ELIGE MADERA Wood and Modernity in Northern Sweden If you travel to this beautiful city in northern Sweden, the first thing you’ll find at the airport is a wooden air traffic control tower emerging from a group of pine and spruce trees. Then there are the biogas buses that run through a city full of wooden apartments and schools, along with wooden bridges and parking garages; the people who built this city definitely didn’t want to have anything to do with steel or concrete. If you travel to this beautiful city in northern Sweden, the first thing you’ll find at the airport is a wooden air traffic control tower emerging from a group of pine and spruce trees. Then there are the biogas buses that run through a city full of wooden apartments and schools, along with wooden bridges and parking garages; the people who built this city definitely didn’t want to have anything to do with steel or concrete. Skellefteå is visionary city in light of the sustainable changes that are coming for the future. In fact, it’s already positioned as the spot for the production of the next generation of electric vehicle batteries and, in addition to producing them, they will also be recycled there. The city runs 100% on renewable and municipally owned energy, through hydroelectric and wind power, recycling 120,000 tons of electronic waste per year; in this process, the excess heat produced is returned to the heating system of the entire city. One of its biggest attractions is the Sara Cultural Center. With 20 floors and a height of 80 meters, it rises well above the city's average and is one of the tallest wooden buildings in the world! Its structure stores about 9,000 tons of carbon from the atmosphere, demonstrating the wonders that can be achieved with this material. As for the technology behind it, the building has two main materials: glued laminated timber (Glulam) and cross-laminated timber (CLT.) Glulam allows for greater load-bearing capacity and is ideal for use in columns and beams, which form the skeleton of this cultural center. On the other hand, CLT is a very strong material that was used specifically for the walls and floor slabs, as well as the elevator shafts. This cultural center is only one of its main attractions, but there’s no doubt that Skellefteå is an unforgettable landscape, surrounded by trees and a sustainable proposition that can be seen in every corner of the city.