Sweden’s White Arkitekter and the City of Lviv have signed a Memorandum of Understanding to deliver Ukraine’s first mass timber school, with the western Ukrainian project committed as a national demonstrator for sustainable reconstruction, regulatory testing and skills development — and the first built pilot under the Swedish-funded SustainTimber: Standards for Sustainable Transition initiative. That is according to Carl Bäckstrand, Deputy CEO and International Director at White Arkitekter, who confirmed the school will operate as a full-scale testbed for timber construction aligned with European standards and EU integration goals.
Funded by the Swedish Institute through the SI Ukraine Cooperation Programme, SustainTimber is led by White Arkitekter, with the Lviv-based practice Studio Zmist and the Swedish Institute for Standards (SIS), and is positioned within Ukraine’s National Recovery Plan as the country’s mass timber regulatory framework. Wood Central understands that the MoU carries the programme from the policy roadmap into its first built pilot, with the Lviv school selected to test materials, building methods, and regulatory frameworks ahead of nationwide replication.
In a statement, Bäckstrand said the Lviv pilot would demonstrate feasibility and support wider replication across Ukrainian cities, with the project shaped through months of dialogue with public authorities and industry stakeholders. “The collaboration marks an important step in translating shared knowledge into tangible initiatives,” Bäckstrand said.
Volodymyr Stasiv, Lead Specialist of the Department of Architecture and Spatial Development at the City of Lviv, said the school would give Ukrainian authorities a working model for modern timber construction whilst delivering high-quality social infrastructure for war-affected communities. “A valuable opportunity to implement modern timber construction technologies in Ukraine,” Stasiv said.
With more than 3,500 educational facilities damaged or destroyed across Ukraine since February 2022, Russian strikes have left nearly 400 schools completely destroyed and pushed 5.3 million children into disrupted learning, according to figures published by Ukraine’s Ministry of Education and UNICEF. Ukraine has lost one in every seven schools to drone, missile and artillery attack, with the impact falling hardest on regions east of the Dnipro and on cities under recurring aerial assault.
The MoU comes as Lviv has emerged as Ukraine’s mass timber civic testbed under Mayor Andriy Sadovyi, with the SustainTimber school joining Pritzker laureate Shigeru Ban’s cross-laminated timber extension to Ukraine’s largest hospital — announced by Sadovyi at the Lviv Urban Forum in June 2023 — as the city’s flagship international mass timber civic projects. Wood Central understands that the SustainTimber school is the first built pilot from the 2025 roadmap, delivered by White Arkitekter, Studio Zmist, and SIS, with Swedish and Ukrainian partners.
White Arkitekter — one of Scandinavia’s leading practices with around 500 staff across Sweden, the United Kingdom, Germany and Canada — has worked with Studio Zmist since 2022, when the Ukrainian firm sent a wide cooperation request to European architectural studios in the months after Russia’s full-scale invasion devastated Ukrainian cities. The Swedish practice is best known for the 30,000-square-metre Sara Cultural Centre in Skellefteå — a 75-metre, 20-storey CLT high-rise completed in 2021 and winner of MIPIM’s 2018 Best Future Project award.
Bäckstrand said the Lviv school would feed directly into White Arkitekter’s 2030 pledge for regenerative, climate-neutral architecture, with the SustainTimber roadmap identifying school-scale reference projects as the primary driver of EU-aligned mass timber rollout across Ukrainian municipalities — alignment Kyiv must complete ahead of the European Union Deforestation Regulation’s 30 December 2026 enforcement date for forest products entering the bloc.
