This past week was one of the few opportunities the TallWood team have managed to have a face2face meeting due to Covid 19 restrictions.  Following the successful NRI hosted meeting in Bodø, Norway (October 2021), the TallWood project team were this time hosted by RISE in Skellefteå, Sweden.  The team both stayed at, and brought into the project, the engineeringly impressive and architecturally inspiring Wood Hotel.  The 20-storey hotel space is integrated with the culture house, library and public ‘covered’ square bringing both public and private space together in a celebration of sustainable design and construction with wood.    Six months in operation it is buzzing with those wishing to celebrate both its excellence and cross border knowledge exchange in innovation and sustainable practices.

The Tallwood project team benefited from a number of presentations about the Wood Hotel, Skellefteå (design and building for robustness) and site visit of the building as part of our two-day meeting schedule.  Other presentations included site visits to some impressive long wooden bridges, eight storey wooden construction apartments, the historical old wooden church town and university research laboratories (timber stress testing, timber moisture analysis CT scanning dept, finishes and glue research laboratory, etc).

In addition, this was a timely meeting to discuss future project applications (Horizon Europe and Aurora) and progress in our specialist areas.  Colleagues are working on multiple applied science challenges for the industry such as: structural elements for planning tools of multi-story wooden buildings; moisture management in wooden buildings; testing methods and noise reduction (in use stage) in wooden buildings, Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) and collaboration in wooden buildings.

NRI are responsible for Work Package 6 (WP6) which will deliver the analysis of building processes and measurement of material properties of wooden pilot buildings; Life Circle Analysis and Assessment (LCA); and Trans-National and regional cluster development for actors involved in hybrid and wooden construction.

We are currently working in collaboration with project partners and our Norwegian collaboration partners to develop a sound methodology for the LCA (cradle-to-cradle) assessing and bring together actors from various Nordic countries to form a northern timber cluster.  Case studies will be drawn from Norwegian, Swedish, and Finnish projects.

Taking advantage of some down time, we were hosted in some lovely historical buildings adjacent to the Landskyrkan  church, where we enjoyed developing new project ideas and furthering our project relationships.

With our newfound ability to meet face2face we also look forward to meetings in Finland and a site visit to other wood innovation buildings, such as the Wood Hotel Brumunddal (Mjøstårnet), Norway.