April 25 & May 2, 2022 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Rebecca Mead’s absorbing “Norwegian Wood,” an account of her trip to Brumunddal, Norway, to see eighteen-story Mjøstårnet, the world’s tallest all-timber tower. Mead puts us squarely there, inside Mjøstårnet:

The material from which the tower had been built was evident, though, in the airy ground-floor lobby and restaurant, where wooden dining tables and chairs were arrayed on bare wooden floorboards, wooden pendant lampshades dangled on long cords, and large bamboo palms in pots were clustered at the base of a curved wooden staircase that rose to a mezzanine. Large columns supporting the building, as well as angled braces cutting across the restaurant’s walls of windows, were formed from massive glulam blocks, the thickest of which were almost five feet by two feet, like pieces from a monstrous Jenga set. Riding a glass-walled elevator to my room, on the eleventh floor, I noticed that the elevator shaft was built from similar chunky blocks.

Those glulam blocks are what give Mjøstårnet its strength and stability. “Glulam” is short for “glued laminated timber.” Mead writes, 

Glulam is manufactured at industrial scale from the spruce and pine forests that cover about a third of Norway’s landmass, including the slopes around Brumunddal, from which the timber for Mjøstårnet was harvested.

She also visits several other innovative all-wood structures, including a seven-story timber office building in Oslo. She says of it,

The tower’s base was occupied by a cafeteria. In its concrete floor, blond-wood furnishings, and floor-to-ceiling windows partly obscured by massive trusses made with blocks of glulam, I could see a wooden-architecture vernacular emerging: airy spaces formed by pale wood beams and columns that had visibly been slotted and joined together. The wooden surfaces had been treated only minimally, to prevent the kind of yellowing that Norwegians associate with old-timey country cabins—the “Norwegian wood” of the Beatles song. Instead, the palette was a globally fashionable greige and cream.

My favourite passage in Mead’s piece is her description of her Mjøstårnet hotel room:

I put my bag down on a blond-wood coffee table by the window, and settled into a low swivel chair, its comfortable backrest fashioned from bent-wood strips. In December, Brumunddal enjoys less than six hours of daylight; had I sat there long enough, I could have watched the sun rise and set with only the barest swivel to adjust my line of sight. The room was quiet and, despite the lowering skies, it was light. With its minimal, tasteful furnishings—a narrow blond-wood desk; a double bed made up with white linens and a crimson blanket—it had the virtuous feel of a spa. I had no desire to go elsewhere….

“Norwegian Wood” is double bliss: great subject; wonderful writing. I enjoyed it immensely.