One of the world’s largest automotive manufacturers—Volvo —is on track to build a significant part of its new campus in wood. It comes as mass timber fabricator Martinsons supplied more than 900 cubic metres of glulam to be used in the first of five cubes at its Gothenburg headquarters, which broke ground last year.
Announced last year, the new cubes are part of Volvo’s grand plans for a state-of-the-art’ Mobility Innovation Destination Torslanda’, a tailor-made testing group that will help Volvo develop its next generation of wireless and bidirectional charging electric and autonomous cars by 2027—all to be built in time for the car giant’s 100-year celebrations.
“The sustainability goals of the project are ambitious. The first new building, which has an area of 25,000 square meters, will be used exclusively by Volvo Cars. It is a wooden hybrid that reduces the CO2 footprint by 15% compared to a traditional steel and concrete frame,” according to Volvo Cars, which is developing the land parcel with real estate developers Vectura Fastigheter and Next Step Group.
“It feels great to be involved in such a prestigious and much-talked-about development. Being entrusted with this contract demonstrates great confidence in our ability to deliver timber frame systems,” according to Hans Nordström, Martinsons Account Manager, who said the fabricator is working closely with BRA Bygg – the builder, Optima Engineering – the structural engineer and assembly team at GEMAB to design the cube.
No stranger to timber construction, the car giant last year opened ‘the World of Volvo’ – part museum, part exhibit, and part delivery program – including a new restaurant run by a Michelin-star chef, Stefan Karlsson, all under a five-storey mass timber superstructure!
Designed by Henning Larsen, the practice behind Europe’s largest timber district under construction in Copenhagen, the 22,000-square-metre giant cross-laminated and glulam shrine took over four years to build and used more than 2,800 tons of timber, including more than 2,400 glulam beams and 2,700 cross-laminated timber boards.
“Not long ago, working with timber on this scale was hard to imagine,” according to Fabia Baumann, the structural engineer for the project, who added that architects on the build had to build a tailored digital workflow to support the design work. “It’s just amazing that we could make this happen, from the initiative sketches that were free form and had to be rationalised to now seeing it unfold in construction.”
