A ground-breaking ceremony has been held in Daejeon, South Korea to celebrate the construction of the Forest Welfare Comprehensive Education Centre, South Korea’s tallest mass timber building. Source: Timberbiz
The building, which will be completed in 2024, will surpass the current holder of the title, which is a five-story building in Seoul called Han Green.
South Korea’s mass timber sector is still at the beginning stages, fuelled by a rising interest in low-carbon construction, revision of the building code for larger buildings of mass timber, and introduction of incentives to encourage the domestic use of wood in construction.
The 7-story timber building will be constructed on a 26,665 square meter plot of land and is designed to be safe, able to withstand a two-hour duration fire and magnitude 5.5 earthquake.
Once the education centre is completed it will become the base of Korean forest professionals and serve as a central hub providing high quality services for the public in the field of forest welfare.
“We see the potential for achieving a carbon-neutrality by the year 2050 through the contributions of wood-framed construction,” said Mr Lee, Director of the Korean Forest Welfare Institution.
It’s worth mentioning that the project’s architect, Kawa Architecture, and Solti Zibin Architecture, have completed Canada Wood’s training program, and that the project was nominated for the 2019 Korea Wood design competition.
