A Norwegian building society will start work on the world’s tallest wooden apartment block, a 14-story structure, which will rise to 49 metres eclipsing the existing record holder in Melbourne, Australia. Source: The Local (Norway)
‘Treet’, or The tree, will begin to rise up next to the Byfjorden in Central Bergen, after the Bergen and Omegn Building Society (BOB) begins work at the end of this month.
The building society this week announced that it had now sold half of the 62 apartments.
Ole Kleppe, who is managing the project for BOB, said that the builders planned to build the apartments around a gigantic timber frame formed of metre-thick columns of wooden ‘glulam’.
“The news is that we are combining load-bearing structures of glulam with apartments based on modules,” he explained.
“All other future high-rise timber projects of more than ten stories around the world today are somehow based on a concrete, steel or composite core.”
Once the modules are fixed in place early next year, the entire building will be wrapped in a glass and metal facade to protect the wooden structures from the notoriously wet Bergen climate.
“The project is a pilot project to show how we can build high-rise timber projects that are sustainable,” he said.
“This project will bind approximately one thousand tons of CO2 in the wooden constructions – an important contribution to reducing emissions of CO2.”
Forté, in Melbourne, became the world’s tallest timber frame apartment building at 32 metres, when it was completed at the end of 2012.
