apartment blocks, industrial buildings, schools, etc. “Building new skyscrapers is a thing of the past, an expression of power. We should really renovate existing ones, by using the valuable medium of wood to make them comfortable and biocompatible,” the expert argues. Utilising and preserving the forest Switzerland has a unique law governing its forests, dating from 1903. “We cut down the forest in order to maintain it,” says Rafael Villar, who underlines the fact that the cost to local authorities of maintaining forests is not balanced out by revenue from wood. The trick is cutting down trees strategically, as for a gymnasium project in Aigle (Vaud), with which his firm was involved. The firm selected trees in the forests of Vaud colonised by bark beetles, an insect that feeds on sap and whose presence exposes the bark to a fungus that can turn the wood blue. “Cutting these trees down saves the wood and lets us put the trees to good use,” the engineer says. A lot of wood is burned However, not all wood cut in Switzerland is used wisely, and some of it ends up as firewood, remarks Ernst Zürcher. One of the main reasons for this is the rise in the price of fossil fuels. A better approach would be to use wood by order of priority, with wood being devoted first and foremost to construction, then to composite products, then to paper and finally as a fuel. “In Switzerland, saw mills are closing because of lack of demand. We even export wood only to reimport it once it has been processed,” laments Zürcher. He stresses the value of promoting forests locally. “There are 5,000 people working in forests, so we are creating employment for over 50,000 people in the wood industry. Burning wood, on the other hand, creates very little added value,” he reflects. Currently, the Swiss wood industry employs 85,000 people. Do we have enough wood? The natural growth of Switzerland’s forests produces ten million cubic metres of wood every year. The country harvests five million of those on average every year, of which 25 per cent is used for heating. The available potential is equivalent to three million cubic metres annually. There is therefore real room for improvement in how Switzerland uses its wood. And there is no shortage of projects. Sébastien Droz cites the Lignum prize, launched in 2009, as an example. “Since then, the quality, diversity and volume of projects have grown significantly,” he says. Another example is the 500-metre wooden skyway that meanders through the forest canopy in Toggenburg, near St. Gallen. This achievement is a reminder of the power of wooden constructions in Switzerland. State-of-the-art: massive beams of beechwood are glued together and then made into custom-made building parts. The Zwhatt high-rise has a very cleanlined structure, consisting of an interior skeleton of wooden beams and pillars, with flexible partition walls. Photos: Pensimo, Sandro Straube, Boltshauser Architekten Swiss Review / April 2025 / No.2 16 Report
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