Sara Cultural Centre has recently been awarded the winner of the International Award for Wood Architecture, which aims to reward quality in wood architecture industry.
“We are very honored to receive this award whose aim is to stimulate the development of innovative architectural thinking using wood. Sara Cultural Centre draws attention because it is unusually tall and made of a lot of wood. But at the same time, it is a very local project, sprung from the community,” said Oskar Norelius and Robert Schmitz, lead architects of the 20-storeys-tall wooden building in Skellefteå, Sweden.
The main goal when designing Sara Cultural Centre was to point out the possibilities of using wood as a construction material for complex high-rise buildings to minimise the industry’s carbon footprint.
“In the context of the construction industry’s net-zero transition, we have shown with Sara Cultural Centre that it is possible to build sustainably and climate-neutral even on a large scale and without compromising on aesthetics. So, there are no reasons to ignore sustainable solutions,” concluded Norelius and Schmitz.
