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
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.
@@louk597 What do you mean with climate change BS? It is not something you can just agree or disagree on. There is physical and scientific proof that it is real. You can not argue what is true.
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."
@@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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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
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
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
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.
@@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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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 :)
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.
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.
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
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 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.
. . .but how much additional building do we need - generally. Lots of office buildings sit half empty. Plus, older buildings, when we tear them down, generate waste. Why not rehabilitate such buildings? They can be modified for modern living too.
@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!
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
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.
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...
Also timber absorbs & re-radiates much less heat than stone, brick & concrete.. so really looking forward to this tech taking off in Australia. Not holding my breath tho 🙄
I don't see the problem of using timber when building. New trees will be planted when cut down and as such will capture more carbon from the atmosphere, new timber buildings are resistant to fire when treated and they look a whole lot nicer than concrete boxes.
Plus producing concrete creates a large amount of CO2 anyway. Just by avoiding concrete, you're already reducing the footprint, without even talking about the wood binding more of if.
The problem is that we use clearcutting hete in Sweden and then we plant monocultures . Also we cut down more natural forest than we get from the plantations, most of the forest in Sweden is really young. Also when you cut down a forest a lot of emissions is generated cause a large part of the tree is not used like the roots
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.
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 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
@@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.
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!
Curious. It used to be that the Swedish fire inspectors would not allow wooden residential buildings past a certain size, since even if companies producing the material claimed it lived up to the demand on fire proofing / burn tempo, there was too little practical data from real life scenarios to prove it. Real catch 22 moment. No way to get the data without building that way, and no way to build that way without the data.
That guy had the most appropriate name ever. "Blomster" actually means "bloom", so his name is "Urban Bloom" - quite fitting for a guy working with environmentally sustainable urban planning!
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
Europeans: Makes fun of Americans for having so many new build wooden houses over brick or stone Also Europeans: Making entire city districts out of wood in 2023
Eh. What? Single family wooden houses are the norm in the Nordics. Have been for hundreds of years. It’s more that we look at what you build and are concerned about the lack of quality due to very loose building laws.
@@markusolofzon You're gaslighting, that's not what people say when they criticize wood structures. it was never about building laws, it was about the materials. The comment is correct, I still see this said quite often (wood is destructive for the environment, useless and weak, etc all the tropes).
@@markusolofzon Europe is more than just "the Nordics". And please refrain from talking about "lack of quality" until you address half the crap being pushed out by Ikea.
@@roccobierman4985 touched a sore toe with the quality comment? Oh no 🙄. Nobody looks to IKEA for quality. Also. This video is about a Scandinavian country in the Nordics which is located a the top of the Nordics. You generalized all of Europe for making comments.
@@Knight_Kin I’m gaslighting? I literally am saying wood is the most popular way of building in the Nordics and that that isn’t why the US building of housing is often criticized. Your comment say I’m gaslighting and that what we do is making comments about building in wood. That makes no sense.
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
I can't believe this video is so biased for the eco-ideology that it chooses to not mention catastrophic failures of wooden structure, just in Norway which is the world's king of infrastructure there have been 2 modern wooden bridge collapses just years after being built. You can't just tell people everything is gonna be OK look at these beautiful 3D renders, this is manipulation, modern wood structures are a whole new pandora's box and you can't just put people's lives at risk, you have to mention the good and the bad.
Swede and living in Malmo, Skåne. We're building an office building made of wood by our border to Copenhagen (Hyllie) and it is fucking enormous! Buuuut as some other swedes already said in their comments, it would be the top 10% percent living there because living in Sweden right now is damn near impossible economically.
@@REDnBLACKnREDI think he's talking about the Tokyo fires that quickly spread through the city's widespread wooden buildings, after the US started using incendiary bombs during the air raids on Japan.
@@stevengunter4990 It isn't. Archive data from 2018 (it's the most recent in their archive, take it as you will) from Tokyo Metropolitan Government (TMG) show that, at least for dwellings, is: Wooden and fire-proofed: 1,944,700 Non-wooden: 4,426,700
This is how they were built way back in the day , BUT they stopped building in wood because the fire dangers and risks in the tightly built crowded cities , so just another example that they dont learn from history. But wooden houses are really great on the country side .
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 :(
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 What do you mean with climate change BS? It is not something you can just agree or disagree on. There is physical and scientific proof that it is real. You can not argue what is true.
@@louk597 so convenient to live in your filter bubble devoid of facts🤦♂
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
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 😂
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
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 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.
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....
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.
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
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.
Sustainable timber sounds like it will remain sustainable right until everybody starts using it. Would love to be proven wrong though.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Fire is looking real nice 🔥🔥🔥
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.
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.
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 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.
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
We learned about this in building physics class. The teacher is a consultant on many of these projects.
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
Great stuff. Thanks for sharing.
I'm from Skellefteå and the art center seen in the video is Sara Kulturhus,, our new landmark.
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 :)
wood is the new material of the future, kinda looks cool
Very enjoyable as always 👍
As a person from sweden, this is crazy. I gotta go there
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.
"Timber" Kesha and Pitbull were ahead of their time! 🎶
I live closer to were this is being build. Im so gonna go see this being build and enjoy every moment.❤❤.
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.
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
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 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.
Hope they separate each city block with a firewall. Remember what happened in Rome and just recently in Hawaii.
. . .but how much additional building do we need - generally. Lots of office buildings sit half empty. Plus, older buildings, when we tear them down, generate waste. Why not rehabilitate such buildings? They can be modified for modern living too.
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!
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
"Sweden is Building a Whole City Out of Wood"
Sweden is Building Part of City Out of Wood
More like one neighbourhood
I hope it works better than those wood bridges that failed.
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.
Great video, I hope to see a new video on the planned new tallest wooden skyscraper in Perth, Australia
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?
Can I buy one of these at Ikea?
...on second thought, the assembly instructions seem like a pain
God, they're doing so much innovation and yet all the buildings are just a ton of rectangles.
Your typing box
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...
I'm a swede, living in sweden. Have never heard of this project!
Building a city with timber is not a feasible solution to concrete as forests are being destroyed
Thankyou someone with common sense
Making concrete requires limestone which is also a finite product and a rare one at that in Sweden.
Also timber absorbs & re-radiates much less heat than stone, brick & concrete.. so really looking forward to this tech taking off in Australia. Not holding my breath tho 🙄
Interesting project! We're also happy to see our yellow adjustable wall braces in many of the shots!
I don't see the problem of using timber when building. New trees will be planted when cut down and as such will capture more carbon from the atmosphere, new timber buildings are resistant to fire when treated and they look a whole lot nicer than concrete boxes.
Plus producing concrete creates a large amount of CO2 anyway. Just by avoiding concrete, you're already reducing the footprint, without even talking about the wood binding more of if.
The problem is that we use clearcutting hete in Sweden and then we plant monocultures . Also we cut down more natural forest than we get from the plantations, most of the forest in Sweden is really young. Also when you cut down a forest a lot of emissions is generated cause a large part of the tree is not used like the roots
"A few 100 kilometres across the baltic sea" proceeds to place the Stockholm marker in Norrtälje. Thats the same distance as London and Oxford.
Chicago with the 1800’s Chicago Fire side eye 💀🔥
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.
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.
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
Considering the current state of my beloved country, Sweden needs bomb secure bunkers at the moment. Not some flimsy ass wood 😢
These will really withstand all the staircase explosions and it will certainly not burn down
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!
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!
That Stockholm pin on the map a few minutes in tho. You'd be hard pressed to find anything but fishing huts and summer homes there
You missed the placement of the pin when mapping out Stockholm at 1:35 :)
Curious. It used to be that the Swedish fire inspectors would not allow wooden residential buildings past a certain size, since even if companies producing the material claimed it lived up to the demand on fire proofing / burn tempo, there was too little practical data from real life scenarios to prove it. Real catch 22 moment.
No way to get the data without building that way, and no way to build that way without the data.
Im from Sweden. This will never happen. Forget it...
“Isn’t it good, Norwegian wood” Except Swedish wood.
That guy had the most appropriate name ever. "Blomster" actually means "bloom", so his name is "Urban Bloom" - quite fitting for a guy working with environmentally sustainable urban planning!
Blomster does also means flowerbed. Interestingly, Rabatt is also used, which can also be translated to discount.
I like how the pin at 1:37 is 100km from Stockholm city....
Looking forward for the termites and woodpeckers.
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 someone living in sweden I see this as an attempt at recreating the 1888 blaze of sundsvall on a larger scale.
We tried that already. It didn't go so well. I'm talking about the great fire of Stockholm in 1625.
Europeans: Makes fun of Americans for having so many new build wooden houses over brick or stone
Also Europeans: Making entire city districts out of wood in 2023
Eh. What? Single family wooden houses are the norm in the Nordics. Have been for hundreds of years. It’s more that we look at what you build and are concerned about the lack of quality due to very loose building laws.
@@markusolofzon You're gaslighting, that's not what people say when they criticize wood structures. it was never about building laws, it was about the materials. The comment is correct, I still see this said quite often (wood is destructive for the environment, useless and weak, etc all the tropes).
@@markusolofzon Europe is more than just "the Nordics". And please refrain from talking about "lack of quality" until you address half the crap being pushed out by Ikea.
@@roccobierman4985 touched a sore toe with the quality comment? Oh no 🙄.
Nobody looks to IKEA for quality.
Also. This video is about a Scandinavian country in the Nordics which is located a the top of the Nordics. You generalized all of Europe for making comments.
@@Knight_Kin I’m gaslighting? I literally am saying wood is the most popular way of building in the Nordics and that that isn’t why the US building of housing is often criticized. Your comment say I’m gaslighting and that what we do is making comments about building in wood. That makes no sense.
4:50 So the survey was carried out by the organization with a vested interest in a certain outcome of said survey. How credible...
1:40 I think the pin for Stockholm is in the wrong location 😅 it's further south left of "baltic sea"
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
I can't believe this video is so biased for the eco-ideology that it chooses to not mention catastrophic failures of wooden structure, just in Norway which is the world's king of infrastructure there have been 2 modern wooden bridge collapses just years after being built. You can't just tell people everything is gonna be OK look at these beautiful 3D renders, this is manipulation, modern wood structures are a whole new pandora's box and you can't just put people's lives at risk, you have to mention the good and the bad.
What is the workaround to the thermal bridging properties of wood?
Swede and living in Malmo, Skåne. We're building an office building made of wood by our border to Copenhagen (Hyllie) and it is fucking enormous! Buuuut as some other swedes already said in their comments, it would be the top 10% percent living there because living in Sweden right now is damn near impossible economically.
Sweden about to find out why Tokyo religiously adopted concrete :P
Sweden does not get earthquakes or typhoons like Japan.
@@REDnBLACKnREDI think he's talking about the Tokyo fires that quickly spread through the city's widespread wooden buildings, after the US started using incendiary bombs during the air raids on Japan.
@@Rain-jx1po If such an attack were to happen then wood or not a city would go up in flames anyway, like Dresden which wasn't made of wood.
Most buildings in the greater tokyo area are still made of wood, and more than half of what they build today is........
@@stevengunter4990 It isn't. Archive data from 2018 (it's the most recent in their archive, take it as you will) from Tokyo Metropolitan Government (TMG) show that, at least for dwellings, is:
Wooden and fire-proofed: 1,944,700
Non-wooden: 4,426,700
Never mind fire, what about water and moisture? Termites? How resilient will these buildings be to those?
What could go wrong…
Nothing?!? Lol
All it take is one person who forgot they left a candle on
This is how they were built way back in the day , BUT they stopped building in wood because the fire dangers and risks in the tightly built crowded cities , so just another example that they dont learn from history. But wooden houses are really great on the country side .
it will be so amazing for all 10 years it will be there!
And here I am, 15min away from Sickla not having an idea that this was gonna happen before watching this video
Looks unreal