented tall timber buildings. Fear of urban fires, like those that had devastated many Swedish wooden towns, meant that the building code of 1874 in practice banned timber buildings of more than two storeys in towns. Only in 1994, when the rules became performance-based, was it permitted again, provided the fire-safety requirements were met. At the same time, interest grew in timber as a climate-friendly material, since wood stores carbon and its production causes lower emissions than concrete and steel. Skellefteå, a municipality with strong traditions in forestry and the timber industry, decided to bring together a library, stages, a museum and an art gallery in a new cultural centre and hotel built of wood.
The competition was won by White Arkitekter with a design by Robert Schmitz and Oskar Norelius. The cultural centre was built with glulam columns and beams, while the hotel tower consists of prefabricated modules of cross-laminated timber, CLT, made in a factory and stacked on site. Even the lift shafts are built of timber, so the tower lacks the concrete core that most tall timber buildings have. The wood comes from forests and sawmills in the region. Construction began in 2019 and the building opened in 2021. It was named Sara after the writer Sara Lidman, who grew up in the village of Missenträsk outside Skellefteå and wrote about the people and landscape of Västerbotten.
Sara Cultural Centre has attracted great international interest and won several awards. It has also become a sign of the change in Skellefteå, where a large battery factory has driven growth in population and construction. At the same time there is a debate about how great the climate benefit of building in timber really is, since it depends on how the forest is managed, how long the building stands and what happens to the material afterwards. The building is part of an international wave of tall timber buildings, in which Mjøstårnet in Norway, completed in 2019, was for a time the tallest in the world. In Sweden, multi-storey timber buildings have become increasingly common, and several municipalities have made timber part of their building policy.