The first commercial office building in Australia made completely from timber will be built by Lendlease as the gateway to its multi-billion dollar Barangaroo development in Sydney. Source: Sydney Morning Herald
The six-storey International House Sydney will be made from engineered wood – Cross-Laminated Timber (CLT) and Glulam (glue laminated timber) – setting a new benchmark in the use of sustainable building materials.
The timbers are sourced from sustainably managed forests in Austria. The CLT has PEFC chain of custody certification.
Engineered wood products are prefabricated in a factory and transported to the building site where they are put together like a Lego set. CLT consists of layers of softwood timber arranged crosswise on top of each other and glued together under pressure into large panels.
International House Sydney, due to be completed next year, will be located on Sussex Street and will front Exchange Place, an entry point to the precinct, which is expected to host more than 33,000 visitors daily.
Lendlease’s Barangaroo South managing director Andrew Wilson said they were on the way to creating Australia’s first large-scale carbon neutral community.
“The source of materials is important. To use at scale, timber is the only renewable resource,” he said.
International House is Lendlease’s third CLT building in Australia after the 10-storey Forte apartments and the public library, The Dock, in Melbourne’s Docklands.
The building was designed by Sydney architect Alec Tzannes, of Tzannes Associates. Mr Tzannes said he aimed to create a new form of beauty beyond shape and surface. “It is ‘deep design’, renewing architecture’s role to serve the greater social purpose of lowering carbon emissions,” he said.
The building will have a “clean glass skin”, with the multi-storey timber structure forming the character of the architecture. Mr Tzannes likened the interior environment to the spaces in Sydney’s historic timber or cast iron and brick warehouses.
A striking colonnade of hardwood columns will front the street. Above that, all the floors are CLT, the cores such as lifts will also be CLT, while the columns and beams are Glulam and exposed around the lifts. Raking columns will be made of Ironbark reclaimed from old bridges mostly in
