Two for one: Växjö’s timber city hall-rail station hybrid
If Hackney, North London, is the capital of urban timber and Austria’s Vorarlberg Europe’s crossroads where rural timber and carpentry meets sustainable architecture and tech culture, then Southern Sweden’s Växjö is the continent’s exemplar wood town. Hackney can show off Dalston Works, and Vorarlberg a cross section of smaller timber jewels. But until recently the Swedish town didn’t really have a go to timber building to present.
Today, all this has changed. In 2021, in the quiet of Covid the completion of the town’s hybrid rail station and municipality headquarters, has brought a showcase hybrid to Sweden’s pioneering wood town.
Won originally by White Arkiteter in 2016, one of Sweden’s largest practices with form in contemporary timber. White’s team, led by Klara Frosterud and Rafel Crespo Solana. For some the result, Växjö Stadsplas, is a large twenty-first century barn. Others see a rail station, or an upmarket office development which happens to sit almost on top of, but is actually beside, the railway tracks. It’s all of these. Its site means it is close to Växjö’s old town, some distance from the town’s other timber building hubs. Its 450 pitched and glazed roof, slopes dramatically down to the first floor facing the town side, while maintaining its internal functions under a single roof. White developed a design which drew together three main functions: town hall, station, and the ground floor with its common and commercial spaces amidst the circulation. But along the way things changed, and another practice, the Swedish conglomerate, Sweco, took over. Now, the completed design differs significantly with what Frosterud and Solana initially proposed, and unfortunately not in a way that improved.
The architects envisaged the building as a common space for all, introducing their competition entry as “Welcome to Växjö’s Living Room”, organised around its different functions under a single big roof. The six-storey building, its maximum height, is tied to a row of new buildings across the far southern side of the station, alongside the town’s nearby handsome and historical church immediately to the east. For the most part, the building sits visible above the four and five-storey buildings which line Växjö’s grid-hatched central streets, dominating the town centre’s skyline. As project architect Crespa Solana notes, regarding the precedent setting hybrid: “(it is) a very special combination, quite unique,” project architect Crespa Solana offers regarding the precedent setting hybrid, before continuing: “It’s a very special combination, quite unique, a multi-purpose house. It was quite smart of the municipality, they needed a travel centre and a new municipality hall and tried to find the synergies.”
A pitched face also marks the eastern station entrance of the oblong mass, while the southern rail and trackside and the western station entrance façades are vertical. Dressed in a rhythmic mix of brown, orange, and lighter beige panels, the external façade, a local artist’s design, references the Småland region glass making and design tradition, which is also found in the roof tiles of older buildings. Face on, the building dominates views from roads leading to the station, and is significantly taller than any of the old central town. Encountering it suddenly at the end of the street one can imagine the side view of a moored ocean liner, and once visible as a single form, a locomotive without wheels.
Sitting alone, a solitary block in front of the tracks dividing the old town with Växjö’s southern lakes, larger corporate office buildings, and further suburbs, the Stadsplas makes for an oddly hermetic piece of place-making. Somewhat apparitional at night, by day the long block stands as a single sentinel in front of the taller blocks of offices and commercial buildings demarcating a boundary line to a different zone.
How the municipality came to decide on this singular marriage of city hall with the rail station, thereby creating a new hybrid typology, is something of a story-in-itself. That’s one part of the station’s story, which was revealed a second only after the design was underway.
Växjö, sitting amidst an inland archipelago of lakes, is known as Sweden’s first wood town, having pioneered timber buildings since the 1990s. Such credentials have burnished a broader green city agenda, which was rewarded in 2017 when Växjö was jointly awarded the EU’s Green Leaf award for greenest European city. Sødra, one of Sweden’s larger wood co-operative businesses covering Småland and the south, is headquartered in the town, and the Linnaeus University features an influential timber engineering department. Along one of town’s lakeside’s is Limnologen, the early, influential midrise timber housing project, which has been followed by a host of other projects have appeared in their wake. The single-lensed focus on wood, though, is these days outdated; much more emphasis is placed on Life Cycle Analysis. “It’s better than a wood solution,” says Henrik Wibroe, the municipality’s planning department’s sole architect. “When the owner is the community, we should build in wood. More than half the public buildings are in wood.”
– photo Växjö Municipality
This hardly means that the majority are timber, particularly in the old town’s central district. The council, stuck with a poorly functioning concrete city office, had begun discussions about what to do in 2014. Likewise, the city’s railway station needed renewal, although the conversation with Swedish Railways wasn’t going anywhere. An initial report made a persuasive case for a carbon cutting renovation and energy performance spec. The cost of the energy performance overhaul of the existing office was comparable, and might be less than a new building.
If the council considered pursuing entirely new council offices, this opened the option of the existing council Kommunhus or city hall being repurposed. With a shortfall in homes and housing a conversion from office to residential use could help the council to meet its housing requirements. But where to build a new council office?
One potential site was close to the railway station, next to Växjö’s modest town centre grid of streets. The council went back to the railway. Re-engaging with Jernhusen, the Swedish railways stations company, a proposal was made – why not combine the two – to build the new municipality's new office building by the rail tracks, and place the station in the same building, on the ground floor. As Växjö’s erstwhile mayor, Anna Tenje notes, by drawing together station with offices, “we’d deal with not one but three headaches.” By answering the question of what to do with the old council building and old station while providing a new Kummunhus (city hall and rail station, and new council housing – Växjö’s politician’s envisaged a three-way win. It also could show off the city’s Wood First policy and act as a gateway to a 21st-century timber future.
It was fitting that this small south Sweden city, which has led the way in greening smaller urban entities, had again come up with something new, this time about transport infrastructure, in their search for densification. Swedish Rail liked the idea, Tenje, today a minister in the centre-right government, says. In 2016 a competition was held organised by the Växjö Fastighetsförvaltning AB, or Vöfab, the municipal property company that owns and manages the town’s public buildings portfolio, with the country’s largest practice submitting a design which would win when it came to decision time. But for White Arkitekter there was to be a bitter-sweet tinge to the project.
Vöfab ran the competition. When it was eventually whittled down to a five-entry shortlist, it included two Danish studios, both from Aarhus, shl arkitekter and CF Møller, plus Stockholm’s Tengbom and Malmo’s Fojab Arkitekter, all of which Wibrae is full of praise for. “The shortlist consisted of five excellent entries, very good and extremel high architectural value.” There wasn’t a pre-set plan for what they wanted, beyond various site conditions. Standing fourteen metres from the city side, and not taller than six storeys, there was a shared desire within the municipality that it needed to be “a wood building” and one which highlighted sustainability, one of the factors in which White’s entry stood out. Everyone was so sure it needed to be wood that there wasn’t even a discussion.” The sustainability programme proposed is a big part of the building, because it covered the building statics, acoustics, statics, and the cost.
White Arkitekter was chosen from this mix of Danish and Swedish offices in a pre-qualified competition, with a jury including Gert Wingardh and Dorte Mandrup, which underlined submissions needing to highlight the town’s pioneering wood focus, a point the two White architects are keen to emphasise their design took seriously. The White team began on the design, and the programming proceeds as planned. But then things began to go awry.
The White team began work on their design. But according to the architects, quite quickly during first meetings and before any official announcement had been made about the project, it became clear that Skanska, one of Sweden’s largest construction companies, were already lined up as the consortium’s build partners. The fifth largest building company internationally and one of Sweden’s largest corporations, Skanska’s origins are as a concrete manufacturer, their concrete expertise continuing to play a central role to the present day. Timber, however, was another matter.
At an early meeting, the Skanska team began to argue that the building needed to use far more concrete than White’s design called for. Frosterud and Solana sound weary as they recall how they feel their design was gradually undermined. Not only did Skanska not have the timber expertise to design in wood, but they contended that the budget could be reduced if the design was adapted to concrete.
White’s design conceived of a broad, expansive ground floor, with wider circulation corridors leading to an open atrium, and symbolically, a tree rising, around a small winter garden, at its centre. The staircase up to the municipality’s public reception area would be wide and open too, with an open-plan office design.
– render White Arkitekter
With Skanska part of the team, the design began to conduct a series of iterations. “There were many changes, Vöfab and Skanska made a lot of demands.” The openplan offices were replaced with closed-meeting rooms, the ground floor corridors narrowed, and the overall footprint for the atrium square shrank. Not only this, but significant technical elements of White’s design, related to solar reflection and ventilation, were removed from the brief. Then the tree disappeared.
Skanska, Wibroe acknowledges, isn’t exactly a paragon of the timber transformation. When he heard he was as amazed as the two White architects: “We all said at the time how can this be? Why Skanska? They’ve never wanted to work with wood.” By contrast, while hardly a radical outfit, White has been dipping in and out of the country’s emerging 21st-century timber building culture since the late 1990s. Still, Sweco began a revised design at the back end of 2017. Lack of experience and expertise didn’t appear to matter and, over the Zoom call, Wibroe appeared to want to believe their involvement and exposure to Växjö and wood-based architecture has had a positive influence on the corporate, and in engaging with building in wood.
White was asked to bid for the equivalent of the UK stage four work, with further changes to the design. Submitting the bid, the architects emphasised continued use of timber in the design, but as it turned out Skanska had already presented a series of further changes under preparation with another of Sweden’s largest architects, Sweco. By the time they sat down with Vöfab, White’s replacement appeared to be a fait accompli. “We didn’t know they wanted something else,” says Frosterud now.
White’s design changes were rejected, and though asked to continue as design consultants, surely to keep White’s name on the project, the architects decided enough was enough. The situation was less than satisfactory. Those who’d envisaged a thorough-going timber showcase, including Henrik Wibroe were “really disappointed.” Today, several years on from their removal from the project, Frosterud and Crispi-Solana say they are mainly sad about the finishes; and how it could have been so much better. For his part, Wibroe notes how “it is always very sad when the architects are changed,” Wibroe says of Sweco’s take over from White halfway through the build. “It should be law that architects can’t be changed”
A visit to the station makes clear that a significant chunk of the building can be traced back to the two White architects, not least the organisation of the two separate functions. The completed station hub takes up the ground floor, while four and a half of the remaining floors above are given over to the municipality, beginning with an open reception area on the first floor, reached via an escalator. Here, the public can access council services, at a contact point, and other facilities.
The ground floor foyer has markedly changed from White’s original thinking. Gone is the tree and more expansive central meeting space, while the access corridors running the length of the building are narrow and somewhat dark. The completed 780m2 of public space features the usual complement of fast-food outlets, the ubiquitous Swedish presence of a Pressbyrån newsagent outlet, and the regional Länstrafiken Kronoberg's travel office. Though pushed by Tenje as a social hub and meeting space, it is hard not to experience the finished result as little more than a tasteful if still characterless retail waiting area.
Originally I’d thought that the city hall was literally built over the tracks but with further plans and renders released it became clear the building stood beside the platforms, denting – at least for me – something of its novelty. Still, a connection to the trains and tracks is maintained by a passenger bridge providing a throughway cutting into the station’s public first floor and escalators. Outside, there are further examples of changes including a fake plastic wood façade lining the town facing side of the building. The landscaping to the station’s immediate East hasn’t been realised. A small piece of parkland immediately in front of the station forecourt, was when I visited a set aside building site, or a second building which is to stand on the far side, this may have since happened.
Above the publically accessible first-floor space, the next three floors comprise a mix of open plan, break out, and closed off office space for Växjö’s municipality’s six-hundred strong administration staff. Into what is essentially a conventional timber fit-out – even if the wraparound wood floors, walls, and ceilings make for a distinctive environment compared to the traditional office – the White design dropped an open atrium in the middle of the building. Seen from below, the floors suggest a super-wide inverted staircase, each floor leaning out over the last, bringing drama to the view. Looking up past the staggered faux-cantilevered floors, the pitched and glazed façade provides a second skin, as well as significant natural light, evoking a greenhouse feel to what could have been – but wasn’t – an internal hanging garden of falling multi-level plant life. Similarly, looking down from the different levels creates drama to the atrium’s ground level, the station’s central concourse.
The double-height sixth floor is primarily reserved, unsurprisingly, for larger meetings, events, and functions and comprises several differently scaled conference and seminar type rooms, further open space rippling around the atrium, and at each end of smaller spill-over meeting spaces. A modest roof terrace features a mini-ecosystem, featuring rooftop plant-life, while views over the townscape reflect the height of the building. The building features some of the usual roll call of sustainability features, including 577 m2 of solar PV modules on the roof and a sustainable urban drainage system. But it is the timber which is the main event.
The partially pitched roof sits over a massive glulam skeleton frame, expanding outwards floor by floor down to the second floor. Europe’s largest timber company, Austria’s Binderholz, was commissioned to deliver the timber construction. To do so, a large temporary tent-like structure was built in 2018, at the beginning of the build under which Binderholz’s team worked through the following winter to complete their part in the build programme. At the time Binderholz had begun moving their distribution from road to rail, and the Växjö project was one of the earlier long-distance deliveries from Binderholz’s central European factories. Some 1100m3 glulam and 3100m3 of cross-laminated timber were transported by rail, symbolic given it was for a railway station. Organised around a 5m by 5.4m plan, the building’s glulam timber frame climbs through the floors, cross bracing running up the building, with only some visible. At ground level narrow corridors edged by nine post and beam frames on the station side, plus seven on the far Växjö Station side, hold up scissor trusses spanning parts of the first-floor ceiling.
Along with the contract for delivering the timber, Binderholz were responsible for the building’s technical performance, implemented through BIM and 3D modelling. Why such a high-profile Swedish building in the country’s prime wood city wasn’t built with Swedish wood is on the face of it quixotic. But according to Frosterud and Crespo Solana apparently, there wasn’t a production capacity in Sweden. The architects talked with Martinsons, but the final decision to award the contract to Binderholz brought on the rail journeys from the Alpine Austrian factory, all the way north to Alveston, the mainline junction where the timber was unloaded and loaded onto lorries to make the last 15km by artic and windy, Swedish roads.
Frosterud and Crespo Solana liked the idea of highlighting and expanding on the transport connection motif, and the building was originally envisaged as a connector between people and Växjö’s timber identity. Its hybrid character emphasised collaborative, working together, and that it was buildable, emphasising smart design that could deliver an advanced design. As to the external design, the panel system punctuates a sea of individual windows protected by plate layers of glass stapled into the façade. The muted colours, brown fading into creams and oranges are augmented by vertical lighting, which come into their own at night. Frosterud says: “The idea was to make this skin of the roof, creating a golden skin, its repetition creating a pulse and rhythm, echoing travel and transportation.”
One consequence is that from outside the station does not look much like a timber building, although these days this is not unusual. Inside is a different matter. Some of those arriving in Växjö, wondering what they are about to uncover in Sweden’s wood city, may be taken aback, as the station area gives few clues as to the building’s eventual timber nature. For anyone who hoped that the convergence of a timber showcase with sustainable transport, in the form of rail, would produce something more holistically overarching in the station’s broader infrastructural design vision, this will inevitably be disappointing. But maybe this was always a faint hope.
Still, the convergence of a timber showcase with sustainable transport which rail travel symbolises, could have produced a more holistic and connected overarching vision for a mobility interchange. Not least since Växjö has a Europe-wide reputation as Sweden’s wood town. Wibroe notes that the planning department states that timber is being integrated across much of the municipality’s public estate. “It isn’t only buildings. We are working across the municipality to introduce wood into infrastructure: “We are always working with this discussion.” In practice this built infrastructure has a new look, but Wibroe acknowledges it doesn’t extend to bus or cycle shelters and infrastructure. Perhaps it could though. The department acknowledges how public transport is a powerful tool for long-term sustainable development in most parts of the country, with a four-fifths increase in public transport journeys across the Kronoberg region between 2006 and 2019, with 10.6 million journeys made by bus and train.
Though the hybrid town hall station is a fully timber building, only some of this transformation makes it into the rest of the station. The station has received a complete makever, the upgraded platform canopies feature underside wood cladding but for safety reasons – in case of train accidents – platform shelter columns are required to be in concrete. A second constraint is that the platforms and their shelters fall under rail rather than station infrastructure, and are owned by Trafikverket, Sweden’s rail network infrastructure company, who are responsible for the design implementation, rather than Jernhusen. This said, according to Wibroe, timber, including CLT, have been used in the shelter roofs and bridges. The second pedestrian and passenger bridge – designed by Gothenburg’s Metro Arkitekter – eatures structural CLT, alongside steel and concrete, and a delightfully sculptural timber roof rippling along the bridgeroof.
Until recently, those arriving crossed the bridge, and after descending, were met with a large anonymous tract of open concrete space doubling as the bus station. Here local buses pull up and depart stands with old windswept, and steel, bus-shelters. A makeover was planned, though and the plot of land closest to the rail station has since become a building site, with developer OBOS recently completing a seventy unit housing block, Brf Norra Station. Will the bus shelter infrastructure fare any better: will they be timber – or bio-based – shelters and in the process send a different signal?
Does this undermine the sustainability message that a high-profile timber main station project would aim to communicate? Might it have been different if Växjö had been on rather than being a short detour off the main Stockholm-Malmø mainline? Probably not, and despite regular commuter train services, Växjö is not a major station.
Though press attention has been modest, the hybrid station office has picked up a small handful of awards, including the Swedish Green Building Council’s gold environmental certification (Miljöbyggnad Guld), a PEFC award, and local awards. The Nordic world is making significant regulatory steps towards zero carbon targets, which means greater use of timber and natural materials. It feels inevitable that in Sweden, one of Europe’s prime timber countries, that the use of materials will become more and more mainstream, including, specifically, across transport infrastructure. In doing so, it’ll be returning to industrial timber’s roots.
Just over one hundred years ago, in the first half 1920s, the railway stations of Sweden’s three largest cities, Stockholm, Gothenburg, and Malmø saw some of the very first glulam structures completed. Malmø’s station roof was completed in 1923, and 2025 will be the anniversary of Stockholm’s glulam canopy. Both continue to function at the heart of their respective stations. There are other contemporary rail stations across the Swedish rail network. Umeå, for instance, features a White Arkitekter-designed glass and timber foyer and ticketing hall, while smaller recent commuter stations around Stockholm’s growing suburbs, similarly highlight the material. For instance, transport and infrastructure architects, & Rundquist designed the striking 2018 Källhall station, futuristic funnel-like mouths at an overhauled commuter stop, feeding on the shoals of commuters, into the expansion south of the capital. During spring 2024, in the High North again, Skellefteå, Växjö’s northern Wood City competitor, announced that Danish practice, CF Møller, had been chosen to design the city’s brand-new station, as part of the Norrbotnian rail extension from Umeå up the Bothnian coast to Lulea. As Jernhusen’s press representative Erika Weginer wrote: “Nowadays, it (timber) might not be as commonly used but it is not unheard of either.”
Jernhusen Weginer also noted they have put in place a carbon plan, aiming for a climate-neutral value chain by 2045, and halving the climate intensity of their operations by 2030. Even now, what is evident is how Växjö provides both a significant and unique contribution to the route map in the greening of rail transport infrastructure, not just in Sweden or the Nordics, but internationally.
Despite the disruptive takeover and change of architects, Växjö’s rail station-city hall hybrid broadens the possibilities in imagining future transport infrastructure. Who’s to say it won’t be a harbinger, an illustration of how transport infrastructure can do much more, not least with a more holistic, all-encompassing design vision. Perhaps remote, given railways are at the heart of the corporate realm, it still permits different hybrids to find their way onto various virtual drawing boards. Like Växjö’s woodcity, which is ahead of the curve, how long before the next rail station hybrid appears?
Further – see the Växjö timber town feature here
