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https://www.theguardian.com/news/ng-interactive/2026/aug/27/the-flat-pack-skyscraper-how-wood-can-shape-the-cities-of-the-future>
"I travelled to Oslo in the early autumn. It felt like arriving into the
future. Or, at least, a fragment of a possible future. I drove north in the
quiet digital bubble of my electric rental car. In 2024, Norway became the
first country in the world where electric cars outnumbered petrol cars.
A smooth, pristine motorway unfolded between farmlands and low hillsides of
dense green forest. Long tunnels carried the route up above the banks of Lake
Mjøsa, Norway’s largest lake. After a little more than an hour, the road curved
downward to run parallel to the lakeshore.
Through gaps in a line of golden birch trees, a tall, slim structure broke the
horizon. It rose from the water’s edge, topped by a triangular crown of bare,
interlocking beams. Against the heavy grey sky and the enfolding mist, it
radiated a gentle warmth from its pale burnt-orange exterior. The only building
of any height anywhere in the surrounding landscape, it is known as
Mjøstårnet, the “Tower of Mjøsa”: an 18-storey, 277ft (84m)-high wooden
skyscraper. The tallest all-timber building in the world.
Mjøstårnet occupies a slice of shoreline next to the small town of Brumunddal.
It incorporates offices, apartments, and a 72-room hotel. I was staying on the
11th floor, and I rode up in an elevator shaft fabricated entirely of wood
(although the elevator cabin itself was made of steel and glass).
Two sides of my corner room had large picture windows, one looking west across
the lake and the other north along the shore. There were wooden floors
throughout, wooden tables and lamps, a wooden bed, and pair of low swivel
chairs formed out of thin slats of bent pinewood.
Most striking of all was the huge wooden column that formed both the corner
piece of the room and – extending in segments above and below me – one of the
four edge-points of the whole tower. It looked reassuringly sturdy, as if it
were the trunk of a massive tree that had been stripped of its bark and worked
into a smoothed organic approximation of a geometric strut of steel or
concrete. Which is almost exactly the case: except that it is not just one tree
but many – a series of blocks of timber that are precision cut and then pressed
and held together using extremely strong glue, creating what is known as mass
timber, or glulam (short for “glued laminated timber”).
The piece in my room was the largest of its kind in the building, its
cross-section measuring some 2ft wide by 5ft (0.6m by 1.5m) long. Although
coated in a pale wax laminate, you could still see the unique knots and whorls
running across its composite slices of wood.
Through the window, mist slipped in waves down the forested slopes of the far
shore. Gusts of wind blew fine rain against the glass. Inside, there was no
sound. The view shifted from white, to grey, to the encroaching blue of night.
Eventually I settled down to sleep in what, I realised then, amounted to
something of a childhood fantasy – a giant treehouse in the sky."
Via Susan ****
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
