These forests, like those of so-called production forests or working forests around the world, from Karelia to the Carolinas, form the base of an enormous industrial pyramid, the foundation of a staggering array of consumer products of which mass timber is only the latest. After its disastrous World War II invasion of the Soviet Union-Finland carries the dubious distinction of having been Hitler’s only democratic ally-the country paid its onerous reparations bill with the wood it produced by converting its thick boreal forests into a highly managed landscape. This is a project that carries, in Finland, shades of a national religion. The Forest Research Institute, like counterparts in Sweden and Norway, designed and built the apartment building as a test project in its constant search for new products to make from their nation’s forests. “Oh, they have one in Oslo that is 13 stories,” he says with the ghost of a grin, “but their first floor is concrete. That makes this building, according to Asikainen, the executive vice president of the Forest Research Institute at the University of Eastern Finland, the tallest all-wood building in the world. Specifically, one of the high-tech, engineered materials collectively called mass timber or structural timber.
Here in Finland it’s wood: In fact, save for a two-inch concrete slab between each floor, the whole building is made of wood. Virtually anyplace else in the world, that exposed skeleton would be concrete reinforced with steel. The Jonesuu apartment building is a case in point. That system, however, depends on something that is disappearing: a steady climate and forests that remain where they’ve been, a paradigm threatened by the very climate crisis that makes carbon-sucking buildings seem appealing. For the past hundred years, that system of so-called scientific forestry, which grew up to counter the seemingly unstoppable deforestation of late 19th and early 20th-century Europe, has provided the wood products that a growing population requires. ( See what cities of the future could look like.)Īll of those products, from the paper fluff in diapers to the bones of skyscrapers, rest on a possible irresolvable contradiction: They all rely on the steady, controlled growth of trees, with harvests generally planned out decades in advance.
#Skyscraper made out of wood upgrade#
If all new-model wood products have their acolytes, proponents of mass timber speak of it with a particularly evangelical zeal, because they see it as not only a chance to decarbonize the construction sector, but also a significant technical upgrade in its own right.
#Skyscraper made out of wood full#
The day before, Asikainen says, the river and canals had been full of an enormous float of spruce logs on their way down from North Karelia or the Russian boreal forests, bound for markets beyond the Baltic Sea. Piles of mostly spruce stacked in the rail yard stretch to the horizon.
Mass timber has a particular utopian appeal among a certain set of architects and designers, and its supporters predict that the cities of the future will be all-wood high-rises like the one Asikainen and I are standing in above the eastern Finland university town of Joensuu, which spreads like a carpet along the canals of the Pielisjoki River.īelow us, the landscape bears the fruits of a style of forestry calibrated to reliably turn out the most trees possible. The frame inside is made of mass timber, a high-density wood product that is one of the new range of high-tech products the global economy relies upon forests to fill. “Look at this,” Antti Asikainen, an austere, affable Finnish forestry professor, says admiringly, pointing to a rectangular hole cut in the sheetrock of a 12-story apartment building, exposing the skeleton below. Now a growing industry wants to bring back the golden age of wood starting with skyscrapers. People were born in oak beds and rocked in poplar cradles and killed by walnut-stock rifles and buried in pine coffins. Everything from weapons and wheels, barrels and houses, tools for cooking and industry, was at least in part derived from materials taken from the bodies of trees. Until about your grandparents’ childhood-or maybe your great-grandparents'-the world was made of wood. The Heinrich Boll Foundation and the Pulitzer Center provided grant support for this story.
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