In Scandinavia, wooden buildings reach new heights

A sandy-coloured tower glints in the sunlight and dominates the skyline of the Swedish town of Skelleftea as Scandinavia harnesses its wood resources to lead a global trend towards erecting eco-friendly high-rises.

The Sara Cultural Centre is one of the world's tallest timber buildings, made primarily from spruce and towering 75 metres (246 feet) over rows of snow-dusted houses and surrounding forest.
The 20-storey timber structure, which houses a hotel, a library, an exhibition hall and theatre stages, opened at the end of 2021 in the northern town of 35,000 people.
Forests cover much of Sweden's northern regions, most of it spruce, and building timber homes is a longstanding tradition.
Swedish architects now want to spearhead a revolution and steer the industry towards more sustainable construction methods as large wooden buildings sprout up in Sweden and neighbouring Nordic nations thanks to advancing industry techniques.
"The pillars together with the beams, the interaction with the steel and wood, that is what carries the 20 storeys of the hotel," Therese Kreisel, a Skelleftea urban planning official, tells AFP during a tour of the cultural centre.
Even the lift shafts are made entirely of wood. "There is no plaster, no seal, no isolation on the wood," she says, adding that this "is unique when it comes to a 20-storey building".

The main advantage of working with wood is that it is more environmentally friendly, proponents say.
Cement -- used to make concrete -- and steel, two of the most common construction materials, are among the most polluting industries because they emit huge amounts of carbon dioxide, a major greenhouse gas.
But wood emits little CO2 during its production and retains the carbon...