Efforts to make buildings greener are not working

ARCHITECTURE STUDENTS used to visit Brumunddal, a town of 10,000 people on the shore of Norway’s biggest lake, for all the wrong reasons. Its crime-ridden high street illustrated how not to design a town centre. In the 1990s a third of all racist attacks in Norway, a country of some 5m people, occurred there. But locals hope that architects will soon have a better excuse to visit. In March the world’s tallest wooden skyscraper, 85 metres high, will open on Brumunddal’s waterfront.

The Mjostarnet tower currently looks like a naked tree rising spectacularly above the town’s low-rise concrete housing. But it is not the pine cladding of the tower that makes it special. The surprise is that all of its supporting columns are made of glulam—wooden beams laminated together. These are lighter than steel of comparable strength and require just one-sixth as much energy to produce. Most of the wood came from sawmills and spruce forests within a 50km radius of the tower, says Rune Abrahamsen, chief executive of Moelven, the Norwegian firm that supplied it. In short, few greenhouse gases were emitted in creating and transporting materials for the tower.