To reduce the “green” half of Sweden’s carbon emissions caused by the forest industries, Anders Berensson Architects have proposed to build the worlds largest timber structure titled the Bank of Norrland. The design aims to store carbon dioxide and a year's worth of timber production, ensuring the continuity of the Swedish construction and manufacturing industries regardless of weather and consumption.
The cubic kilometer of stored logs will form the world’s largest timber structure and the largest man-made carbon dioxide storage built to date. Instead of burning timber for paper or fuel as it is practiced nowadays, the structure will help store the wood for future use. This process prevents the release of large amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
At full capacity, the structure will extend over a cubic kilometer and contain 900 million logs, which is around 330 million cubic meters of wood. The structure is built by placing logs on top of each other, forming large walls that intersect to create stable cubes. The logs are dried and monitored closely to avoid shrinkage in the structure.
Sweden is in an ongoing process of reducing its consumption of oil-based products in the aims of becoming a fossil-free, climate neutral country. To follow through with their plan, the country must soon find solutions to its forest industry, and address how and why the citizens harvest wood. The conceptual project of Bank of Norrland summarizes facts about Sweden’s current forest industry and proposes a new radical architecture that preserves the natural resource.
The Bank of Norrland has been developed for the “Architectures of Transition” exhibition at Bildmuseet in Umeå, an event open to visitors until March 2022. The project is a conceptual proposal and will not be realized in the near future.
