White Arkitekter

Sara Kulturhus Center

Sara Kulturhus Center

SARA KULTURHUS CENTER

White Arkitekter

CATEGORY
Cultural Center

LOCATION
Skellefteå, Sweden

PHOTOGRAPHS
Åke E:son Lindman, Patrick Degerman, Jonas Westling

YEAR
2021

The internationally active office White Arkitekter is dedicated to the renewable material wood and ecologically and socially sustainable architecture.

Sara Kulturhus Center
Sara Kulturhus Center

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 centre right in the core of the city combining theatre, museum, art gallery, public library, conference centre and hotel – opens this year.

Sara Kulturhus Center
Sara Kulturhus Center
Sara Kulturhus Center

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 minimising the project's climate footprint.

A NEW CULTURAL CENTRE.

In 2016, White Arkitekter won the international design competition for the new cultural centre Sara Kulturhus in Skellefteå.

Sara Kulturhus Center
Sara Kulturhus Center

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 do not only create a new living room for the city’s inhabitants, but also a showcase for sustainable design.

Sara Kulturhus Center
Sara Kulturhus Center

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

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.

Sara Kulturhus Center
Sara Kulturhus Center

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.

Sara Kulturhus Center
Sara Kulturhus Center

INNOVATIVE SOLUTIONS FOR SUSTAINABLE CONSTRUCTION.

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 programme has called for a range of innovative solutions in solid wood construction to handle spans, flexibility, acoustics and overall statics.

Sara Kulturhus Center
Sara Kulturhus Center

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.


Sara Kulturhus Center
Sara Kulturhus Center
Sara Kulturhus Center
Sara Kulturhus Center
Sara Kulturhus Center
Sara Kulturhus Center
Sara Kulturhus Center
Sara Kulturhus Center


Sara Kulturhus Center
Floor plan level 1
Sara Kulturhus Center
Floor plan level 2
Sara Kulturhus Center
Floor plan level 3
Sara Kulturhus Center
Floor plan level 4
Sara Kulturhus Center
Floor plan level 9
Sara Kulturhus Center
Floor plan level 20


Sara Kulturhus Center
East facade
Sara Kulturhus Center
South facade
Sara Kulturhus Center
West facade
Sara Kulturhus Center
Section

White Arkitekter
T +46 31 608600
White Arkitekter
Magasinsgatan 10, 403 17 Göteborg, Sweden