The modern wave of mass timber construction, pushed forward by pioneering architects and aided by experienced timber frame suppliers, is one that symbolises a moment when a material seen as a relic of the past becomes the beacon of a beautiful future.
For as long as humanity has built shelters, wooden construction has existed, but over the past few decades, there has been a distinct shift in its role in providing a green construction future.
Whilst always seen as a natural, worthy building material, the growth of timber construction both in terms of the number of buildings that use the material and the sheer audacious ambition of buildings such as Ascent In Milwaukee, the tallest wooden building ever made.
Whilst the concept of building a building made of mass timber might have been seen as overly ambitious in the past, wooden buildings that are close to 300 ft tall exist and a highly ambitious project to build a 350 m tall wooden skyscraper in Tokyo (1,148 ft) is set to commence construction this year.
Before this current wave of mass timber structures disrupting the existing dominance of concrete and steel buildings, there were other buildings that helped to pioneer this modern wave and prove how relevant wood construction is beyond sustainability benefits.
Here are some of the buildings that made a green construction future possible through mass timber.
Ölzbündt
Choosing a starting point for modern mass timber is difficult given that there has always been some degree of timber construction for as long as there has been construction of any kind.
However, a good starting point for the discussion of the modern use of timber and a watershed moment that proved that timber framing was an effective and sustainable solution for large housing projects was Ölzbündt in Austria.
It was amongst the first housing developments of any kind to be defined as a passive house due to how little energy it needed for heating and cooling. Wood is an excellent insulator and this was taken full advantage of by studio HK Architekten, led by Hermann Kaufmann.
It must be noted that the structure of the building was not entirely made from timber; there were steel supports, there were other steel design elements and a canopy roof designed to add weatherproofing.
However, what it does is prove the principle, revive what was at that point a lost art and plant the seed that would germinate into the modern timber frame construction world. It still stands strong to this day, proving that timber construction has considerable longevity.
Bau Technik Zentrum
The Construction Technology Centre at Austria’s Graz University of Technology is a critical building when it comes to mass timber construction, not just for the building itself but the groundbreaking research that was undertaken within it.
Starting with the exterior, however, the BTZ was the first timber building to have a curved roof when it was completed in 2001, one of the earliest examples of mass timber using a series of prefabricated wooden panels, and an early pioneering example of cross-laminated timber.
This discovery, first described at Graz, created much stronger timber that did not have weaknesses along the grain, allowing for timber to be used as a structural material for increasingly ambitious construction projects.
Somewhat fittingly, other practical research advancements in CLT were developed inside the BTZ thanks to the work of the Institute for Timber Engineering and Wood Technology.
Murray Grove
A lot of the early pioneering building concepts were based in Austria, primarily because a significant part of the Austrian landscape is populated by vast forests and therefore there is a long tradition of timber construction.
The first decade of the modern era of mass timber since Ölzbündt was about proving the principle and showing that timber is useful as a structural material, as well as providing aesthetic and biophilic benefits.
Once the principle had been proven with BTZ, architects fascinated by mass timber started to wonder if it would be possible to make tall buildings that were structurally sound and built from timber.
The skyscraper was seen as the ultimate architectural achievement of steel and concrete and a type of building only possible due to the use of such environmentally expensive materials.
This led to the Murray Grove project in London, and when it was completed in 2009 brought mass timber to the UK, a huge number of firsts and awards and proved the economic case for timber when a global financial crisis had devastated the entire industry.
When it was finished, it was the world’s tallest timber residential building, was constructed entirely from timber unlike the previous attempts, took just 27 days for the fundamental honeycomb superstructure to be built and 49 weeks for the whole building to be completed.
This was 23 weeks less than a typical building of its size made from concrete and steel would take, and this figure made a lot of architects and building contractors stand up and take notice of the potential of mass timber.
To this day, we are still living in the world Murray Grove helped create, and the greater ambitions for timber construction in buildings more than twice its height could only have been possible with the Hackney apartment proving the principle.
Forté
One country that was particularly fascinated by the potential for tall timber buildings was Australia, which took the truly audacious step of commissioning and importing 750 CLT panels from Austria to the other side of the world in order to construct Forté.
Completed in 2012, despite the obvious carbon implications of importing mass timber, the 10-storey building managed to still have a lower carbon footprint than comparable buildings using concrete, becoming just the second apartment in Australia to get a maximum Green Star rating from Green Building Council.
Although far from an ideal arrangement, the fact that even with a journey around the world it still had a lower environmental impact highlighted just how significant the environmental benefits of using timber framing were.
Because of this, whilst Forté itself faced constant regulatory battles to get approved, Australia’s building regulations changed to allow for mass timber structures to be constructed more easily without requiring the levels of intensive review they used to.