Swedish architects are planning a housing development on Stockholm's waterfront featuring 31 cross-laminated timber (CLT) towers.
Designers Anders Berensson Architects were commissioned by the political group Stockholm Centre Party to conceive a sustainable district for the Swedish city. The development is a collection of towers and sky bridges built on top of the existing waterfront neighborhood of Masthamnen. The plan would leave the buildings below relatively untouched but would cap them with a public park and walkway level over which the new towers would rise.
The designers embraced wood as a building material because it “releases the least carbon dioxide.” Renderings show interiors and exteriors clad with wood finishes, and the architects describe the buildings using mass timber technologies like cross-laminated timber (CLT).
Made of the CLT, the 31 towers will be between 25 and 35 stories and spread across an area of 19 blocks. In addition to homes, the buildings will contain more than 90 shops and restaurants.
The imaginative scheme is meant to provide additional housing close to the center of Stockholm, where the housing market is tight and space is expensive. There are no apparent plans to enact the proposal. The Center Party has worked with Berensson before on speculative designs for the city, many of which have included timber high-rises. The party has relatively little power to realize these ideas as they are the opposition party in the city’s government, which is controlled by the Social Democrats.
Timber has received a lot of attention in Sweden as a structural material for high-rises, although it’s not clear what the country has been able to realize so far. Globally, mass timber is starting to make inroads as a standard building technique, but it faces a long road to widespread adoption in the U.S.
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