The future is exceptionally bright for mass timber construction, as timber frame suppliers are part of the vanguard of a green construction revolution that brings together natural materials and highly modern technological advances to make wooden buildings with capabilities previously seen as unthinkable.
Much is made about the literal and figurative rise of plyscrapers such as Ascent MKE and the benefits for construction, for inhabitants and the built environment as a whole.
However, whilst Ascent is the tallest wooden skyscraper ever made, it is far from the largest wooden building of any kind, and whilst this record could potentially be broken if the W350 Project is ever made, the current tallest wooden building in history does not exist anymore.
The Great Tower Of Mühlacker
Based in the region of Baden-Württemberg, the town of Mühlacker is a relatively small and relatively traditional town with a population of just over 26,000 people.
Around the German South West north of the Black Forest, it looks relatively nondescript except for the appearance of several exceptionally tall red and white towers dotted along the horizon.
They are part of the Mühlacker Broadcasting Transmission Facility, first switched on in 1930 and featuring several huge freestanding towers to act as transmission aerials for the region.
Originally, there were two wooden lattice towers that were 100m tall. Whilst this is still taller than Ascent MKE, they were not tall enough for the purpose of allowing clear radio transmission, and so the two towers were dismantled in 1933 and moved elsewhere.
In their place was a wooden tower that was 190m tall, which is the same height as The Scalpel in London, designed to be tall enough to hang a vertical wire antenna powerful enough to provide wide radio coverage for the south of Germany.
It is an astonishing feat of wooden engineering for the time, even taking into account that all the tower needs to hold is a wire and a relatively small cluster of electronic components, and it became a distinct symbol of Mühlacker despite the fact that it did not exist for all that long.
The tower was used alongside a cluster of smaller towers closer to 100m tall in order to broadcast throughout the South of Germany, and between them, the entire facility became the centre of broadcasting in the entire country.
This included the German Army, who used it as a communications centre from the construction of the largest wooden tower in the world until 6th April 1945, as the result of the end of the Second World War.
Ten days before the Battle of Berlin, and during a point where several major cities and towns in Germany that had known strategic importance had been bombed, there were concerns that the same would happen to Mühlacker, especially since the Battle of Stuttgart was raging in a very close vicinity.
Exactly what happened is a matter of debate. Whilst there are claims that bombing runs by the Allies took out the tower directly and just happened to miss the rest of the town, what is far more likely is that it was demolished.
As a communications tower is a critical piece of infrastructure that could be used both for propaganda and intelligence purposes, the prevailing theory is that the tower itself was deliberately destroyed for strategic purposes.
There is a chance that both could be true, as bombing raids were executed near Mühlacker, but the result is the same in either case. Ten days later, the last European battle of the Second World War was fought in Berlin, and on 5th May 1945, Germany unconditionally surrendered.
The 190m wooden tower that once stood as a monument to Mühlacker’s secret technological advances was smouldering embers, and would be replaced by a 273m steel tube mast in 1950, marking the end of the tallest wooden building ever made.
This was part of a wave of wooden radio towers constructed in the 1930s that were over 100m tall, of which only the 111m Gliwice Radio Tower in Poland is still standing and as of 2024 is the tallest surviving wooden building of any kind.
Notwithstanding the violent conflicts that led to the destruction of an entire generation of tall wooden structures, the nature of the evolution of telecommunications means that even had it not been destroyed by either the German or Allied armies, the tower would likely not still stand to this day, despite Gliwice proving that they had the capability to stand for nearly a century.