Green light for world’s tallest timber tower to be built in Perth
Melbourne developer James Dibble’s Grange Development has received approval to build the world’s tallest hybrid timber tower, after his C6 apartment building in South Perth was approved by Western Australia’s Joint Development Assessment Panel.
The 191.2-metre, 50-storey structure, designed by architects Elenberg Fraser, will be built at 6 Charles Street near the Perth Zoo, It will be notably taller than Atlassian’s hybrid timber tower in Sydney, which is under construction and set to top out at 180 metres when completed in 2025. No time frame for the construction of C6 has been given.
The world’s tallest completed timber building is Mjøstårnet, a mixed-use tower in Brumunddal, a small town in Norway, which has 18 floors and rises 85.4 metres. Mjøstårnet is built entirely out of timber.
Projected to have a $350 million value once completed, Grange Development’s South Perth tower will also be one of the first carbon negative residential buildings in Australia, meaning it locks up more carbon (through timber, plants and other elements) than it generates.
C6 will incorporate 7400 cubic metres of mass timber in its construction – equating to more than 40 per cent of the total structure alongside concrete, steel and other materials – and will sequester 10.5 million kilograms of carbon dioxide during the building phase, the equivalent of 4885 economy-class seats on flights from Perth to London.
Dibble said that taking into account the growth rates of each region of sustainably harvested plantations, the timber needed for the structure could be regrown in less than an hour from just 600 sustainably forested trees, and the seeds for these trees could fit within two cupped hands. “We can’t grow concrete,” he said.
The project will offer 237 apartments and include 3500 square metres of edible, floral and native gardens and 18 square metres of communal space per apartment. All energy will come from renewable sources.
Owners and residents will have access to a fleet of 80 self-driving Tesla cars, helping them reduce their carbon footprints.
“The built environment accounts for 39 per cent of global emissions, and our industry is perilously lagging in innovation to address this global challenge,” Dibble said.
“Our aspiration with C6 is to shift the focus towards a more climate-conscious approach to our built environment, rooted in science and engineering.”
A spokesman for Grange Development said the developer intended to launch pre-sales of apartments late in the second quarter or early in the third quarter of next year.
“They unfortunately can’t reveal any pricing as yet – that will come with the launch of pre-sales,” he said.
Development giant Lendlease has been at the forefront of timber building construction in Australia over the past decade. In 2019, it completed its second timber building at Barangaroo that it leased to WeWork.
In 2012, Lendlease built what was then the tallest timber building in the world, a 10-storey apartment building called Forte in Melbourne’s Docklands which topped out at 32 metres.
In 2016, Lendlease opened a factory in Sydney with plans to manufacture $1 billion worth of pre-fabricated building material over the next five years, the majority of this being cross-laminated timber. This factory has ceased production.
