About the project

Welcome to Katajanokan Laituri, the 247,600 sq ft (23,000 m²) low-carbon landscraper, home to the world’s leading renewable materials company, Stora Enso. The internationally acclaimed urban redevelopment sets a new benchmark in life cycle assessment (LCA)-led design and provides outstanding biophilic amenities to the City of Helsinki with waterfront hotel rooms, event space, open-plan offices, restaurants, cafés, and rooftop terraces.

As one of the largest and most established wood suppliers and forest owners, holding the number one market position for cross-laminated timber (CLT), (sawing capacity 191 million cu ft / 5.4 million m³) and operating the largest fully automated coating line, with a capacity of 5.4 million sq ft (500,000 m²), it’s perfectly fitting that Stora Enso has used the most resource-efficient methods and materials available today, to create their new head office.

The structural frame comprises over 269,451 cu ft (7,630 m³) of CLT and laminated veneer lumber (LVL) with preinstalled steel parts.

All structural LVL beams and columns are LVL G LX. They were further processed by a specialist subcontractor, who cut them to shape and block-glued them to their final dimensions before sanding and coating them with UV and moisture protection to specification. The ground floor columns (diamond-shaped multi-panel columns) were preinstalled with glued-in rods to create the interface with the concrete basement and foundations. Each individual piece was manufactured with tight tolerances with a combination of visual and non-visual surfaces. Stora Enso has a reputation for some of the best CLT surface qualities which enabled much of the load-bearing CLT walls to be left exposed.

As Europe’s leading industrial component manufacturer, Stora Enso provided the extremely strong, load-bearing window components (Effex®Dura) to support the 700 panoramic windows. Katajanokan Laituri is built to last at least 100 years.