Sweden is Building a Whole City Out of Wood

I love how concept art/animation from architectural firms always blow up greenery on everything and then it never pans out in the final product.

as someone who lives in stockholm, all i have to say is that these houses will be so immensely expensive that only the 10% of the population would be able to afford this

As a Canadian, it is INFINITELY frustrating that we aren't a world leader in this technology. We are an enormous Forrest for god sakes. -.-

Wood has been used to build entire cities in Scandinavia before, so it's cool to see us returning to our traditional material.

Steel is often less fire resistant than mass timber, because it is very thermally conductive meaning heat is spread to the whole frame quickly, and it rapidly weakens with respect to heat. A sufficiently thick timber structural member will form a charred layer which insulates the centre of the member from the fire, and if sufficiently thick will still have the necessary strength, if not it still delays failure.

Come on Tomorrows build. At 1:38 neither of those pins are at Stockholm or Helsinki, 0/10 could use a bit of QC

As a stockholmer the timber aspect of this isn’t exactly advertised here. It’s just a new development to us in an area called Nya Sickla

In sweden we had a city made out of alot of wood named Sundsvall. Alot of it burned down and it got nicknamed stone-city and all of the buildings got remade!

What an extremely well suited name for an urban devloper - Urban Blomster (Urban Flowers)

I recently had the pleasure of visiting Bangalore airport terminal 2. The whole interior, exterior and much of the superstructure is made of bamboo, local wood and live plants instead of synthetic ornamentation. It is drop dead gorgeous.

If wooden buildings are really more sustainable depends highly on the sourcing of the wood. The recent book ”skogslandet” highly criticises the swedish foresting industry practices and shows it is often not sustainable. Commonly there is clear cutting and replanted mono-culture forrests, with really bad consequences regarding biodiversity, climate issues and forest health. I dont know about the company ”söder” and their practices though! But a bit funny that the outcome of their survey is that people want more wooden buildings 😄

i assume the fire resistance has improved by a lot. Back in 1888, my hometown Sundsvall burned to the ground. It is the first thing i think about whenever i hear wooden constructions. Might be because we heard about this about 10 times during school :D

speaking from experience with large timber buildings, my only gripe is that the inherent lightness of the structure makes it bad at keeping out low frequency noise. So very dull footsteps, idling engines, airplane noise, that sort of thing. I wonder if there are real fixes for that.

Regarding the sustainability part, there is nothing more to it than replanting the trees in Sweden. The environmental aspect of the forests is 0%, and the economics of it 100%. That’s partly why we have so few species of wildlife in our forests these days. It’s monoculture, you can think of it as a wheat field. So it’s not forest, it’s tree plantations which cover 98% of the forest area in Sweden. The remaining 2% or so are protected areas which contain real forests.

I learned something today: having no knowledge at all about forestry makes a person believe that he is an expert on forestry.

It's great to see Sweden taking a lead on shifting to constructing large buildings made of Wood, clearly this method costs more compared to steel and concrete given the time spent on the design and planning stages. It seems it's still in it's testing phase so we thank Sweden for taking this initiative for the rest of the world to follow.

This is really a big loss for Stockholm as the land could have been used for cheap public housing (something the city currently is in dire need of), but instead it's been gifted away to a company that's only going to build offices and apartments for the wealthy. I'd like to see it built, but the government should be the landlord.

As a Swedish person I have to object to the location of that pin for Stockholm. It's right at the end of that big lake under the O in Stockholm at the same height as the top of the B in Baltic sea not where the H in Stockholm is. Otherwise I'm looking forward to this project and if I weren't already set on havbing to live where I can have a at home workshop and a garden I would have loved to live there but my time in appartment is over and I can never go back to that.

0:39 As far as the perennial fire question, it's a maybe counterintuitive fact that steel supports will fail before the same grade of wood in a fire. All to do with charring and its capacity to hinder further ingress into the wood core. Oh, you kind of touched on it at 04:40.

If they can reduce the risk of fire, I could cope with living/working in a city made of wood, but I would need to be convinced that it was safe. London and Moscow are only two of many cities which burnt to the ground in the past! Thank you for the video!