“To build skyscrapers over a thousand meters high may seem like an obscenity or an extravagance,” said Austrian architect Harry Seidler in 1963, “but have no doubt that it is entirely feasible and that sooner or later someone will do it. The destiny of mankind is to impose grandiose projects and carry them out”.
Today we know that without the collapse of the real estate market in Saudi Arabia, Seidler’s old prophecy would have come true at least a year ago. It was planned that Jeddah’s Kingdom Tower, whose works were crippled in the spring of 2018, would surpass that Babylonian kilometer in 2021 to become the tallest human structure on the planet. A thousand meters, the distance that separates Madrid’s Puerta del Sol from the Almudena Cathedral, a vertical steel and concrete structure that rises a kilometer above sea level in the middle of the Arabian Desert. It would take a professional athlete just over two minutes to cover this distance. It would take a senior climber several hours to climb to the top of a vertical wall of this length.
Mjøstårnet, the tower of Lake Mjøsa, in the small Norwegian municipality of Brumunddal, holds the current height record at 18 floors and 85.5 metres. Alamy Stock Photos
The Towers of Babel in China, Dubai, Kazakhstan or Malaysia
The Tower of Jeddah, as Seidler pointed out at the time, can be an eccentric and almost obscene act of human arrogance. But it’s also not much taller than the world’s current architectural pinnacle, in operation since it opened in 2010, the Burj Khalifa Tower in Dubai, which is 829 meters tall.
In the words of British architect Peter Cook, “Projects like this spring from that ancient urge to push our limits as a species and soar to the skies, something inherent in myths like the Tower of Babel.” They also arise from competition between elite architects in the service of emerging economies or feudal satrapies.
The United States has not fully withdrawn from a race it has led for decades, but it is China, Malaysia, the United Arab Emirates or Kazakhstan who are currently competing hardest in the stratospheric thousand-meter league. For comparison: the tallest building in Western Europe, London’s Shard of Glass, is at 309 meters only 60 meters higher than the peak of the Iberian Peninsula, the Torre de Cristal in Madrid.
Old Europe is competitive, yes, in a league that is insignificant for the moment but is gaining momentum lately, that of wooden skyscrapers. Here the numbers are more modest. We’re not talking about hundreds of meters, but about dozens. But the development is starting to be noticeable in recent years.
From the student tower in Vancouver to the Norwegian skyscraper
In 2017, news broke that a Canadian CLT student residence, Vancouver’s Brock Commons Tallwood House, had risen to 175 feet, inches taller than the Treet of Bergen apartment tower. At this point, his only competitors in the league of high-flying wood were already sacred buildings from another time, relics of a time before the modern concrete dictatorship. Orthodox cathedrals like the one in Almaty or the ancient pagoda of the Fogong Temple in China, built in the 11th century and also over 50 meters high.
Among the contemporary competitors, the HAUT building in Amsterdam was the strongest, whose 21 floors should lead it to a new limit of 75 meters high. However, this project is still under construction and will already have been surpassed by larger competitors by the time it opens. The first of these was the HoHo building in Vienna, a hybrid timber and concrete skyscraper that reached a more than a respectable 84 meters in 2019, raising the bar by 31 meters in just two years. Shortly thereafter, Mjøstårnet, the Mjøsa Lake Tower, would arrive in the small Norwegian municipality of Brumunddal, which holds the current record at 18 stories and 85.5 meters tall. Not only is it one and a half meters taller than the Vienna Tower, but it also does without the complementary use of concrete, which reinforces its character as the tallest wooden skyscraper in the world.
Vancouver’s Brock Commons Tallwood House is Canadian laminate student housing.Steven Errico
Zurich time and Milwaukee time
However, everything indicates that the Norwegian tower will be a short-lived achievement. In March 2020, it was confirmed that a hybrid timber residential complex, the Ascent MKE in the US city of Milwaukee, would add another five stories to its original project, reaching 87 meters this September.
At the same time, an even more imposing wooden monster was taking shape in Europe. The Rocket & Tigerli complex in the Swiss city of Winterthur, very close to Zurich, will consist of four buildings, one of which will be up to 100 meters high. A round number that currently represents the main claim of this project, “of rabid modernity, exquisite, exclusive and full of light”, as the journalist Amarachie Orie describes it in a chronicle for CNN.
For those responsible for the project, the Danish office Schmidt Hammer Lassen Architects (SHL), “breaking a height record is always an incentive because it is a fact that goes down in history, a wonderful letter of recommendation for the building that ensures its uniqueness”. But the 100 meters are not an end in themselves. Rather, he is concerned with “demonstrating that there are hardly any limits to the feasibility of wood, that it is not a thin or not very versatile building material, but an organic and quite viable alternative to concrete or almost any other component.
Kristian Ahlmark, partner and design director of the Danish studio, adds that “Wood not only has remarkable aesthetic qualities, but also offers little-explored technical possibilities that are fully compatible with the needs of modern architecture.” It is also much more respectful of the environment .
For the ascent tower, concrete has been replaced with wood, saving emissions equivalent to removing 2,100 cars from the road.
The future of green architecture
Oscar Holland, a journalist specializing in trends and design, explains that laminated timber towers “until recently were theoretical architectural projects through which the most advanced studies attempted to raise awareness of how unsustainable it is to continue building large masses of cement”. For Holland, “It is scandalous that the construction industry is responsible for 40% of the world’s energy use and at least a third of its CO2 emissions, and we have not taken seriously the return to the massive use of less polluting materials such as wood. The expert cites a very remarkable fact: “The builders of the Ascent Tower have published that by replacing concrete with wood, their project represents an emission saving equivalent to removing 2,100 cars from the road.”
For Irene Jimeno, architect, conservationist and director of the informative blog Toca Madera, the number of promoters from Milwaukee is plausible: “Building with wood is, above all, excellent business for the planet.” and constructive point of view has several advantages, starting with speed and precision. “But the main thing is that it fits perfectly into circular economy models that allow us to reduce energy waste and carbon footprint.” The impact on forest mass “is very positive when responsible and sustainable forest management is practiced.”
The aim is to replace the specimens that are felled as part of a continuous resettlement policy, as promoted in Spain by the Spanish Association for Ecological Sustainability. In his opinion, “the best guarantee that the forest mass will be preserved is that it is used commercially with these criteria of responsibility and efficiency.”
For Jimeno it is clear that “wood is a building material with tradition and cultural roots and is also very valuable”. There is hardly anything that cannot be made from wood. Monumental architecture or high-rise buildings are no exceptions. “Despite everything,” he clarifies, “I’m not very much in favor of creating competitive dynamics and haphazardly adding plants to housing projects in order to break records.”
In his view, this tendency contributes to trivializing architecture, allowing it to enter a speculative dynamic and ultimately making it less responsible and sustainable. What Jimeno appreciates most about projects like Rocket & Tigerli or Mjøstårnet is that “they are technical achievements and very eloquent examples of the virtues of the material used, but that they have a few floors more or less and that they increase a few how many meters appear irrelevant to me and a bit toxic”.
Hyperion, the sequoia of Redwood Natural Park (California) is the tallest tree on earth at 115 meters.
The next evolutionary leap
For Oscar Holland, the wood revolution will be unstoppable in the coming years due to one decisive factor: cost. “While the price of other building materials has risen enormously, that of wood has fallen thanks to the mass production of cross-laminated timber, the product that some are already calling the concrete of the future.” Being a relatively new material and in increasing demand, the price is multiplying Number of manufacturers doing everything possible to offer it at competitive prices. For Holland it is clear that projects of the ambitious and enormous scale of HoHo or Rocket & Tigerli are to some extent a consequence of this change in market trends. For the expert, the more than 100 meters high that the Swiss Tower promises could “be very little in the short term”. Two projects in particular, awaiting final approval, aim to smash records. One of these is the Oakwood Tower in London, an 80-story skyscraper that would become part of the Barbican residential complex and would rise 300 meters in height.
The other, proposed to the city of Tokyo in 2018, tentatively named Project W350, would have a wooden structure reinforced with 10% steel to make it more resilient to earthquakes and storms, and would reach 350 meters. Construction is scheduled to begin in 2024 and be finished in 2041. If the forecasts come true, cities like Chicago, Philadelphia, Perth and Eindhoven will be home to wooden skyscrapers over 100 meters high by then. They’ll be able to look in the eye of their cousin, Hyperion, a redwood from California’s Redwood Natural Park that stands 115 meters tall and is the tallest tree (and living thing) on Earth, as far as is known.