Sara Kulturhus Center | White Arkitekter

The internationally active office White Arkitekter is dedicated to the renewable material wood and ecologically and socially sustainable architecture. In 2016, they designed a 20- storey building in Skellefteå in Sweden that will be one of the world’s tallest timber high-rise structures.

Sara Kulturhus – a new cultural center right in the core of the city combining theatre, museum, art gallery, public library, conference center, and hotel – opens this year. The building, designed to reduce embodied as well as operational carbon emissions, is mainly made of wood grown in the regional boreal forests. Solar panels and efficient energy systems further contribute to minimizing the project’s climate footprint.

In 2016, White Arkitekter won the international design competition for the new cultural center Sara Kulturhus in Skellefteå. The city is situated in the north of Sweden just below the Arctic Circle and has a long tradition of timber construction, which was the main source of inspiration for the competition proposal. White Arkitekter does not only creates a new living room for the city’s inhabitants, but also a showcase for sustainable design.

With an elevation of almost 80 meters, Sara Kulturhus houses six theatre stages, the city library, two art galleries, and a hotel with 205 rooms, a conference center, restaurants, a sky bar, and a spa. The 20-storey hotel offers dramatic views over Skellefteå’s.

Ensuring that Sara Kulturhus is an “arena” for all citizens regardless of their previous interest in culture, has been a central concern for the municipality, and a starting point for the design. The location of the building and the transparent façade with many entrances work together to lower the threshold to enter the building and to replace the image of an austere cultural institution with an open and welcoming building. Sara Kulturhus is aimed to enrich the community and become a new destination attracting visitors regionally, nationally, and internationally – a showcase for sustainable design and construction where all forms of culture live side-by-side.

With Sara Kulturhus White Arkitekter aims to expand the application possibilities of wood as a construction material for complex high-rise buildings and to make progress in the field of sustainable construction. The diverse program has called for a range of innovative solutions in solid wood construction to handle spans, flexibility, acoustics, and overall statics.

The hotel for example is built from prefabricated solid cross-laminated timber (CLT) volume modules stacked between two CLT lift cores. In contrast, the low-rise building is constructed with columns and beams of glulam and cores and shear walls of CLT. The architecturally integrated design allowed the load-bearing structure to be built entirely without concrete, speeding up construction time and drastically reducing the carbon footprint.

Project Info:
Architects: White Arkitekter
Location: Berlin, Germany
Project Year: 2021
Photographs: Åke E:son Lindman, Patrick Degerman, Jonas Westling