The journey north from the capital takes about an hour and a half, but I didn’t need a watch to tell me when I had arrived at Brumunddal-the incongruous sight of a tower block rising from the water’s edge was a sufficient signpost. The forested bank opposite, when it emerged from clouds of fog, was dark green against the pallid sky. The steely waters lapped a shoreline of charcoal-colored rock, on which traces of the previous weekend’s snow remained. I went to see the building in mid-December, arriving by a train from Oslo that passed through farmland and woodland before reaching the edge of Lake Mjøsa, which is Norway’s biggest. Glulam is manufactured at industrial scale from the spruce and pine forests that cover about a third of Norway’s landmass, including the slopes around Brumunddal, from which the timber for Mjøstårnet was harvested. It depends for its strength and stability not on steel and concrete but on giant wooden beams of glulam-short for “glued laminated timber”-an engineered product in which pieces of lumber are bound together with water-resistant adhesives. Like the Flatiron Building-one of the earliest steel-frame skyscrapers, which defied public skepticism about the sturdiness of a building that tapers to the extreme angle of about twenty-five degrees-Mjøstårnet is an audacious gesture and a proof of concept. (Three years later, it was capped with a penthouse.)
Its scale is similar to that of New York’s Flatiron Building, which, when completed in 1902, topped out at just over three hundred feet. Although Mjøstårnet dominates the Brumunddal skyline, it is a tenth the height of the world’s tallest structure, the Burj Khalifa, in Dubai.
It’s the third-tallest tower in Norway, a country whose buildings rarely extend above ten stories.
Mjøstårnet-the name means “Tower of Mjøsa”-stands at two hundred and eighty feet and consists of eighteen floors, combining office space, residential units, and a seventy-two-room hotel that has become a destination for visitors curious about the future of sustainable architecture and of novel achievements in structural engineering. Since 2019, however, Brumunddal has achieved a more welcome identity: as the site of Mjøstårnet, the tallest all-timber building in the world.
#Wooden skyscraper series#
The town, which has a population of eleven thousand, was until recently best known to Norwegians for a series of attacks on immigrant residents three decades ago, which led to street clashes between anti-racism protesters and supporters of the far right. Industrial buildings, mostly for the lumber industry, occupy the area closest to the lake, and the waterfront is cut off by a highway. There are no picturesque streets with cafés and boutiques, as there are in the ski resort of Lillehammer, some thirty miles to the north. This gives us much larger structural pieces to work with, which changes the scale of what we can do.” The other benefit of this engineered wood is that it’s rapidly renewable through sustainable forestry (at least in theory).This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.īrumunddal, a small municipality on the northeastern shore of Lake Mjøsa, in Norway, has for most of its history had little to recommend it to the passing visitor. “The change is that we are asking them to keep the panels whole. “The manufacturers typically cut large panels of the engineered wood into small beams,” explains Green. Engineered wood–smaller pieces glued together, not so differently from what you see in IKEA furniture–can create a stronger metawood that we’re already using in smaller scale construction. Green’s work is fueled by more than passion or tradition: The last several decades have seen several breakthroughs in wood technology. The question I ask is have we lost our spirit to innovate when we are just now catching up to century old ideas?” “Today our building codes don’t conceive of building 7-stories in wood, but 100 years ago it was common in our region. “As I write this, I sit in a 105-year-old building that is 7-stories tall and supported by solid wood columns all the way into the parking garage below the ground,” Green writes Co.Design. And he’s working on multiple projects, including a 30-story building for Vancouver, that would see this happen. He wants to build a new generation of high-rises out of wood. Architect Michael Green has an idea, an old idea.
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