A massive project is underway in Western Australia, as the world’s tallest wooden skyscraper is set to be constructed in Perth, as the city’s Metro Inner-South Joint Development Assessment Panel (JDAP) has recently approved Grange Development’s application for the ambitious building.The proposed skyscraper, named “C6“, will be a “hybrid” tower, with 42% of its structure crafted from timber, complemented by a core of reinforced concrete.
C6 is expected to reach a height of 191.2 meters, more than double the hight of the current tallest “hybrid” building – Wisconsin’s 25-story Ascent tower, which stands at 86 meters. Although with no completion date announced, the C6 building is also set to outshine the upcoming Atlassian Headquarters in Sydney, poised to temporarily claim the record once it finishes construction, in 2026.
The design of C6 aims to showcase the potential of wood as a sustainable and environmentally friendly building material, as the use of timber in high-rise construction has gained traction in recent years due to its sustainability and carbon sequestration properties. Grange Development, the firm in charge for the project, envisions the C6 tower as Western Australia’s first carbon-negative residential building. “Our aspiration with C6 is to shift the focus towards a more climate-conscious approach”, James Dibble, Director of Grange Development, emphasized in a press release.
Dibble highlighted the environmental benefits of using wood as a construction material, noting that “we can’t grow concrete” and describing the project as “a new open-sourced blueprint that utilizes hybrid construction methodology to offset the carbon within our built environment, which is the single biggest contributor to climate change”.
For the director, the project is an opportunity for the firm to show they “genuinely care about both the housing crisis before us and the climate crisis we are doing very little about as an industry”.
The tower, made of 7,400 cubic meters of timber, sourced from 600 trees, will house over 200 apartments, have a rooftop garden, an urban farm and provide residents with access to 80 fully-electric Tesla Model 3s.
“Typically we build tall buildings out of steel and concrete. Cement is responsible for 8% of all CO2 emissions. So by replacing concrete and steel with a bio material such as timber, it is going to reduce the environmental impact of the building quite significantly”, Philip Oldfield, Associate Architecture Professor and head of the University of New South Wales’ School of Built Environment, told CNN. “We do need to be building far more of our buildings out of timber”.
However, commenting on the claim that the skyscraper would be carbon negative, Oldfield said that is not realistinc, as the timber used in the construction of the building would store more carbon than is released by the other materials at the most for a short period of time.
