#Wooden skyscraper series
"All buildings over a certain size need to have sprinklers and active fire suppression systems - irrelevant of whether it's wood, concrete or steel," he adds.Ī series of blazes at Dubai skyscrapers in recent years have highlighted that it isn't just timber buildings at risk of catching fire. Therefore, fire engineers can calculate how large a block of wood is needed to provide a protective layer to sustain a building for a certain period of time. Very big pieces of wood are quite hard to set on fire - they aren't kindling material." The great fires of London and Chicago were both sparked by very small pieces of wood. "Timber doesn't burn in the way the public imagines. "There is a huge perception problem," says Ramage.
His center has been awarded £250,000 ($353,785) from the Engineering Physical Sciences Research Council in the UK to research timber construction techniques, such as fire proofing. Ramage says Oakwood Tower - an extension of the Barbican Center in Central London - would exceed Britain's fire standards of regular steel and concrete buildings. Obviously, when it comes to wooden buildings, there's one burning question. Kevin Flanagan, a partner at PLP architects, adds that in the future he can imagine the industry genetically modifying wood to make it even more conducive to high-rise construction. You get large pieces of what looks like lumber. "We can take the walls of bamboo tubes, cut them up into rectangles and glue them into big slabs. "We're working on engineered bamboo," says Ramage. With a five-times higher growth rate than wood, but similar mechanical properties, there are 31.4 million hectares of bamboo worldwide, according to the Food and Agricultural Organization.
"There's a whole bunch of new materials made out of wood that are structurally able to build big buildings," says Dr Michael Ramage, of the Center for Natural Material Innovation at Cambridge University.Ĭross-laminated timber, for example, sees thin layers of wood placed across one another at right angles, and laminated with fire-resistant glue to create a stronger weave.īut it's bamboo - a material that has been used in Asian construction for centuries - that most interests Ramage. New types of ultra-strong timber are partly driving the trend for wooden buildings. At 1,000 feet tall, it would only be overshadowed in London by The Shard. The 80-story tower, if given the green light for construction, will be London's first wooden skyscraper. It's been called an experiment in pushing the frontiers of building with wood. Meanwhile, the Oakwood Tower is a proposed joint project by PLP Architecture and Cambridge University's Department of Architecture. It took that title in 2014 from the 10-story, 104-feet-high Forte residential block, which overlooks Melbourne's Victoria Harbour and was completed in 2012. The 18-story Brock Commons Tallwood House, a student residence, topped out last year at the University of British Columbia (UBC), in Vancouver, and has been dubbed the world's tallest "plyscraper."īefore it topped out, The Treet in Central Bergen, Norway, was the world's tallest timber. Over the past decade, there has been a global explosion of timber towers, either built or proposed, every one seemingly a recorder breaker in some respect.Ĭanada currently holds the world record for the world's tallest timber tower, at 164 feet tall. It isn't only Japan where wooden skyscrapers are putting down roots. In 2010, it passed the Promotion of Use of Wood in Public Buildings Act, which required all government buildings up to three stories high to be constructed with wood, or to utilize wood. The Japanese government is trying to encourage more developers to use wood. "The aim is to create environmentally-friendly and timber-utilizing cities where (cities) become forests through increased use of wooden architecture for high-rise buildings," the company said in a press release. Green balconies will populate the skyscraper's exterior, connecting the building to its environment. A steel vibration-control framework will underpin the design - an important feature in a city where earthquakes are frequent. The 70-story tower will be a hybrid structure made from 90% wooden materials. The W350 tower will cost an estimated 600 billion yen ($5.6 billion) to build. Japanese company Sumitomo Forestry says its 1,148-feet-tall timber tower will be completed in 2041, to mark the 350th anniversary of the business that year. A Tokyo skyscraper is set to become the world's tallest wooden building.
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