Wooden wonder poised to join skyline
19-storey highrise on West Hastings would be the world’s tallest hybrid timber structure
A design by award-winning Japanese architect Shigeru Ban for the world’s tallest hybrid timber structure is poised to be built in downtown Vancouver.
When complete, the building made of wood, glass and concrete will stand 19 storeys and 71 metres tall — one storey higher than the wood-hybrid Brock Commons at the University of B.C. — said Tobi Reyes, the CEO of PortLiving, the Vancouver-based developer behind the project.
Ban designed the residential tower, called Terrace House, as a tribute to late architect Arthur Erickson’s decades-old neighbouring building Evergreen, at the corner of Jervis and West Hastings streets.
Once built, the two buildings will stand next to one another in what Reyes called “a partnership 40 years in the making.”
“On a philosophical level, it really feels like our project completes the Evergreen building,” he said. “There’s this relationship between the two and I think it’s really interesting how Shigeru pays homage to Arthur.”
Ben Albertson, a project architect at Shigeru Ban Architects, explained that relationship.
“When (Ban) went to visit the site, he was struck by the beauty of Erickson’s Evergreen building and he knew immediately that he wanted to design this building to relate and complement that building formally.”
To do that, Ban used triangular shapes, natural materials and terraces to connect the two designs, and enlisted Cornelia Oberlander, the Evergreen building’s landscape architect, to work on the project.
While concrete and steel were the primary building materials in the 19th and 20th centuries, wood was considered to be too weak for massive structures, Albertson said. That’s changing.
“Recently, with concerns about the environment and sustainability and wanting to use natural materials, architects and developers are returning to the use of wood,” he said.
Also on the project is wood structural engineer Hermann Blumer, who worked with Ban on the Centre Pompidou-Metz in Paris. Ban won the Pritzker Architecture Prize thanks in part to his design for that building, which placed him in the company of some of the world’s top minds.
Though Reyes said building a taller wood structure than anyone else had before “wasn’t by design,” there is something of an ongoing competition for the title of world’s tallest.
For now, Brock Commons at UBC is the record holder. The student residential building, built last September, stands 18 storeys and 53 metres tall.
Meanwhile, architects are working on a 57-metre tall tower for Bordeaux, France, a 73-metre tower for Amsterdam and a 304-metre tall skyscraper for London — all in wood.
But as Reyes said, though there are lots of announcements about tall wooden buildings, few of them are permitted like his is. PortLiving has a development permit for Terrace House and it is now seeking a building permit.