STORY / PUBLIC SOURCE RECORD
Norway is home to the world’s second tallest timber building
- Published 27 March 2023; updated 21 September 2026; estimated reading time 4 minutes. Mjøstårnet in Brumunddal is 85.4 metres and 18 storeys, opened in March 2019 after two years’ construction. It contains offices, 33 apartments, a 72-room hotel, restaurant and rooftop terrace; a wooden municipal swimming pool sits next door. Norway spruce/glulam is the primary structure, with concrete limited mainly to foundations/floors and steel to beam connections. It was certified tallest timber building in 2019, then surpassed by Ascent MKE in August 2022; the page now calls it second tallest.
- Moelven Limtre supplied glulam; Voll Arkitekter designed the building and Hent built it. The article describes glulam as layered spruce bonded into structural beams/columns and says it can withstand severe weather and earthquakes and has fire performance comparable to concrete. It argues timber can reduce embodied emissions and store tree carbon, while reporting that steel/concrete production emits nearly one-sixth of global CO₂ and that producing steel beams uses 2–3 times more energy and 6–12 times more fossil fuels than glulam. These broad comparisons are source claims.
- Prefabrication was central: structural modules were made offsite, assembled four storeys at a time and hoisted into place, reducing on-site assembly and scaffolding. The article presents prefab as reducing material waste, supporting reuse and lowering construction-site energy use. Related industry: Architecture and construction. No direct contact block shown.