It's usually to sell it to the developers, because they have no understanding of aesthetics but as soon as they see greenery they think, "Green=eco=fashionable=easy to sell."
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
Most buildings in North America in short of skyscrapers and parking garages are made of wood. They simply have a facade that makes them look like brick/concrete buildings. Pay attention to construction sites next time and you’ll see what I’m talking about.
I totally agree. When the Art Gallery of Ontario added its new front facade they installed huge timber Glulam beams and when I went to the unveiling, I happen to bump into the owner of the company that built them. I didn't know who he was, but I couldn't stop admiring the Beauty of these beams. He was very pleased the hear my praise after telling me he built them. But he then said, it's a real struggle to convince people to make full houses or taller buildings out of CLT and glulam. For me, it just makes sense.
@@Gnaw85 that's not what they mean ya pompous-ass, CLT buildings are a relatively new tech, you can't build multi story buildings the same way you do with single family homes in canada ; in fact canada does have some of the first CLT skyscrapers (UBC i believe), the real reason we dont have more of these is because of regressive zoning in cities, we are more than capable of building these in canada and have expertise, it's archaic NIMBY laws and archaic fire safety laws, that's why voting in municipal & provincial elections is way more impactful to your day to day life than federal
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!
@@tropical2551Wood is much more shock absorbent than concrete. As for the flammability... well let's hope they coated it with something more flame resistant than what they've used on the Gävle goat in the past :D
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.
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.
Totally agree! So many people hear timber and they assume it will be similar to historic timber buildings, instead if it being the modern, treated and protected massed timber that it is.
@@louk597 if you want a yt video to explain it, Undecided with Matt Farrel did a great video on the topic not that long ago. I'll try and give you a basic rundown though. Trees aren't the best fighters against carbon emissions anyway. They take decades to reach full size where they are effecient at scrubbing air, and we *cannot* cover the planet in enough trees to combat climate change. It's impossible. Algae on the other hand is *siginifcantly* better at scrubbing o2 of co2, as it grows *super* quickly. (Slightly off topic now but they're starting to invent "liquid trees" which are tanks full of algea that function like a 30 yr old trees but take up way less space and can even be like a bus stop or city bench or something, now back to trees) Building with trees is is actually a carbon sink. As the tree grows you get your fibrous material out of the carbon, then when you build with it, that carbon is locked away in that wood. Unlike concrete or steel, which require CRAZY amounts of co2 to be released when those things are being made. On top of that, these buildings are usually prefab buildings created in an engineered woodshop using cnc machines and super detailed architectural drawings so it gets assembled on site like lego. As such, you need waayyy less men on site during construction. There's a famous hotel in the states that's mass timber (i forget its name sorry) and they had one single truck delivering the peices to and from the delivery yard, instead of a line of concrete mixer trucks like when you'd traditionally lay a concrete floor. They also go up VERY quickly since they are prefabricated. Once you lay the concrete foundation and possible carpark underground type deal, the wood top of the building is assembled very fast. And trees can be replanted and need very little/no maintenance for like 40 years before you go back and use them for that exact purpose. We've been doing regenerative logging in Canada for decades.
@@barbs8584 Not even Norrtälje, it's 20km northeast of Norrtälje (80km northeast of Stockholm), it's a peninsula with some small farms and some vacation homes.
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.
Dry wall and gypcrete floors can probably help with that. Matt risinger has a video on how to improve sound isolation in buildings. But if it’s just raw timber then it’ll probably keep those same issues.
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
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.
Use google maps with satellite imaging. Zoom in anywhere dark green in Sweden and you’ll se rows, lines, clear cuts etc. The only areas left are the north west mountain areas and wetlands or really steep terrain where the logging machines cannot move.
While I don't dispute that most of the old growth forrest in Sweden has been chopped down, one should notice that our forests never was much of a multiculture. The forest belt here are a part of the Taiga and as such, it's naturaly made up of almost entirely spruce and pine to begin with.
The guy talking in the beginning Urban Blomster, his name translated to English literally means Urban Bloom. This guy was literally destined to work with sustainable cities lol
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 😄
Sustainable is not the same as environmentally friendly. Sustainable means you can replant the trees and harvest them again, which is possible. It may hurt the ecosystem, but this does not make it less sustainable except if the trees depend on the ecosystem to grow (they don't). In addition, the wood is essentially made from captured carbon unlike concrete which requires lots of carbon to produce. Every building material has its advantages and disadvantages :)
@@vyndecimibd Sustainable for us humans maybe, but the forest itself needs more than endless rows of pines to be a healthy forest. In addition only a small amount of carbon is stored in the tree it self, most of it is actually stored in the ground and is ripped up with the roots and by the machines when the forest is cut down. Our Swedish forests is dead since a long time, now we should just all it tree plantations instead since that's what it essentially is.
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.
It's still quite risky. In Sundsvall/Sweden the entire city was made out of wood, and after a big fire the entire city burnt down, they rebuilt it in stone and now call it the stone city.
Mix of wood, concrete columns, metal and adobe is the best ! Creative combination makes the buildings more functional. Stressing to be one thing everything is as limited as using concrete for everything.
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!
And which year did they burn down? You can treat things these days to make it alot less flammable etc. Also im taking a stab that they burned down when people used woodstoves for heating.
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 you want to build dense urban core with 5-10 storey buildings 5-10 meters apart with this stuff, the question isn't how long you have structural integrity, its how fast the fire spreads. This district will have tons of dry fuel for each square meter of land. What happens if fire is not suppressed quick enough for some reason?
@@JP_TaVeryMuch Then I hope nothing bad happens in the summer and Swedish authorities actually looked at the risks instead of just accepting them. Surely they always do their best jobs. Like if for example there was some kind of dangerous virus going around then surely they will take it very seriously and be very effective at preventing it's spread
Like i don't know, maybe it is actually fine, but these pop sci/tech vids have to spend some more effort explaining it instead of defaulting to one talking point about how it chars slower than normal wood. In the meantime I just think that 5 storey building still has plenty of surface area and then recall pictures from Hawaii and California wildfires when entire neighborhoods, albeit low-density, burnt down completely to the ground. I don't really think theres no other way to solve climate change without risking my block looking like Tokyo after firebombing campaigns one day
I'm not as concerned about fire damage as I am about water damage. What happens when somebody on the top floor on one of these highrises has a major water leak? This is a major issue for insurers right now...
As a footnote the pin for Stockholm on the map is on Marum, which while technically a administered as a part of Stockholm County is just about as far away from the city as you can get within that area and very, very rural.
At 1:37 you can see the Helsinki pin being slightly misplaced (just compare with the actual roads visible) and the stockholm pin being more than a little misplaced :)
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.
Its not a bad idea, as long as you can get the fire protection right both during construction and long term. For cold climates it often very beneficial in terms of project time scales as well.
"For cold climates it often very beneficial" This is kind of a myth. When we design houses we designed the outside of the house to have a certain average insulation. The denser the usage is, the less insulation we typically use (a office use very little, but a single family home use a lot). If the building have a lot of windows, we typically need a bit thicker insulation. And, to be totally fair there really exist 3 type of buildings. Concrete, wood and hybrids. I work as a construction engineer and we make both concrete and hybrid buildings. The hybrid buildings are pretty much houses with concrete inner walls and a wood outer wall. The outer wall is in that case pretty much identical how it would be in a fully wood building. And the inner walls are the same as in a fully concrete building. This is in no way shape or form new. We have done that at least since the 1950s and there are millions of building built that way. The outer wall of a concrete high rise need to be 150mm thick if its fully load bearing and down to a minimum possible of 80mm of its only carrying it own weigh. A wood wall need to be 120mm thick if its self carying, and how thick it need to be to be load bearing is a bit difficult to answer, it depends on how high the building is (typically just add 25mm for every floor is somewhere in the ball park, i don´t design those so i´m not sure). With 150mm concrete we can build 12-15 floors no problem. When it comes to insulation there are basically 3 chooses. glass/rock wool, styrofoam, or expanded foam. The later two we don´t use in wood construction in Sweden (it is popular in the US). The insulation factor is about 40, 30 and 20 (lower better). We typically use 180mm styrofoam or 120mm expanded foam for a multi family home. If it was wool 240mm would be needed (we typically don´t use that). Now it gets even more complicated, a wood frame can integrate part of the insulation. But with doing that, it loses some insulation property. I don´t work with that so i can´t say right of the bat how much it will do, but i would guess that a 145mm frame would need 145mm more insulation, while a 150mm concrete would need 120mm of expanded foam or 180mm styrofoam. That works nice for a 2 or 3 floor building. But if you build a 6 floor building, that just won´t do. In effect, its not really doable. Those 3 wall alternative will preform the same, they will be designed to preform he same. Those wall will cost about (last time i checked, i don´t work with costing) €400, €550 and €600. As you see the wood wall is significantly cheaper. So of cause the question is, why don´t we just use wood walls on all project. Well they can´t be load bearing if its a wood outer-wall. And depending on how the project is formed, the number of load bearing inner walls can be drastically decreased and there fore the total cost is lower. A other benefit of concrete out wall is that they can be made maintenance free, very beneficial in the long run. Now last few years the company i work for have strated to make building with mixed outer walls. That is that have a mix of concrete and wood outer walls to have the concrete once exactly and only where they are needed. This is a bit complicated to match the exterior wall to look identical. And yes, we have building that have concrete next to wood, and its int visible in any way shape or form from the outside... If you want to make a 2 or 3.. or possibly 4 floor high framed building, can just use traditional method, no problem. 5 floor...you can probobly get away with a mix.. 6 floors. Well now your are in trouble. Non of the outside walls can be load bearing. This works fine for 80% of the walls. But with something like corner walls, yea that is a problem. Either one of the corner have to be load bearing. Then one section of the wall have to be CLT as well. The issue with CLT walls is that they can´t be internally insulated. So if there is a 120mm CLT wall, all of the 240mm insulation have to be on the outside of that wall, making it really thick. And its so large diffrance it can´t be flexed from wall to wall. This is also a actuarial problem.
@@matsv201 I couldn't read all that text to be really brutally honest but I saw a lot about insulation so I'm guessing it not mostly about what I meant which is its beneficial for construction continuity and speed
Here in DK we are building a 20 stores high rise of wood. A big part of it, is recycled wood and old wings from wind turbines. How it works with the recycled wood and the wings, I don't know.
Well it is interesting. It is certainly very bold to do so it will be interesting to see how it develops. A wooden building is certainly lovely to walk into .Going back in time somewhat.
I hope their standards for “sustainable” forestry are higher than here in Canada. We use wood for framing in most residential construction, but in the process we’ve destroyed most of our old-growth forests and created a massive problem with forest fires (which tree farms are more vulnerable to). Most lumber companies claim to be sustainable, but a 30-year or less growth cycle can never replace old growth.
@@sheilashineleofany822 It'll be more than enough for a few houses :) Forest covers 70% of Sweden's surface, around 87 billion trees. Of what is forested more than 85% of products (including paper and pulp etc) are exported. In 2021 alone 19 million cubic metres of saw timber was produced.
Not quite finished with the video but wanted to point out the renderings have no car lanes in between the buildings. Very refreshing coming from a USA resident that is so used to apartments/offices being built along highways, resulting in unsafe and loud environments.
Uhm... your pin for stockholm missed it with like 80km. It's in Norrtälje which is it's own city. To be even more precise it's in Glämsta, which is kind of a semi island north east of Norrtälje. Sickla is located south of the city. You hit Stockholms county though 👍 No normal swede will be able to afford these though, just like all the other building projects like these.
I don't quite understand where the "We can't afford this" attitude comes from. These buildings are cheaper and faster to make, wouldn't be more expensive than building a new modern home. And as a married couple who has life in order, there should be no issue getting a loan to buy a 7mill sek house.
Getting enough money is not too hard, save up for a loan. Buy an older house, refurbish and make it nice, sell it, get some profits, do it again. Until you have enough money. The price of housing is always rising and its the most secure way to invest your money
Doesn't sound like a great idea to me. The whole area could easily burn out. I recently read a news article about a apartment building in Sweden(I forgot where) that caught on fire, and the firefighters had a really hard time putting the fire out because there would be embers(or whatever the right word would be in English) "hiding" deep in the wood of the structure, so it took a lot longer to put out compared to a apartment building not made entirely out of wood.
I live in a Swedish town that's 400+ years old made up of more than 50% wooden houses. There has only been a few fires in its 400+ year history where only a handful of houses has burned down and then rebuilt. And these houses are made of wood that has not, as far as I know, been treated to prevent them from burning down. So, based on that, I'm not too worried.
@@magnuskarlsson8655 I dont think you can compare singular wooden house, to a whole high rise wooden appartment or office complex. The chances of something going wrong are much higher.
@@mattia8327 Many of these wooden houses are not "singular wooden houses" but relatively big, two or three stories buildings housing a number of different apartments, restaurants, shops etc. - especially in the city centre where the oldest houses are located - not much different from many of the houses in the video. But I agree, the bigger they are the higher the risk.
Känns som att de bygger ut Hammarby Sjöstadsområdet. Lär knappast bli billigt. Majoriteten av de som flyttar in, gissar jag, blir unga par med hög inkomst och 60+ are som sålt huset. Så såg det ut när Sjöstan befolkades... Lär bli fight om dessa.
Stockholm and affordable doesn't mix sadly. It doesn't even have anything to do with construction costs, it's just that the demand is so high that prices will be high eventually even if initial costs were low.
This is really nice but we need to focus on building more less expensive options in Stockholm since we've had a housing crisis for almost 20 years now.
Timber definitely beats concrete and steel for environmental impact, if harvested responsibly, and it definitely is more attractive than either one. Still, though, you can improve on entirely timber buildings by using timber framing and cob walls (long history in most of Europe) and reduce the fire risk to zero (with the wood fully enclosed) and harvest a fraction of the forest. They can go to several storeys high, more than ten in arid regions, and are much cheaper to heat and cool with a lot of it passive.
@@paledrake and tbh from that we’ve learned that a city will burn down regardless. And there have been countless other non-wooden towns/cities just like it around the world that have burned down in the past. If the wood here has proved to be less flammable than regular wood, imho building a wooden, more environmentally friendly district/city sounds like a good idea.
@@rev31089 Maybe, though I feel like stone would be more sustainable. It's more durable, less flamable and lasts longer. Idk how long timber lasts, but wodden planks don't last longer than maybe 100 years without good maintenance.
According to a university professor I had most of the CLT is sourced outside of Sweden. He named Romania as a country where he ordered it for a project of his. Sweden is importer of most products, you have few factories here. So I don't know how emmisions look from this aspect.
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.
Sweden as a whole needs cheap or humanely priced housing. It's basically impossible to buy a house because of the rising loan interest. Even apartments are insanely expensive.
I live in Stockholm, and I would not be surprised if the people who approved this construction did so more ideologically than pragmatically. I say so because wood at the bottom will have to carry all the weight and stress put on it, and wood does compress which is one of the reasons everyone moved over to other building materials for these types of buildings in the first place... Unless CLT wood can withstand that as well for 6-7 story buildings, I'm expecting the long term to be someone suing either this company or the city for approving it in the first place.
@@fredrikcarlen3212 No, in Sweden there is enough wood available (just like in Norway and Finland) to build cities in wood, if they so desire. But, outside of these countries, things are different. Not much wood is available, so the price of would goes up and subsequently it's not a viable product for building cities. Too expensive.
@@dirkgonthier101 The price of wood has nothing to do with this development being completely unaffordable to average people... Just because wood buildings CAN be built cheaply doesn't mean that these are. The cheapest apartment (small 2 bedroom) in this development costs almost twice as much as the average house, and then you still have to pay rent...
@@fredrikcarlen3212 If you build a complete city in wood, you don't build for the 1%. As we never do in Europe. The 1% are just an obsession for the Americans (which I can understand). The price of wood has to do with the availability of wood. In the Northern-Scandinavian countries, there's so much wood that they even heat their homes with wood. But in the rest of Europe, this is economically not viable, because of low availability of wood and subsequently high prices (in countries like the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Italy, Greece and so on). This is elementary economics.
@@dirkgonthier101 You don't imagine the guy with a Swedish name you're talking to might, just possibly, perhaps be from Sweden? In any case, I know wood is cheap. I like most people here live in a house made of wood... That has nothing to do with the fact that this specific development, which the video is about, is not for average people. The cheapest apartment currently for sale is a two room apartment, and costs 5.9 million SEK. This is VASTLY more than the average person has to spend on a small apartment. I have never been talking about wooden buildings in general, it has always been about this specific development and nothing else.
Obviously not as long as brick but id expect them to last atleast 50 years+. We know timber here in Sweden. Its one of our largest industries and if you look at villas most of them are made out of wood, id say 4/5 is made out of wood the rest are brick. Now i am no expert but i dont think it will cost more to maintain but if it does it will be worth it.
@@svampen7782 I get that but many older wood buildings were made out of old growth timber where the trees are over 100 plus years old and not from trees that are 20-40 years old
I would've liked this video to be half an hour long or so and dive in deep. Now, after watching it, it's like just scratching the surface... It's nice though, just like more of it :)
This probs wouldn’t happen in Australia, our natives trees don’t provide much wood, growing new ones are in limited upply, and wood like most building materials cost more here than they do in other countries,
Yeah, here trees grows like weed. One forest-patch near me was clear-cut 2-3 years ago(without replanting), and now there are mixed trees 1-3 meters high in every inch, you can´t see a meter ahead of you. It gets very dense fast.
Well, we had a super modern cool looking wooden apartment house here in Malmö, Sweden (Lindängen). There was a fire on the top floor some time ago. The firefighters did their thing and now they have to tear the whole building down due to the damages caused by the water the firefighters used to put out the fire. Recently they have also built a five floor parking house of wood here in Malmö (Sege Park) and Im just waiting for a EV to catch fire. There wont be much left of the building if that happens. Wood is good for small houses on the countryside but not for apartment buildings and such.
Karlstad has suffered four major fires. Only the cathedral and a few houses remained after the last fire on July 2, 1865. Karlstad was thereafter rebuilt according to a grid pattern with wide streets surrounded by trees...
The building shown at 0:30 is from my hometown Skellefteå. Its a bit of an eyesore for the locals if you compare it to the surrounding buildings. :'D Kinda sticks out! But for a larger region of blocks where all the buildings look like it? I'm all for it!
@alvarovalderrama9069 Wood is a pretty good material for building earthquake safe houses. They must of course be designed for that kind of horizontal shaking. Sweden is very free of eartquakes, so I don't think they design for that. But wooden houses would be a good idea, I think, in areas plagued by thouse.
@@larsnystrom6698 Thanks, I was wandering since I'm from Chile, a very seismic country, and while wooden houses are regularly built, I've never seen anything even approaching this scale here. It's a very interesting approach to construction!
As a Swede I’m excited for this but I question the validity of the sustainability claims, A LOT. Even most Swedes think the majority of the country’s surface area is covered by forests, but most of our “forests” aren’t real. They’re monoculture plantations that really threaten biodiversity and and larger functions of the biome. So unless forestry changes around here these sustainability claims are unfounded if not purely fabricated. Love the video as usual though. Just critical of the claims presented to you.
Finns en bra dokumentär på SVT som heter slaget om skogen. Den pratar om just hur hållbart det är med kalhygge, skövling och monokultur. Men sammanfattat kan man säga att den "skogen" vi har i Sverige är tall. Som alla planteras samtidigt, är lika gamla och består av bara ett fåtal arter. Sverige har avverkat mer än 90% av sin urskog så det man ser i Norrland eller Lappland är bara träd - inte skog.@@morgainebarkefors9806
I don't understand why people say that steel is less fire resistant than CLT. Without wood, what is there to catch fire that will sustain its heat long enough to compromise the structural integrity of steel? I get that there are other flammable materials in a structure other than the structural wood but a wooden structure is literally made of wood. If you take that out, there's nothing to catch fire that will burn long and hot enough to make a difference. But if your house is literally made of wood and something catches fire, if a single one of those beams wasn't treated properly, you're hosed.
The lifespan depends _entirely_ on construction and maintenance. (even for concrete buildings... *cough* florida *cough*) Good plain wooden shingles can last decades in direct rain- wooden beams that aren't exposed last centuries, if you take care of the roof. And walls? Well, construction again. I suspect any wood that isn't there just for looks will be protected well enough to last 200 years. Often, a permeable coating is better than a closed one- moisture needs to get out, no matter what you think how well you kept it out in the first place.
We have stave churches built around 900 years ago still standing. Real wooden buildings will stand strong for centuries if propper ventilated there's plenty of several hundred years old wooden buildings in the Nordics.
@@DurgaUsagiyeah, but even if you replace alot after 60 to 100 years you still come out on top climate wise compared to steel and concrete.....also, replacing buildings keeps the tradrs occupied and working people are happy people, japan is very happy with theor wooden buildings
Given the price fluctuations that construction materials are going through right now and the knowledge that concrete will most likely only get more expensive in the future, diversifying makes a lot of sense from an economic point of view. I wonder when bricks will start making a comeback for large buildings.
Im not saying this is a bad idea, but people tend to have a negative view on concrete which they shouldnt. Concrete is cement, sand/gravel and water. Cement is burned clay and chalk. Rome is full of concrete still lasting from the roman empire. Its all natural resources and its really strong. Maybe the production of concrete has gone of the rails at some point, i dont know. The material at its core is perfectly safe, strong and very long lasting.
There’s a project to watch in Perth, Australia. C6 is proposed to be the tallest timber tower in the world at 51 storeys. It achieved planning approval from the WA state government a couple of weeks ago
The problem with use of wood as a structural material is that people treat it like a homogenous material, which it isn’t. A number of wood bridges have been failing.
At the moment, fossil-based glues are used in the industry. They make up less than 2% of the total weight of CLT or glulam. Polyurethane glues don't emit formaldehyde, while MUF glues do. They're the main ones used in structures like that. Except on the project from Puurakentajat in the video: a lot of it is LVL, and there, they use resorcine glue (I have no idea what are its properties, apart from being ugly). There are research project to replace glues with biomaterial-based ones, like using the "natural" glue that makes wood fibers stick together, lignine, as a base.
Hahaha it be like that with these videos, I've heard though about an office in Sweden or another Scandinavian country that is made out of lumber, but it is so thick with stacked lumber in order to isolate it from the cold.
Sure, changing the materials these buildings will be built in is noteworthy, but what about the building themselves? Apart from the "novelty" they look like any bland "modern" structure you'd find in any city across the world . Is it that hard to make them at least aesthetically pleasing?
Listen we are facing a climate emergency But don't worry we have Tree's to cut down for ugly office blocks plz don't turn your heating on tho or drive a car :/
@@louk597 understood the sarcasm but u must surely believe it wheen you say it that way, apparently for you,its useless to do something if it doesnt solve the entire problem. Switching a part of construction field to wood construction helps reduce CO2 emissions, thats it, they never said it will save human kind. just one small piece in a bigger puzzle
I am no fan of modern architecture but these wood buildings are far nicer and warmer looking than concrete and glass. No one with alot of money want to build beautiful oldschool buildings anymore it just costs too much.
People should remember: forests do not store carbon just by existing. Mature trees put on little mass each year. It's young trees that rapidly soak up carbon. If you want any given square mile of forest to efficiently remove co2 from the air you have to constantly remove large mature trees to make room for younger trees and then make sure those trees you're cutting do not rot so the carbon is not returned to the air. Making buildings out of the wood is a great way to do that. But of course, when the building is eventually torn down, you've got to make sure the wood is buried deep underground where it cannot rot.
The idea is to lock up the carbon in the buildings for a few hundred years in the hope that atmospheric CO2 reduction has been mastered by the time the buildings are recycled.
I don't understand how this hasn't been in any news in Sweden... Although I don't read the news too often but still, I still think I should've heard about it before TH-cam and Google telling me
My curiosity is if there is a fire and any degree of significant damage what the challenges of removing variouse elements (clt) and repleacing them in this type of structure
As a geographer living in Sweden I gasped when I saw where you placed your red pin 📍 for Stockholm You missed by 100 km. PS. In Swedish, the recent English loan word _city_ does not mean what it does in English. It means a tight unit of integrated buildings, such as a shopping center with other constructions (such as residential) built at the same time and all linked together. And English _city_ is a _stad._ A _town_ is a _tätort,_ and a _village_ is a _by,_ a suffix still seen in English place names mainly in the old Dane law. A _stad_ is an old designation for a town/city granted a royal charter for certain commercial purposes. Most of these grew to become large in our day, but a few remain small towns but are, by tradition, still _städer_ (plural form). Naturally, language being what it is, there is certain murky overlap in everyday usage. Best wishes for your channel's success.
The other thing I’m not sure I heard mention is thermal mass. Timber doesn’t retain the heat from the day the same way concrete buildings do so helps as global warming increases temps and city temps continue to rise
@@miketackabery7521 You are entitled to your opinion but ill tell you your eyes dont work mate. These buildings are not soulless, ive seen some in my hometown and they are far nicer than concrete and glass buildings.
@@svampen7782 forgive me. I unthinkingly wrote concrete when I meant steel. I should have written "ugly steel and glass buildings". My argument is with modernism in architecture, not construction materials. Again, forgive me.
Sustainable architecture is NOT all about the materials. It is exemplified by the buildings that are still standing 100-200 years later and loved by those that who use/visit them over and over again. THAT would be a great sustainable development.
@@znail4675I don't deny that, but what I'm getting at is the design elements not just the construction. Is the design actually attractive to the majority of people that live close to it? Or is just a box with windows?
I'm glad all our medieval cities here in tuscany have been built with bricks and stones and they're still standing today almost intact. If they were made of wood they would have rotted away centuries ago.
Wood doesnt rot if ventilated properly. There are churches made of wood a thousand years old. Ofcourse they need to be maintained, but so does brick building
We have wooden buildings that are nearly a thousand years old. We build wooden buildings to last. They're also warmer than stone buildings which is a bonus up here.
Sure, that might work, but working with wood gives you the option of just tearing it down and rebuilding it 90 years later and still be cheaper than masonry is today.......
Even if the taller structures could survive a fire how can they be repaired? If they aren't repaired wouldn't the charred timber tend to give off a smell of burnt wood on humid days? That happens with a chimney for a wood stove. On some warm days when the stove isn't on, the air falls in the chimney. It appears that most MT or CLT structures are not covered with sheet rock or other more fireproof material. Could that mean that after a fire the timber might only be covered over with sheetrock or some other interior finish that changes the aesthetic appeal of the timber? Would a crew have to scrape off and laminate the surface in situ? No doubt that would be very time consuming and difficult especially on CLT slab systems that cross laminate alternate boards creating a waffle like structure to allow for wiring, light fixtures and conduits. How could that be repaired at all? In those systems the timber isn't "mass' but the thickness of the usual 2x6 or 2x8 stick. No doubt those will burn through quickly. In fact their configuration is like logs in my wood stove - just perfect for keeping a fire going and very hot. Air can easily reach the combustion. As far as I know there have been no fires in any CLT or mass timber buildings. A steel frame with proper fire resistant protection or a concrete frame building will also survive a fire but they are easier to repair. And for the past 30 years bombing of buildings has become more common. Or perhaps it just seems like they are?. In many cases the concrete or steel frame survives and only the partitions and windows are destroyed. But the entire structure doesn't collapse.
Why? Reinforces concrete can be pretty much eternal, there are no significant earthquakes in Scandinavia, so it is cheaper than in southern europe and there is much greater chance to keep the buildings undamaged, and population is not growing. Isn't it cheaper and better for the environment to build once and keep forever, wood requires maintenance and will not last half as much as concrete.
Concrete requires mainenance, too. Some roman buildings last for milennia, but most modern construction will crumble quickly if you stop maintaining it. Once water gets in, it's a question of a few decades. Almost everything needs maintenance- and most things that don't, loose their purpose sooner or later. Roman viaducts may still stand, but aren't up to modern demand.
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.
Not necessary here. Those buildings start sprouting by then selves 😂
It's usually to sell it to the developers, because they have no understanding of aesthetics but as soon as they see greenery they think, "Green=eco=fashionable=easy to sell."
@@petervlcko4858eiyo mushroom hunting seasons maybe
@@sheilashineleofany822 in the office 😂
@@sheilashineleofany822lol funny
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
Yep, feel like this is gonna be reserved for influencers, rich old seniors, and Ulf Kristersson-types
@@lovisaloy Ulf Kristersson types lol, stay broke.
Oh look, I found the insulted moderate
at least those 10% might now hesitate for 5 minutes before purchasing a house in west London.
10% is too high. Think 6%.
Wood has been used to build entire cities in Scandinavia before, so it's cool to see us returning to our traditional material.
Bet it's the only place in the world that has a ban on matches too .
It used to be used to build everywhere. And guess what. They always burned down. It’s incredibly stupid to use flammable materials in the modern age
You know what else used to be in Scandinavia? Scandinavians.
I guess they take Ikea quite seriously in Sweden.
@@PROVOCATEURSKhahah so true
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. -.-
Most buildings in North America in short of skyscrapers and parking garages are made of wood. They simply have a facade that makes them look like brick/concrete buildings. Pay attention to construction sites next time and you’ll see what I’m talking about.
I totally agree. When the Art Gallery of Ontario added its new front facade they installed huge timber Glulam beams and when I went to the unveiling, I happen to bump into the owner of the company that built them. I didn't know who he was, but I couldn't stop admiring the Beauty of these beams. He was very pleased the hear my praise after telling me he built them. But he then said, it's a real struggle to convince people to make full houses or taller buildings out of CLT and glulam. For me, it just makes sense.
@@Gnaw85 that's not what they mean ya pompous-ass, CLT buildings are a relatively new tech, you can't build multi story buildings the same way you do with single family homes in canada ; in fact canada does have some of the first CLT skyscrapers (UBC i believe), the real reason we dont have more of these is because of regressive zoning in cities, we are more than capable of building these in canada and have expertise, it's archaic NIMBY laws and archaic fire safety laws, that's why voting in municipal & provincial elections is way more impactful to your day to day life than federal
@@cookiedoughdynamo1487 Go to the northern side of St-Lawrence River in Quebec, forest is everywhere
if they build something like this in vancouver or toronto some crazy person would probably light it on fire lol :(
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!
I think the Brits had something similar happen awhile back
These will really withstand all the staircase explosions and it will certainly not burn down
@@tropical2551Wood is much more shock absorbent than concrete. As for the flammability... well let's hope they coated it with something more flame resistant than what they've used on the Gävle goat in the past :D
If only lessons where learned
I work with pressure impregnating wood (bitus AB) and we have a product called Burn block. Its pressure impregnated with tons of salt @@sorlag110
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
Expect Nya Rinkeby in the coming decades.
I hope the gangs don't have matches.
@@Xerdoz nya rinkeby e nästa nivå💀
It is called Trästaden - the wooden city
@@Xerdoz Då får gbg också bygga nya biskops
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.
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.
Totally agree! So many people hear timber and they assume it will be similar to historic timber buildings, instead if it being the modern, treated and protected massed timber that it is.
I hate all this climate change B.s but I don't see cutting down More tree as a good thing No matter how many times I'm told it's substantial :/
@@louk597 if you want a yt video to explain it, Undecided with Matt Farrel did a great video on the topic not that long ago. I'll try and give you a basic rundown though. Trees aren't the best fighters against carbon emissions anyway. They take decades to reach full size where they are effecient at scrubbing air, and we *cannot* cover the planet in enough trees to combat climate change. It's impossible. Algae on the other hand is *siginifcantly* better at scrubbing o2 of co2, as it grows *super* quickly. (Slightly off topic now but they're starting to invent "liquid trees" which are tanks full of algea that function like a 30 yr old trees but take up way less space and can even be like a bus stop or city bench or something, now back to trees)
Building with trees is is actually a carbon sink. As the tree grows you get your fibrous material out of the carbon, then when you build with it, that carbon is locked away in that wood. Unlike concrete or steel, which require CRAZY amounts of co2 to be released when those things are being made. On top of that, these buildings are usually prefab buildings created in an engineered woodshop using cnc machines and super detailed architectural drawings so it gets assembled on site like lego. As such, you need waayyy less men on site during construction. There's a famous hotel in the states that's mass timber (i forget its name sorry) and they had one single truck delivering the peices to and from the delivery yard, instead of a line of concrete mixer trucks like when you'd traditionally lay a concrete floor. They also go up VERY quickly since they are prefabricated. Once you lay the concrete foundation and possible carpark underground type deal, the wood top of the building is assembled very fast. And trees can be replanted and need very little/no maintenance for like 40 years before you go back and use them for that exact purpose. We've been doing regenerative logging in Canada for decades.
@@louk597 so convenient to live in your filter bubble devoid of facts🤦♂
@@TigruArdavi & what facts are you talking about?
Come on Tomorrows build. At 1:38 neither of those pins are at Stockholm or Helsinki, 0/10 could use a bit of QC
haha yes I was so confused, thought they were building something out in Norrtälje, but then its in Stockholm centre Sickla? Confusing!
@@barbs8584 Not even Norrtälje, it's 20km northeast of Norrtälje (80km northeast of Stockholm), it's a peninsula with some small farms and some vacation homes.
Noticed that too, I assume it was for visual clarity. Could at least have put the pins right, otherwise what are pins for?
In their map you can even see all the roads of the actual cities to the side and below the pins, haha.
Norrtälje är den nya Stockholm 😂
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.
Dry wall and gypcrete floors can probably help with that. Matt risinger has a video on how to improve sound isolation in buildings. But if it’s just raw timber then it’ll probably keep those same issues.
Well making it walkable so that cars don't exist there would certainly help.
It turns out there _are_ technological fixes for idling engines… and cultural and social ones, too, as mentioned above.
Motors on EVs don't idle.
Good input! Normally it’s the fire resistance which they seem too have handled. Noice and other disturbances are yet to be discovered....
What an extremely well suited name for an urban devloper - Urban Blomster (Urban Flowers)
Hahahaha
It's meaning also has a vague connotation to something like "Urban Blooming" or "Urban Blossoming"
Nominative determinism at work.
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
Verkligen d va d första jag tänkte på när jag hörde detta
Yeah have they not learned anything from the years: 1721, 1803 and 1888.
My hometown Vimmerby burned down 3 times during history. I really hope it has otherwise they have not learned anything...
@@fridahultgren8865 and here i thought Sundsvall had it bad :) 3 times is rough
@@TheBecke1983 that is what you get when putting houses of wood in a close rectangle together 😑
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.
are u saying 98% of swedens forest is planted fr?
Use google maps with satellite imaging. Zoom in anywhere dark green in Sweden and you’ll se rows, lines, clear cuts etc. The only areas left are the north west mountain areas and wetlands or really steep terrain where the logging machines cannot move.
That is not true. White there is a problem with mono-culture, you are simply just overexaggerating the issue
While I don't dispute that most of the old growth forrest in Sweden has been chopped down, one should notice that our forests never was much of a multiculture. The forest belt here are a part of the Taiga and as such, it's naturaly made up of almost entirely spruce and pine to begin with.
The guy talking in the beginning Urban Blomster, his name translated to English literally means Urban Bloom. This guy was literally destined to work with sustainable cities lol
I learned something today: having no knowledge at all about forestry makes a person believe that he is an expert on forestry.
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 😄
Sustainable is not the same as environmentally friendly. Sustainable means you can replant the trees and harvest them again, which is possible. It may hurt the ecosystem, but this does not make it less sustainable except if the trees depend on the ecosystem to grow (they don't). In addition, the wood is essentially made from captured carbon unlike concrete which requires lots of carbon to produce. Every building material has its advantages and disadvantages :)
@@vyndecimibd Sustainable for us humans maybe, but the forest itself needs more than endless rows of pines to be a healthy forest. In addition only a small amount of carbon is stored in the tree it self, most of it is actually stored in the ground and is ripped up with the roots and by the machines when the forest is cut down. Our Swedish forests is dead since a long time, now we should just all it tree plantations instead since that's what it essentially is.
The survey included other materials and not just wood
Still better than steel and concrete. Climate Collaps and giant mines are surely not a better option than monoculture forrests
@vyndecimibd do you even know how long a tree takes to grow to be harvest ready ? 😅😅
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.
Maybe a yearly maintenance also quite high maybe.. sometimes insects (carpenter bees for example) can holing up the exterior and making a nests
Funny how the same people who protest climate change are also the ones who support deforestation.
It's still quite risky. In Sundsvall/Sweden the entire city was made out of wood, and after a big fire the entire city burnt down, they rebuilt it in stone and now call it the stone city.
@@adara4635 there were fires in Stockholm too and vänersborg because most homes were built by, you guessed it WOOD
Its not really, the apartments in this bulding will be so expesive only like 5% will even have the amount of money to live there
Mix of wood, concrete columns, metal and adobe is the best !
Creative combination makes the buildings more functional.
Stressing to be one thing everything is as limited as using concrete for everything.
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!
And which year did they burn down? You can treat things these days to make it alot less flammable etc. Also im taking a stab that they burned down when people used woodstoves for heating.
@@zoom5024 That is the point I was making. These days it is safer.
At the time they used actual fire to keep warm and cook, right?
@@danielintheantipodes6741 Funny how the same people who protest climate change are also the ones who support deforestation.
Stockholm itself had major fires too.
Im from Sweden. This will never happen. Forget it...
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 you want to build dense urban core with 5-10 storey buildings 5-10 meters apart with this stuff, the question isn't how long you have structural integrity, its how fast the fire spreads. This district will have tons of dry fuel for each square meter of land. What happens if fire is not suppressed quick enough for some reason?
@@E1Luch Don't worry, it's Sweden, they're quite hot on safety. If all else fails another snow storm will be along in five minutes.
@@JP_TaVeryMuch Then I hope nothing bad happens in the summer and Swedish authorities actually looked at the risks instead of just accepting them. Surely they always do their best jobs. Like if for example there was some kind of dangerous virus going around then surely they will take it very seriously and be very effective at preventing it's spread
Like i don't know, maybe it is actually fine, but these pop sci/tech vids have to spend some more effort explaining it instead of defaulting to one talking point about how it chars slower than normal wood. In the meantime I just think that 5 storey building still has plenty of surface area and then recall pictures from Hawaii and California wildfires when entire neighborhoods, albeit low-density, burnt down completely to the ground. I don't really think theres no other way to solve climate change without risking my block looking like Tokyo after firebombing campaigns one day
@@E1Luch Ha! Sweden famously dismissed the idea of national lockdown and suffered no worse, no better a fate than the rest of us who had to stay home.
I'm not as concerned about fire damage as I am about water damage. What happens when somebody on the top floor on one of these highrises has a major water leak? This is a major issue for insurers right now...
Concrete gets damage by water as well, so it's not really a downside compared with the normal materials.
1:38 Just wanted to say that the map pin for Stockholm is placed quite far from Stockholm :)
lol the pin for Helsinki too. You can even see where on the map most roads converge so I don't see how a mistake like that could be made.
As a footnote the pin for Stockholm on the map is on Marum, which while technically a administered as a part of Stockholm County is just about as far away from the city as you can get within that area and very, very rural.
At 1:37 you can see the Helsinki pin being slightly misplaced (just compare with the actual roads visible) and the stockholm pin being more than a little misplaced :)
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.
Its not a bad idea, as long as you can get the fire protection right both during construction and long term. For cold climates it often very beneficial in terms of project time scales as well.
"For cold climates it often very beneficial"
This is kind of a myth. When we design houses we designed the outside of the house to have a certain average insulation. The denser the usage is, the less insulation we typically use (a office use very little, but a single family home use a lot).
If the building have a lot of windows, we typically need a bit thicker insulation.
And, to be totally fair there really exist 3 type of buildings. Concrete, wood and hybrids. I work as a construction engineer and we make both concrete and hybrid buildings. The hybrid buildings are pretty much houses with concrete inner walls and a wood outer wall. The outer wall is in that case pretty much identical how it would be in a fully wood building. And the inner walls are the same as in a fully concrete building.
This is in no way shape or form new. We have done that at least since the 1950s and there are millions of building built that way.
The outer wall of a concrete high rise need to be 150mm thick if its fully load bearing and down to a minimum possible of 80mm of its only carrying it own weigh.
A wood wall need to be 120mm thick if its self carying, and how thick it need to be to be load bearing is a bit difficult to answer, it depends on how high the building is (typically just add 25mm for every floor is somewhere in the ball park, i don´t design those so i´m not sure). With 150mm concrete we can build 12-15 floors no problem.
When it comes to insulation there are basically 3 chooses. glass/rock wool, styrofoam, or expanded foam. The later two we don´t use in wood construction in Sweden (it is popular in the US). The insulation factor is about 40, 30 and 20 (lower better). We typically use 180mm styrofoam or 120mm expanded foam for a multi family home. If it was wool 240mm would be needed (we typically don´t use that).
Now it gets even more complicated, a wood frame can integrate part of the insulation. But with doing that, it loses some insulation property. I don´t work with that so i can´t say right of the bat how much it will do, but i would guess that a 145mm frame would need 145mm more insulation, while a 150mm concrete would need 120mm of expanded foam or 180mm styrofoam. That works nice for a 2 or 3 floor building. But if you build a 6 floor building, that just won´t do. In effect, its not really doable.
Those 3 wall alternative will preform the same, they will be designed to preform he same. Those wall will cost about (last time i checked, i don´t work with costing) €400, €550 and €600. As you see the wood wall is significantly cheaper. So of cause the question is, why don´t we just use wood walls on all project. Well they can´t be load bearing if its a wood outer-wall. And depending on how the project is formed, the number of load bearing inner walls can be drastically decreased and there fore the total cost is lower.
A other benefit of concrete out wall is that they can be made maintenance free, very beneficial in the long run.
Now last few years the company i work for have strated to make building with mixed outer walls. That is that have a mix of concrete and wood outer walls to have the concrete once exactly and only where they are needed. This is a bit complicated to match the exterior wall to look identical. And yes, we have building that have concrete next to wood, and its int visible in any way shape or form from the outside...
If you want to make a 2 or 3.. or possibly 4 floor high framed building, can just use traditional method, no problem. 5 floor...you can probobly get away with a mix.. 6 floors. Well now your are in trouble. Non of the outside walls can be load bearing. This works fine for 80% of the walls. But with something like corner walls, yea that is a problem. Either one of the corner have to be load bearing.
Then one section of the wall have to be CLT as well. The issue with CLT walls is that they can´t be internally insulated. So if there is a 120mm CLT wall, all of the 240mm insulation have to be on the outside of that wall, making it really thick. And its so large diffrance it can´t be flexed from wall to wall. This is also a actuarial problem.
@@matsv201 I couldn't read all that text to be really brutally honest but I saw a lot about insulation so I'm guessing it not mostly about what I meant which is its beneficial for construction continuity and speed
@@mdl2427 Funny how the same people who protest climate change are also the ones who support deforestation.
Also mold resistance.
Here in DK we are building a 20 stores high rise of wood. A big part of it, is recycled wood and old wings from wind turbines. How it works with the recycled wood and the wings, I don't know.
"Timber" Kesha and Pitbull were ahead of their time! 🎶
Sustainable timber sounds like it will remain sustainable right until everybody starts using it. Would love to be proven wrong though.
Chicago with the 1800’s Chicago Fire side eye 💀🔥
Well it is interesting. It is certainly very bold to do so it will be interesting to see how it develops. A wooden building is certainly lovely to walk into .Going back in time somewhat.
We tried that already. It didn't go so well. I'm talking about the great fire of Stockholm in 1625.
I hope their standards for “sustainable” forestry are higher than here in Canada. We use wood for framing in most residential construction, but in the process we’ve destroyed most of our old-growth forests and created a massive problem with forest fires (which tree farms are more vulnerable to). Most lumber companies claim to be sustainable, but a 30-year or less growth cycle can never replace old growth.
Probably from some percentage they would import it from Canada incase local woods are not enough aha
Not really, unfortunately. Sweden also has big issues with monoculture forests and loss of old growth.
@@sheilashineleofany822 It'll be more than enough for a few houses :) Forest covers 70% of Sweden's surface, around 87 billion trees. Of what is forested more than 85% of products (including paper and pulp etc) are exported. In 2021 alone 19 million cubic metres of saw timber was produced.
Canada has been overcutting for decades, nothing at all like the situation in Sweden where the forest is growing year by year.
There exists only a few square km of "old forest" left in the whole of Sweden. @@mnemetotoro
Not quite finished with the video but wanted to point out the renderings have no car lanes in between the buildings. Very refreshing coming from a USA resident that is so used to apartments/offices being built along highways, resulting in unsafe and loud environments.
Great stuff. Thanks for sharing.
I'm a swede, living in sweden. Have never heard of this project!
Uhm... your pin for stockholm missed it with like 80km. It's in Norrtälje which is it's own city. To be even more precise it's in Glämsta, which is kind of a semi island north east of Norrtälje. Sickla is located south of the city. You hit Stockholms county though 👍
No normal swede will be able to afford these though, just like all the other building projects like these.
I don't quite understand where the "We can't afford this" attitude comes from. These buildings are cheaper and faster to make, wouldn't be more expensive than building a new modern home. And as a married couple who has life in order, there should be no issue getting a loan to buy a 7mill sek house.
Getting enough money is not too hard, save up for a loan. Buy an older house, refurbish and make it nice, sell it, get some profits, do it again. Until you have enough money. The price of housing is always rising and its the most secure way to invest your money
Great video, I hope to see a new video on the planned new tallest wooden skyscraper in Perth, Australia
Doesn't sound like a great idea to me. The whole area could easily burn out.
I recently read a news article about a apartment building in Sweden(I forgot where) that caught on fire, and the firefighters had a really hard time putting the fire out because there would be embers(or whatever the right word would be in English) "hiding" deep in the wood of the structure, so it took a lot longer to put out compared to a apartment building not made entirely out of wood.
I live in a Swedish town that's 400+ years old made up of more than 50% wooden houses. There has only been a few fires in its 400+ year history where only a handful of houses has burned down and then rebuilt. And these houses are made of wood that has not, as far as I know, been treated to prevent them from burning down. So, based on that, I'm not too worried.
@@magnuskarlsson8655
I dont think you can compare singular wooden house, to a whole high rise wooden appartment or office complex. The chances of something going wrong are much higher.
@@mattia8327 Many of these wooden houses are not "singular wooden houses" but relatively big, two or three stories buildings housing a number of different apartments, restaurants, shops etc. - especially in the city centre where the oldest houses are located - not much different from many of the houses in the video. But I agree, the bigger they are the higher the risk.
Me, A Scandinavian looking around my own street: But it's all made of wood already....
Yeah it’s nothing new 😂 like nearly ALL houses and many buildings are already made out of wood and been like that for centuries
Fire is looking real nice 🔥🔥🔥
We learned about this in building physics class. The teacher is a consultant on many of these projects.
I live in Stockholm and didn't even know this! I would love to move in here when it's finished, hope there will at least be some affordable flats!
Eller hur? Bor i Farsta. Har inte hört ett pip om det
Det blir inga billiga lägenheter där. En tvåa med hög avgift i alphyddan eller ekudden ligger på 3 miljoner kronor.
Känns som att de bygger ut Hammarby Sjöstadsområdet. Lär knappast bli billigt. Majoriteten av de som flyttar in, gissar jag, blir unga par med hög inkomst och 60+ are som sålt huset. Så såg det ut när Sjöstan befolkades... Lär bli fight om dessa.
Stockholm and affordable doesn't mix sadly. It doesn't even have anything to do with construction costs, it's just that the demand is so high that prices will be high eventually even if initial costs were low.
@@znail4675Not just Stockholm sadly, Sweden as a whole is suffering from residence shortage and high loan interests.
This is really nice but we need to focus on building more less expensive options in Stockholm since we've had a housing crisis for almost 20 years now.
Timber definitely beats concrete and steel for environmental impact, if harvested responsibly, and it definitely is more attractive than either one. Still, though, you can improve on entirely timber buildings by using timber framing and cob walls (long history in most of Europe) and reduce the fire risk to zero (with the wood fully enclosed) and harvest a fraction of the forest. They can go to several storeys high, more than ten in arid regions, and are much cheaper to heat and cool with a lot of it passive.
hi b1m, at exact 1:41..i noticed the pointers of both cities are wrongly placed. dk if u intended in an obvious way or a lenient way. kudos though.
I remember watching a doc about american city that was built from wood. I think it burned twice entirely. They gave up and switched to stone 😅
The U.S. can barely even plan decent “regular” concrete and steel cities so failing to build a wooden one does not sound suprising.
@@rev31089 it was also when US was connected by railway system and had gold rushes etc. +1800s iirc
A city in Sweden also burnt down and was rebuilt with stone. I am highly skeptical of this wooden city plan. Looks like a giant fire hazard to me.
@@paledrake and tbh from that we’ve learned that a city will burn down regardless. And there have been countless other non-wooden towns/cities just like it around the world that have burned down in the past. If the wood here has proved to be less flammable than regular wood, imho building a wooden, more environmentally friendly district/city sounds like a good idea.
@@rev31089 Maybe, though I feel like stone would be more sustainable. It's more durable, less flamable and lasts longer. Idk how long timber lasts, but wodden planks don't last longer than maybe 100 years without good maintenance.
According to a university professor I had most of the CLT is sourced outside of Sweden. He named Romania as a country where he ordered it for a project of his. Sweden is importer of most products, you have few factories here. So I don't know how emmisions look from this aspect.
Very enjoyable as always 👍
Interesting project! We're also happy to see our yellow adjustable wall braces in many of the shots!
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.
you better vote left for that, such a thing will never occur with a right-led government.
@@benktlofgren4710 100%
Sweden as a whole needs cheap or humanely priced housing. It's basically impossible to buy a house because of the rising loan interest. Even apartments are insanely expensive.
Vi vill inte ha fler miljonprojekt, kan du inte vara glad att något roligt byggs din fucking partypooper
@@paledrake Never happening. The people in power has everything to gain by keeping the prices artificially high. Both the left and the right.
I'm from Skellefteå and the art center seen in the video is Sara Kulturhus,, our new landmark.
We already had a wooden city in sweden called "eksjö". It is now mostly concrete as any other city, because all the wooden buildings burned down. 😂
I live in Stockholm, and I would not be surprised if the people who approved this construction did so more ideologically than pragmatically. I say so because wood at the bottom will have to carry all the weight and stress put on it, and wood does compress which is one of the reasons everyone moved over to other building materials for these types of buildings in the first place...
Unless CLT wood can withstand that as well for 6-7 story buildings, I'm expecting the long term to be someone suing either this company or the city for approving it in the first place.
In Sweden they have plenty of wood. Just like in Norway or Finland. For the rest of Europe it is too expensive to even think about those projects.
This is for the 1%, not regular people. Cost isn't an issue.
@@fredrikcarlen3212 No, in Sweden there is enough wood available (just like in Norway and Finland) to build cities in wood, if they so desire. But, outside of these countries, things are different. Not much wood is available, so the price of would goes up and subsequently it's not a viable product for building cities. Too expensive.
@@dirkgonthier101 The price of wood has nothing to do with this development being completely unaffordable to average people...
Just because wood buildings CAN be built cheaply doesn't mean that these are. The cheapest apartment (small 2 bedroom) in this development costs almost twice as much as the average house, and then you still have to pay rent...
@@fredrikcarlen3212 If you build a complete city in wood, you don't build for the 1%. As we never do in Europe. The 1% are just an obsession for the Americans (which I can understand).
The price of wood has to do with the availability of wood. In the Northern-Scandinavian countries, there's so much wood that they even heat their homes with wood. But in the rest of Europe, this is economically not viable, because of low availability of wood and subsequently high prices (in countries like the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Italy, Greece and so on). This is elementary economics.
@@dirkgonthier101 You don't imagine the guy with a Swedish name you're talking to might, just possibly, perhaps be from Sweden?
In any case, I know wood is cheap. I like most people here live in a house made of wood... That has nothing to do with the fact that this specific development, which the video is about, is not for average people. The cheapest apartment currently for sale is a two room apartment, and costs 5.9 million SEK. This is VASTLY more than the average person has to spend on a small apartment.
I have never been talking about wooden buildings in general, it has always been about this specific development and nothing else.
So what’s the life span on these wood buildings , vs brick/masonry vs steel buildings? And what is the yearly cost of maintenance?
Obviously not as long as brick but id expect them to last atleast 50 years+. We know timber here in Sweden. Its one of our largest industries and if you look at villas most of them are made out of wood, id say 4/5 is made out of wood the rest are brick. Now i am no expert but i dont think it will cost more to maintain but if it does it will be worth it.
@@svampen7782 I get that but many older wood buildings were made out of old growth timber where the trees are over 100 plus years old and not from trees that are 20-40 years old
I would've liked this video to be half an hour long or so and dive in deep. Now, after watching it, it's like just scratching the surface... It's nice though, just like more of it :)
This probs wouldn’t happen in Australia, our natives trees don’t provide much wood, growing new ones are in limited upply, and wood like most building materials cost more here than they do in other countries,
Yeah, here trees grows like weed. One forest-patch near me was clear-cut 2-3 years ago(without replanting), and now there are mixed trees 1-3 meters high in every inch, you can´t see a meter ahead of you. It gets very dense fast.
Well, we had a super modern cool looking wooden apartment house here in Malmö, Sweden (Lindängen). There was a fire on the top floor some time ago. The firefighters did their thing and now they have to tear the whole building down due to the damages caused by the water the firefighters used to put out the fire.
Recently they have also built a five floor parking house of wood here in Malmö (Sege Park) and Im just waiting for a EV to catch fire. There wont be much left of the building if that happens.
Wood is good for small houses on the countryside but not for apartment buildings and such.
Are you future proofing your comment? It happened like two months ago and the building is still there, only the roof is gone.
@@kingen411 Well, I will correct myself. They have decided to tear it down. It aint worth saving. Good enough for you?
@@RichardVemvillveta It's not about me
@@kingen411 Well, you wrote the answer smartie, so I responded to you.
You very smart building professor. Give more advice plz
Karlstad has suffered four major fires. Only the cathedral and a few houses remained after the last fire on July 2, 1865. Karlstad was thereafter rebuilt according to a grid pattern with wide streets surrounded by trees...
You just need good fire protection and maintenance. Pretty neat idea!
The building shown at 0:30 is from my hometown Skellefteå. Its a bit of an eyesore for the locals if you compare it to the surrounding buildings. :'D Kinda sticks out!
But for a larger region of blocks where all the buildings look like it? I'm all for it!
Great video. Is there any indication on how these large wooden structures would fare on earthquakes? Are they possible also on seismic countries?
Earthquakes are not a big thing in Sweden.
Wood is a living, flexible material. With the right construction absorbing the vibrations it would probably work well.
@alvarovalderrama9069
Wood is a pretty good material for building earthquake safe houses.
They must of course be designed for that kind of horizontal shaking.
Sweden is very free of eartquakes, so I don't think they design for that. But wooden houses would be a good idea, I think, in areas plagued by thouse.
@@larsnystrom6698 Thanks, I was wandering since I'm from Chile, a very seismic country, and while wooden houses are regularly built, I've never seen anything even approaching this scale here. It's a very interesting approach to construction!
And here I am, 15min away from Sickla not having an idea that this was gonna happen before watching this video
As a Swede I’m excited for this but I question the validity of the sustainability claims, A LOT. Even most Swedes think the majority of the country’s surface area is covered by forests, but most of our “forests” aren’t real. They’re monoculture plantations that really threaten biodiversity and and larger functions of the biome. So unless forestry changes around here these sustainability claims are unfounded if not purely fabricated.
Love the video as usual though. Just critical of the claims presented to you.
Yes, I usually call them "timber fields" (träåkrar) due to this fact
Finns en bra dokumentär på SVT som heter slaget om skogen. Den pratar om just hur hållbart det är med kalhygge, skövling och monokultur. Men sammanfattat kan man säga att den "skogen" vi har i Sverige är tall. Som alla planteras samtidigt, är lika gamla och består av bara ett fåtal arter.
Sverige har avverkat mer än 90% av sin urskog så det man ser i Norrland eller Lappland är bara träd - inte skog.@@morgainebarkefors9806
As also a swed vi vill inte har fula moderna byggnader
You put the pin at 1:40 in the wrong location; that is not Stockholm.
Nothing can go wrong with this. Nothing.
As long as you don't chew it Mr. @engineeringsquirrel of Foreshadowton.
I don't understand why people say that steel is less fire resistant than CLT. Without wood, what is there to catch fire that will sustain its heat long enough to compromise the structural integrity of steel? I get that there are other flammable materials in a structure other than the structural wood but a wooden structure is literally made of wood. If you take that out, there's nothing to catch fire that will burn long and hot enough to make a difference. But if your house is literally made of wood and something catches fire, if a single one of those beams wasn't treated properly, you're hosed.
What about durability? What will be the average lifespan of a wooden structure?
CLT has a life span of 60 years.
@PLuMUK54 that's not even A HUMAN lifetime.....ithink this prob isn't the BEST idea as far as LONGEVITY goes.....
The lifespan depends _entirely_ on construction and maintenance.
(even for concrete buildings... *cough* florida *cough*)
Good plain wooden shingles can last decades in direct rain- wooden beams that aren't exposed last centuries, if you take care of the roof.
And walls? Well, construction again.
I suspect any wood that isn't there just for looks will be protected well enough to last 200 years.
Often, a permeable coating is better than a closed one- moisture needs to get out, no matter what you think how well you kept it out in the first place.
We have stave churches built around 900 years ago still standing. Real wooden buildings will stand strong for centuries if propper ventilated there's plenty of several hundred years old wooden buildings in the Nordics.
@@DurgaUsagiyeah, but even if you replace alot after 60 to 100 years you still come out on top climate wise compared to steel and concrete.....also, replacing buildings keeps the tradrs occupied and working people are happy people, japan is very happy with theor wooden buildings
1:40 you placed the marker of stockholm a bit high up. Stockholm is located more in the middle of were the lakel you can see is.
Given the price fluctuations that construction materials are going through right now and the knowledge that concrete will most likely only get more expensive in the future, diversifying makes a lot of sense from an economic point of view. I wonder when bricks will start making a comeback for large buildings.
Im not saying this is a bad idea, but people tend to have a negative view on concrete which they shouldnt. Concrete is cement, sand/gravel and water. Cement is burned clay and chalk. Rome is full of concrete still lasting from the roman empire. Its all natural resources and its really strong. Maybe the production of concrete has gone of the rails at some point, i dont know. The material at its core is perfectly safe, strong and very long lasting.
There’s a project to watch in Perth, Australia. C6 is proposed to be the tallest timber tower in the world at 51 storeys. It achieved planning approval from the WA state government a couple of weeks ago
The problem with use of wood as a structural material is that people treat it like a homogenous material, which it isn’t.
A number of wood bridges have been failing.
@@jsbrads1That's one of the things that mainly worries me
51 floors seems excessive and a bit risky to make in wood. I think the Stockholm project is a bit more realistic.
As a person from sweden, this is crazy. I gotta go there
When you hear the word “Laminated” you should also think of glue. What type of glue and how do they make it?
At the moment, fossil-based glues are used in the industry. They make up less than 2% of the total weight of CLT or glulam. Polyurethane glues don't emit formaldehyde, while MUF glues do. They're the main ones used in structures like that. Except on the project from Puurakentajat in the video: a lot of it is LVL, and there, they use resorcine glue (I have no idea what are its properties, apart from being ugly).
There are research project to replace glues with biomaterial-based ones, like using the "natural" glue that makes wood fibers stick together, lignine, as a base.
I live in Sweden and this is the first I'm hearing about this.
Hahaha it be like that with these videos, I've heard though about an office in Sweden or another Scandinavian country that is made out of lumber, but it is so thick with stacked lumber in order to isolate it from the cold.
Remarkable content as usual
I live closer to were this is being build. Im so gonna go see this being build and enjoy every moment.❤❤.
Sure, changing the materials these buildings will be built in is noteworthy, but what about the building themselves? Apart from the "novelty" they look like any bland "modern" structure you'd find in any city across the world . Is it that hard to make them at least aesthetically pleasing?
Ideals of beauty died long time ago when people sold their souls for efficiency and profit.
Listen we are facing a climate emergency But don't worry we have Tree's to cut down for ugly office blocks plz don't turn your heating on tho or drive a car :/
@@louk597 understood the sarcasm but u must surely believe it wheen you say it that way, apparently for you,its useless to do something if it doesnt solve the entire problem. Switching a part of construction field to wood construction helps reduce CO2 emissions, thats it, they never said it will save human kind. just one small piece in a bigger puzzle
I am no fan of modern architecture but these wood buildings are far nicer and warmer looking than concrete and glass. No one with alot of money want to build beautiful oldschool buildings anymore it just costs too much.
Can I buy one of these at Ikea?
...on second thought, the assembly instructions seem like a pain
People should remember: forests do not store carbon just by existing. Mature trees put on little mass each year. It's young trees that rapidly soak up carbon. If you want any given square mile of forest to efficiently remove co2 from the air you have to constantly remove large mature trees to make room for younger trees and then make sure those trees you're cutting do not rot so the carbon is not returned to the air. Making buildings out of the wood is a great way to do that. But of course, when the building is eventually torn down, you've got to make sure the wood is buried deep underground where it cannot rot.
The idea is to lock up the carbon in the buildings for a few hundred years in the hope that atmospheric CO2 reduction has been mastered by the time the buildings are recycled.
I don't understand how this hasn't been in any news in Sweden...
Although I don't read the news too often but still, I still think I should've heard about it before TH-cam and Google telling me
Is anyone aware of projects as large as these bldgs in hurricane/typhoon/earthquake zones, just curious?
What is the workaround to the thermal bridging properties of wood?
Hope they separate each city block with a firewall. Remember what happened in Rome and just recently in Hawaii.
My curiosity is if there is a fire and any degree of significant damage what the challenges of removing variouse elements (clt) and repleacing them in this type of structure
1:35 They placed Stockholm in Norrtälje lol
Bless you 😊. You make sense 😊
God, they're doing so much innovation and yet all the buildings are just a ton of rectangles.
Your typing box
wood is the new material of the future, kinda looks cool
As a geographer living in Sweden I gasped when I saw where you placed your red pin 📍 for Stockholm You missed by 100 km.
PS. In Swedish, the recent English loan word _city_ does not mean what it does in English. It means a tight unit of integrated buildings, such as a shopping center with other constructions (such as residential) built at the same time and all linked together.
And English _city_ is a _stad._
A _town_ is a _tätort,_ and a _village_ is a _by,_ a suffix still seen in English place names mainly in the old Dane law.
A _stad_ is an old designation for a town/city granted a royal charter for certain commercial purposes. Most of these grew to become large in our day, but a few remain small towns but are, by tradition, still _städer_ (plural form).
Naturally, language being what it is, there is certain murky overlap in everyday usage.
Best wishes for your channel's success.
The other thing I’m not sure I heard mention is thermal mass. Timber doesn’t retain the heat from the day the same way concrete buildings do so helps as global warming increases temps and city temps continue to rise
Finally something good for once. The renders look beautiful. No more ugly souless concrete buildings.
Yes! Instead: ugly soulless wood buildings!
The renders look no different from concrete, except for the color.
@@miketackabery7521 You are entitled to your opinion but ill tell you your eyes dont work mate. These buildings are not soulless, ive seen some in my hometown and they are far nicer than concrete and glass buildings.
@@svampen7782 forgive me. I unthinkingly wrote concrete when I meant steel. I should have written "ugly steel and glass buildings". My argument is with modernism in architecture, not construction materials. Again, forgive me.
@@miketackabery7521I agree and I do live in Sweden.
@@paledrake thank heavens for the Swedes! You people are showing us all how to successfully rebel against modernist architecture!
Sustainable architecture is NOT all about the materials. It is exemplified by the buildings that are still standing 100-200 years later and loved by those that who use/visit them over and over again. THAT would be a great sustainable development.
Wood buildings can last for quite a long time.
@@znail4675I don't deny that, but what I'm getting at is the design elements not just the construction. Is the design actually attractive to the majority of people that live close to it? Or is just a box with windows?
I'm glad all our medieval cities here in tuscany have been built with bricks and stones and they're still standing today almost intact. If they were made of wood they would have rotted away centuries ago.
Wood doesnt rot if ventilated properly. There are churches made of wood a thousand years old. Ofcourse they need to be maintained, but so does brick building
We have wooden buildings that are nearly a thousand years old. We build wooden buildings to last. They're also warmer than stone buildings which is a bonus up here.
Sure, that might work, but working with wood gives you the option of just tearing it down and rebuilding it 90 years later and still be cheaper than masonry is today.......
Even if the taller structures could survive a fire how can they be repaired? If they aren't repaired wouldn't the charred timber tend to give off a smell of burnt wood on humid days?
That happens with a chimney for a wood stove. On some warm days when the stove isn't on, the air falls in the chimney. It appears that most MT or CLT structures are not covered with sheet rock or other more fireproof material. Could that mean that after a fire the timber might only be covered over with sheetrock or some other interior finish that changes the aesthetic appeal of the timber? Would a crew have to scrape off and laminate the surface in situ? No doubt that would be very time consuming and difficult especially on CLT slab systems that cross laminate alternate boards creating a waffle like structure to allow for wiring, light fixtures and conduits. How could that be repaired at all? In those systems the timber isn't "mass' but the thickness of the usual 2x6 or 2x8 stick. No doubt those will burn through quickly. In fact their configuration is like logs in my wood stove - just perfect for keeping a fire going and very hot. Air can easily reach the combustion.
As far as I know there have been no fires in any CLT or mass timber buildings. A steel frame with proper fire resistant protection or a concrete frame building will also survive a fire but they are easier to repair.
And for the past 30 years bombing of buildings has become more common. Or perhaps it just seems like they are?. In many cases the concrete or steel frame survives and only the partitions and windows are destroyed. But the entire structure doesn't collapse.
Why? Reinforces concrete can be pretty much eternal, there are no significant earthquakes in Scandinavia, so it is cheaper than in southern europe and there is much greater chance to keep the buildings undamaged, and population is not growing. Isn't it cheaper and better for the environment to build once and keep forever, wood requires maintenance and will not last half as much as concrete.
Most buildings have a very short life cycle. Especially in the western world. So it makes much more sense using renewable materials.
Wooden buildings lasts for centuries and are warmer than concrete buildings.
Concrete requires mainenance, too.
Some roman buildings last for milennia, but most modern construction will crumble quickly if you stop maintaining it. Once water gets in, it's a question of a few decades.
Almost everything needs maintenance- and most things that don't, loose their purpose sooner or later.
Roman viaducts may still stand, but aren't up to modern demand.
These will really withstand all the staircase explosions and it will certainly not burn down
as someone from Stockholm, I would love to see this!
So all the rich influencers can move in there, while you can't afford to, and then preach about how you have to be "green" like they are?
As someone living in sweden I see this as an attempt at recreating the 1888 blaze of sundsvall on a larger scale.