This special issue is dedicated to the 10th Forum Wood Building Nordic, organized by Forum Holzbau, Wood Building Nordic AB, Smart Housing Småland, The Swedish Wood Building Council and Linnaeus University, 22–24 of September 2021.
Forum Wood Building is translated from the German “Forum-Holzbau”, which is a society run by the Universities of Applied Sciences in Biel (CH) and Rosenheim (GER), Aalto University School of Science and Technology Helsinki (FI), the Technical Universities in Munich (GER) and Vienna (AUT), and the University of Northern British Columbia in Prince George (CAN), all providing excellence in Wood Building research and education. Among other things, Forum-Holzbau aims at promoting and facilitating the use of wood in the building industry.
Today, the conference portfolio of Forum-Holzbau consists of about ten annual events in different countries, of which Forum Wood Building Nordic mainly represents the Northern European countries. Surplus funds are directed to the Foundation Forum Holz, supporting R&D projects and student works.
The 10th edition of Forum Wood Building Nordic is dedicated to the topic Growing beyond being a challenger: Wood Building in the 2020th! This reflects the development of the building material wood in the past decades and serves as well as a future promise. Challenging traditional building materials, single projects were built and evaluated. Industry, academia and the public sector showed that the triple helix concept not only exists in textbooks but can act as a mean in acting towards a more sustainable building industry. Whilst early research activities mainly focused on constructional aspects, the areas of research slowly but surely extended towards e.g. material science, built environment, architecture, business models, markets and logistics, finance and economics, production and robotics. Offerings developed from single-family houses to multi-family houses, public buildings in wood gained on market share and even newcomers or career changers discovered the immense potential of wood as a building material. The challenger became an established player that is able and willing to bear responsibility for the future development of our society.
A vast share of the infrastructure of the world we will see in 50 years has yet to be build and the wood building industry will take a leading role in that development. This very special journal issue is aiming to be part of that scenario. Results from international researchers, representing different field related to wood building, are part of that development. The published articles correspond to selected presentations at the 10th Forum Wood Building Nordic and are part of the conference program.
The organizers of the 10th Forum Wood Building Nordic thank all involved authors for submitting their abstracts and articles, the involved professionals in the international scientific committee for selecting appropriate contributions, the highly valuable reviewers for their engagement in the essential process of ensuring academic quality, and last but not least, editor Prof. Dick Sandberg, Luleå University of Technology, for his sedulous commitment in all parts of the publishing process.