April 18, 2024
(press release)
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NEWSROOM ARTICLES AND REFERENCE CASES WOOD BOLDLY GOES WHERE NO OTHER MATERIAL CAN: SOME OF OUR FAVOURITE 2024 EXAMPLES Stora Enso Wood Products recently held a competition to find examples of our partner’s building projects that could only be built with prefabricated wood products. Photo: Nordic Hotels & Resorts We received many impressive examples of how today’s designers and engineers are leveraging mass timber’s lightweight properties and predesign compatibility to fill in even the hardest-to-reach spaces. The projects left us feeling incredibly hopeful about curbing urban sprawl and building sustainably, and we just had to share some of our favourites with you here. Modellen 4, Stockholm, Sweden Building a six-story apartment block via an entranceway to the construction site the size of a king-size bed might seem next to impossible. Creative readers might be thinking of a ship-in-the-bottle technique, and while that could work, prefabricated CLT (cross-laminated timber) is making light work of it in this extremely tight infill. Our Sylva™ CLT kit arrives curbside with our just-in-time delivery service. From there, the general contractor, MVB AB, loads the elements onto battery-driven tracked carriers that take them through the passageway. Ingeniously, MVB used a crane on the street to lift another lightweight crane over the rooftops of the surrounding houses and assemble the kit into place, circumnavigating several safety and logistical issues. The building is set to open this summer ’24. Photo: Wallfast / StudioS19 Hosta, Paris HOSTA is suspended over six lanes of traffic on the Porte Brancion is rapidly transforming wasted space above a busy ring road around Paris into a vibrant boulevard. How? Woodeum, France’s low-carbon real estate specialists, are leveraging mass timber’s high strength-to-weight ratio to create a mechanical scaffold/living bridge for Hardel Le Bihan’s architectural design of a 7-storey residence. Given the location, had the building been constructed with concrete, it would have been so heavy that it could only be four floors high. And because delivery trucks are much smaller than heavy cement trucks, deliveries can fit through the tight entranceway to the site with perfectly planned and nested loads. Set to open in 2024. Photo: Woodeum / @PotionMediatique Cederhusen, Stockholm Savvy and sustainable property developers Folkhem will be winning awards all this year for their revolutionary urban infill. The project team outwitted the restrictions on how much load they could put on top of the tunnel over the Swedish E4/E20 highways and Värtabanan rail line with their application of mass timber. Not only did wood enable them to build up to 13 floors (much higher than possible with concrete). But Bjerking engineers calculate, they increased the available leasable space by a whopping 55%. Photo: ByggPartner / Folkem Arding & Hobbs, London The only way was up for B&K Structures when faced with how to extend the iconic Arding & Hobbs department store. Their clever use of a sustainable prefabricated Sylva™ CLT kit added a flexible/adaptive new top floor to the 1908 heritage building. Far too often, buildings are demolished not because they are starting to fall apart but because the needs have changed. But this project clearly proves you can easily heighten existing building stock and eliminate the need for climate-damaging demolition. Photo: B&K Structures Convent (Las Salesas) Refurbishment, Pamplona Flooding a former convent with natural daylight through a wood-framed skylight is not only energy-saving and delightful for the workers of this regional government office in Spain but was also very likely the only material for the job. The skylight frame is made with laminated veneer lumber (LVL), which is five times lighter than concrete and twice as strong in strength-to-weight ratio. Our partners in Spain, Madergia, assembled a grid in their nearby workshop and delivered it ready to plop into place in a matter of hours on the sensitive restoration building site. Photo: Madergia / ©Pablo García Esparza Svalbard Folkehøgskole, Longyearbyen, Norway Finally, we would like to give a shout-out to Svalbard Folkehøgskole. Situated 500 miles from the North Pole, Folkehøgskole is possibly the world’s most northern school and demonstrates so clearly how fast-to-assemble, healthy Sylva™ schools-in-a-box can reach places where they are very much needed and would be unsustainable and impractical with most other construction materials today. Photo: Woodcon / Hæhre Arctic We hope these projects gave you the same warm glow they gave us. If you would like to know more about the benefits of wood construction, please sign up for our newsletter and be one of the first to be informed about our white paper: 10 Advantages to Building with Mass Timber, coming out soon. Thank you to all our partners and customers who participated in our competition. Special thank you to our partners and customers B&K Structures, Woodeum, Woodcon, ByggPartner, Madergia, and MVB for demonstrating so beautifully how mass timber is replacing steel and concrete with their applications of Sylva™ CLT building kits by Stora Enso. All of the entries can be viewed in our Reference Library.
Stora Enso Partner: Woodcon AS
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