Perth to get world’s tallest timber building

The “revolutionary” hybrid design of the world’s tallest timber structure will rise to a height of 191.2 meters and be located in Western Australia. The skyscraper will have 50 stories and a height of 191.2 meters.

The C6 building in South Perth will have beams, floor panels, studs, joinery, and linings made out of timber, which will account for 42% of the structure’s total mass.

On Thursday, the Metro Inner-South Joint Development Assessment Panel in Perth gave its stamp of approval to the Grange Development project that would be located at 6 Charles Street. This project will comprise more than 200 apartments. The designers claim that it will be carbon negative, meaning that it will store more carbon than it will use, and that it will combine lightweight, durable, and renewable glued laminated timber and cross-laminated timber with lower amounts of steel and concrete than standard construction methods.

It will also be taller than the hybrid timber headquarters that Atlassian is now building in central Sydney, which will reach a height of 180 meters when it is completed. Ascent, located in Wisconsin, United States, holds the record for the tallest timber building with a height of 86.6 meters and 25 floors.

Reade Dixon, an architect and principal at Fraser and Partners, stated that the project, which does not yet have a date for its construction, is innovative in an industry that has not altered much in its approach to commercial buildings over the course of the past seventy years.

The architects of the building believe that the 7,400 cubic meters of timber that were used in its construction could have been regrown within 59 minutes in a single sustainably managed forestry sector.

According to what is said on the website for the project, “C6 will consume approximately 580 pine trees sourced from sustainably managed and farmed forests.” “Concrete cannot be grown by us.”

On the rooftop of C6, there will be both edible and flower gardens.

Dixon stated that the timber for the project would either come from Australia’s largest mass timber producer, XLam, which is located in Albury, New South Wales, or it would be transported from Europe in empty iron ore ships that were returning to Western Australia.

Timothy McCarthy, who is the director of Sustainable Buildings Research Centre at University of Wollongong, noted that the statements made by the developer do not take into account the end-of-life carbon costs of timber.

“Currently, the end of life scenario for timber is landfill – people are working to get this changed – but the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] only considers permanent sequestration for materials, and timber eventually rots or burns, returning its CO2 to the atmosphere,” he added. “People are working on getting this changed.”

McCarthy highlighted that only forty percent of a tree is used for its timber; the remaining sixty percent is either tilled back into the soil or converted into mulch, and some of it is used in the production of paper. The trees that were used in the design came from sources that were completely sustainable.

Despite the fact that the grandiose design was a “tough task,” he lauded the way the project was approached.

“[C6’s] ambitions are to be lauded,” he said, “and if it can deliver that sustainability over the full life of the building, we are changing the playing field.” This is especially true in the state of Washington, where the climate is notoriously severe.

All of the project’s technical documentation will be made available to the public via open-source publication. According to Dixon, the goal is to promote more architecture made of mass timber in the built environment as a reaction to the climate issue.

According to what he had to say about it, “our greatest hope is that it challenges the industry to do future projects better.”

The production of cement alone is responsible for 8% of the world’s total carbon emissions, whereas construction as a whole is responsible for 11% of all carbon emissions. In the year 2020, Western Australia was responsible for producing 81.7 million tons of CO2, which is equivalent to 16% of Australia’s total emissions.