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As part of our Timber Revolution series, we have rounded up the world’s 10 tallest buildings with mass-timber structures, including an engineered-wood shopping-centre extension and a carbon-negative cultural centre.

Compiled using data from the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, the roundup also features apartment towers, hotels and a school, demonstrating the potential of mass timber in building tall structures.

While some of the projects have structures made entirely from mass-timber components, such as cross-laminated timber (CLT) and glued laminated timber (glulam), others introduce concrete and steel elements to build taller.

Here are the world’s 10 tallest buildings with mass-timber structures:

Ascent, USA, by Korb + Associates Architects (2022)

Designed by American studio Korb + Associates Architects, this 86.6-metre-tall luxury apartment and retail tower in Wisconsin was certified last year as the world’s tallest timber building.

Named Ascent, the 25-storey building has a concrete base, elevator and stair shafts, with the rest of its structure made from CLT and glulam.

Mjøstårnet, Norway, by Voll Arkitekter (2019)

Certified as the world’s tallest timber building at the time of its completion in 2019, the 85.4-metre-tall Mjøstårnet tower by Norwegian architecture studio Voll Arkitekter has glulam columns and elevator shafts made entirely from CLT.

Located in Brumunddal – an area in Norway with an established wood-processing industry – the timber used to build Mjøstårnet was locally sourced.

HoHo Wien, Austria, by RLP Rüdiger Lainer + Partner (2020)

Austrian architecture studio RLP Rüdiger Lainer + Partner designed the mixed-use HoHo Wien building with three connected tower blocks arranged in an L-shape, each with a concrete core supporting the timber structure.

According to the studio, 75 per cent of the 84-metre-tall building above the ground-floor level is made from wood, including walls, ceilings, floors and columns.

Haut, the Netherlands, Team V Architecture (2022)

Dutch architecture studio Team V Architecture designed the 21-storey Haut residential building with floors and load-bearing inner walls made from CLT, along with a predominantly glazed facade and a core, basement and foundations made of concrete.

The 73-metre-tall structure features a rooftop garden with rainwater storage and 1,500 square metres of solar panels on its roof and facade, helping it achieve a BREEAM Outstanding sustainability rating.

Sara Kulturhus Centre, Sweden, by White Arkitekter (2021)

The Sara Kulturhus Centre in Skellefteå, Sweden, is a 72.8-metre-tall structure made from CLT and glulam that architecture studio White Arkitekter designed to be carbon negative over its lifetime.

It was completed in 2021 and contains a theatre, gallery, library, museum and hotel.

“Embodied carbon emissions from materials, transport and construction as well as carbon emissions from operational energy during 50 years are less than the carbon sequestration in wood within the building,” said White Arkitekter partner Robert Schmitz.

De Karel Doorman, the Netherlands, by Ibelings van Tilburg Architecten (2012)

Dutch architecture studio Ibelings van Tilburg Architecten restored a 1940s shopping centre in Rotterdam and topped it with a hybrid structure of wood and steel containing 114 apartments.

The original shopping centre was ready for demolition before the studio’s intervention, which rests on existing concrete pillars and foundations and extends the building to a height of 70 metres.

“By choosing to ‘top up’ the building we have prevented demolition and the need to remove 15,000 tonnes of concrete,” said the studio.

55 Southbank Boulevard, Australia, by Bates Smart (2020)

Australian architecture studio Bates Smart transformed a concrete building in Melbourne into a 69.7-metre-tall hotel by adding a 10-storey CLT structure on top of it.

Completed in 2020, the studio claims that the project is Australia‘s first CLT extension.

“The existing concrete building was designed to support an additional five floors of concrete structure, however by utilising timber, which is 20 per cent the weight of concrete, an additional 10 levels were able to be built providing 15,000 square metres of new floor space and 220 new hotel rooms,” Bates Smart told Dezeen.

Arbo, Switzerland, by Manetsch Meyer Architects (2019)

Swiss architecture studio Manetsch Meyer Architects designed three buildings for the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts campus in the Swiss municipality of Risch-Rotkreuz.

Two of the three buildings were constructed with composite structures of wood and concrete, including the tallest building named Arbo, which is 60 metres tall and currently the world’s eighth-tallest mass-timber building.

According to the project developer Zug Estates, Arbo was the tallest wooden building in Switzerland when it was completed in 2019.

Eunoia Junior College, Singapore, by CPG Consultants (2019)

Completed in 2019 by building management firm CPG Consultants, the Eunoia Junior College comprises both a 10-storey and 12-storey tower, alongside a five-storey structure topped with a sports field. At its tallest point, it reaches 56 metres.

Described by the firm as Singapore‘s first high-rise junior college, the school is constructed with CLT exterior walls clad with aluminium, teamed with floors made up of concrete slabs and glulam beams.

Brock Commons Tallwood House, Canada, by Acton Ostry Architects (2017)

This student residence in Vancouver was formerly the tallest contemporary mass-timber building in the world at the time of its completion in 2017.

Although its height of 53 metres has now been well surpassed, Canadian studio Acton Ostry Architects designed the student housing to demonstrate that engineered wood was a viable option for building high-rise structures.

It is constructed from two concrete cores, along with CLT floor panels that are supported by glulam columns.

Timber Revolution
This article is part of Dezeen’s Timber Revolution series, which explores the potential of mass timber and asks whether going back to wood as our primary construction material can lead the world to a more sustainable future.

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A mid-century house originally designed by British architect Trevor Dannatt has undergone a sensitive restoration by architecture studio Coppin Dockray in north London.

Named Hampstead House, the 1960s home has been overhauled by Coppin Dockray to transform it into a spacious and thermally-efficient residence suited to the needs of its owners’ growing family.

Hampstead House is a British interpretation of a Californian experimental Case Study House and was originally designed to have an intimate relationship with its low-lying, north-facing site in Hampstead.

It is one of the few private houses by the late architect Dannatt, who is best known for his work on the Royal Festival Hall, where he detailed the numerous staircases and glazed screens of the foyers.

Surrounded by grand Edwardian villas, the home follows the levels across the site to form a series of courtyards and roofscapes surrounded by a verdant garden.

However, over the years it had been poorly extended and developed significant structural issues, with its original elements obscured by a wild and unruly garden.

Coppin Dockray’s ambition for its overhaul was to rationalise these alterations and reflect Dannatt’s original vision – though it was not possible to restore his design in full.

“It was barely insulated, the roof was failing,” the studio’s co-founder Sandra Coppin told Dezeen. “Post-war buildings are notoriously flimsy and thermally volatile.”

Coppin Dockray had a threefold approach to its proposal. It first identified key aspects of the house that were important to retain, such as the spatial sequence and material qualities of the building.

It then created a larger home suited to its client’s needs by sensitively extending the house with clearly expressed additions. Finally, it aimed to significantly improve the building’s thermal comfort and energy performance.

The 1980s mansard has been replaced by a new first floor with additional bedrooms and a study, while the ground floor extensions have been rationalised to reinforce the kitchen’s role as the heart of the house.

The studio was careful to limit the material choices, teaming the existing brickwork with black aluminium panels on the facade.

Hampstead House’s floor plan is split into two wings hinging off a glazed entryway. The larger public-facing wing contains a dining room and kitchen, which is framed with bespoke sweet-chestnut joinery and a baffle below a large roof light.

Beyond it is an expansive living room, bathed in light from three sides by extensive glazing. It is flanked by a terrace and courtyard, giving views into the newly landscaped garden.

Coppin Dockray was also responsible for updating the home’s interior design, sourcing a combination of vintage, bespoke and new furniture and fittings for a “domestic, lived-in” feel.

Improving the building’s thermal performance was another priority. The existing building was upgraded with new timber-framed windows, as well as insulated roofs, floors, and walls.

“Each intervention considered the careful balance between the building’s character and form and its urgent need for improved energy performance and comfort,” said Coppin.

According to the studio, the result of these interventions has brought about a 59 per cent reduction in the building’s annual carbon dioxide emissions.

Coppin Dockray is a London studio founded in 2012 by Coppin with Bev Dockray. Hampstead House is the latest in a series of architecturally significant modernist houses that it has had a hand in restoring to their former glory.

“We are curious about buildings, especially these exceptional post-war houses and we spend much time trying to understand them as best we can,” said Coppin.

Its previous projects include a renovation of a modernist house by the Danish architect Jørn Utzon, and a house called Ansty Plum, which was built in 1962 by architect David Levitt and featured a studio designed by Alison and Peter Smithson.

The photography is by James O Davies unless stated otherwise. 

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Deck-access housing has unfairly become a symbol for urban squalor in the UK, but a new wave of architects is demonstrating its merits, writes Rory Olcayto.

As Miles Glendinning and Stefan Muthesius convincingly argue in Tower Block, their 1994 book on post-war housing, there “has probably never been another feature in UK public housing which has been so widely criticised” as deck access to blocks of flats. Often called “streets in the sky”, decks were a common means of separating pedestrians and cars in 1960s social housing projects but soon came to be seen as spirit-sapping hotbeds for anti-social behaviour. Some were even demolished within years of completion.

This negativity is so ingrained that anyone familiar with British crime dramas, from Luther to Line of Duty, will know that deck-access housing has become a shorthand for urban dystopia. Channel 4 even filmed a brutalist version of its logo floating in a run-down walkway on the Aylesbury Estate, with seemingly no regard for the residents still living in the modernist neighbourhood.

Deck-access housing has become a shorthand for urban dystopia

The British architecture profession, despite pioneering the deck-access block more than any other bar the Dutch, could be just as cruelly dismissive. Former RIBA president Lancelot Keay, a social housing pioneer in 1930s Liverpool, called it housing “for dirty people”. To this day, insurers and mortgage lenders regard deck-access homes with caution and planners advise against them.

Yet some of the finest modernist housing in the UK, from Park Hill to Dawson Heights, is deck access, as are many more workaday schemes housing hundreds of thousands of people who use elevated walkways to get to and from their front doors every day without incident – and even quite enjoy doing so. This is not a story, however, that lends itself to nuance.

Opportunities to design deck-access public housing were killed off in the 1980s after a number of high-profile structural failures in the prefab design of such estates, as well as Alice Coleman’s skewed 1985 report Utopia on Trial – discussed at length in a recent piece from Anna Minton – which linked them to social unrest.

So why, after a 30-year hiatus, is the typology – the once-ubiquitous solution for mid-rise mass housing in England – enjoying a comeback, with the likes of Haworth Tompkins, Apparata and RCKa leading the drive?

That is the question we have sought to answer in The Deck Access Housing Design Guide. Co-authored by Andrew Beharrell and with a foreword by Owen Hatherley (a proud deck-access dweller himself), the book includes a history of this evolving housing type, recent British and European case studies, and practical guidance produced by Pollard Thomas Edwards‘ knowledge hub.

The short answer is that the revival was kickstarted, somewhat surprisingly, by former mayor Boris Johnson‘s 2009 draft of the London Housing Design Guide. It stressed a preference for dual-aspect homes and cited deck access as a viable means of achieving this, linking the suggestion to a call for an appropriate vernacular.

Most of the architects were feature were too young to have practised in the “peak deck” era

Most of the architects we feature – Stirling Prize-winners Haworth Tompkins, Maccreanor Lavington and AHMM, finalists Mae, HawkinsBrown and Henley Halebrown, plus a host of other civic-minded studios from Pollard Thomas Edwards and Levitt Bernstein to Collective Architecture and RCKa – were too young to have practised in the “peak deck” era of the ’60s and ’70s, entering a profession shaped not by the public good but by market economics.

Nostalgic for the public-spirited modernism practised by their Boomer-age mentors, this new “school” of architects took up the mayor’s challenge, defining an anti-iconic housing style – the New London Vernacular (NLV). Easily adapted to deck access, NLV was pitched as a de-risked developer strategy forged in the wake of the 2008 financial crash: easier to cost, design, build and sell, and, as a result, better at providing accurate land values than the icon-led regeneration projects of the Tony Blair years.

There is a dose of policy too, in NLV’s formulation. For example, the London Housing Design Guide didn’t actually say “use brick” but it did, as Hatherley notes in his essay Building the Austerity City, “place great stress on that floating signifier, ‘context’ – which in London means bricks”.

The guide also called for “tenure-blind” housing with welcoming entrances and spacious balconies, features identified by David Birkbeck and Julian Hart in a 2012 report for Urban Design London (UDL), which strove to define the emerging style. And so, while post-war deck-access housing was implemented to enable the separation of pedestrians and cars, today it’s intended to provide dual-aspect homes in high-density housing and grant each home a front door.

Unlike the more dynamic continental exemplars, the British projects appear conservative at first glance. The European case studies with long decks and extensive use of timber, for example, wouldn’t be allowed in the UK. But a closer look reveals considerable range: Henley Halebrown’s playful bridges, arches and loggias; Matthew Lloyd Architects’ new homes harmoniously blended with the historic Bourne Estate; Haworth Tompkins’s brick facades for the Silchester Estate that build on the tradition of early philanthropic dwellings.

Not every British exemplar is NLV: Murray Grove, the oldest of them, is pre-fabricated high-tech, while the exposed concrete of Apparata’s A House for Artists recalls James Stirling’s muscular 1970s deck-access scheme in Runcorn. Our retrofits encompass a number of eras and building types: Park Hill’s private sector makeover, a transformed barracks in Greenwich and a horse stables with cobbled decks reworked by Collective Architecture to provide affordable homes to rent in Glasgow.

Deck access means dual-aspect homes with cross-ventilation

Elsewhere, RCKa’s timber lattice-wrapped stair tower and winter gardens in Seaford provide a strong foil to its brick-clad street elevation, while DO Architecture’s stark reinvention of the Glasgow tenement ploughs its own furrow.

“Housing for dirty people” is back and I welcome it, especially when compared with alternatives like residential towers: deck access means dual-aspect homes with cross-ventilation, daylight from both sides and variety of outlook. Every home has a “fresh air” front door lending an enhanced sense of identity as well as the health benefits of increased contact with the outside world. And a well-planned scheme can yield around 300 homes per hectare too. As Hatherley writes in his foreword: “A good deck is a delight – a new way of walking through the city, a convivial and neighbourly space, a sort of second balcony shared with your neighbours.”

So far, most new deck-access housing has been developed by urban affordable housing providers on relatively small plots. Large-scale housing developments are generally delivered by consortia of commercial house builders and large national housing associations at the more conservative end of the design spectrum, and many are sceptical about deck access. This will surely change in response to planning requirements for dual-aspect flats and the growth of factory-built housing. Until then, the exemplars in our deck access guide – the best in Britain and beyond today – show how it can be done.

Rory Olcayto is a writer and critic at Pollard Thomas Edwards and has written and edited multiple books on architecture. The Deck Access Housing Design Guide is published by Routledge, with a launch party taking place in London on 29 March.

The photo, showing the Park Hill estate in Sheffield, is by Jack Hobhouse.

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British studio David Chipperfield Architects has revealed plans for a housing project in Antwerp that will adjoin a 60-tree fruit orchard.

Named Boomgaard, the residential project is set to be built in Antwerp’s Nieuw Zuid neighbourhood and will contain 54 apartments that sit beside landscapes designed by Bureau Bas Smets.

The housing project will be a seven-storey building. On the ground level, the building will house four commercial spaces, while its basement will contain storage rooms as well as bicycle and car parking.

Alongside the 54 apartments, Bureau Bas Smets will create a 60-tree fruit orchard that the studio explained is set to become the heart of the Nieuw Zuid neighbourhood.

Boomgaard will form part of the Nieuw Zuid housing development where Japanese studio Shigeru Ban Architects has also begun construction on a residential project.

It will sit alongside a number of buildings designed by leading architecture studios including Stefano Boeri Architetti’s Palazzo Verde and Office Kersten Geers David Van Severen’s Tim Van Laere Gallery all of which are being developed by Antwerp developer Triple Living.

“We don’t just want to put up a nice building, we want to create a pleasant piece of the city,” said David Chipperfield

“We are delighted that Triple Living contacted us to do our bit for Antwerp’s Nieuw Zuid neighbourhood,” he continued. “Thanks to Paola Viganò’s master plan, we can help stitch together a fresh and vibrant neighbourhood with pleasant public spaces. The orchard, which will be open to all, is an important aspect of this project.”

The building will be constructed using a combination of cross-laminated timber (CLT) and concrete in an effort to reduce the building’s CO2 emissions, while its apartments will be designed to meet strict energy and insulation standards.

Winter gardens are pictured wrapping around the exterior of the building and adjoin to each apartment to form covered terraces. The winter gardens provide homes with an additional layer between the interior and the elements resulting in better insulation.

“With Boomgaard, we want to contribute to the city’s look and life positively,” said Chipperfield. “Sustainability and the environment are crucial to us as an architectural firm. We always start from a holistic vision of sustainable design.”

“We also deliberately designed the building rather shallow, so that as much natural light as possible enters everywhere and maximum use can be made of ventilation.”

Founded by Chipperfield, David Chipperfield Architects was founded in London in 1985. He was recently awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize for his “understated but transformative” body of work that covers four decades.

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Not to be outdone by Realme’s Coca-Cola Phone, Redmi is upping the ante with a special Harry Potter edition of its Note 12 Turbo phone. The phone comes with a built-in custom launcher as well as the Hogwarts insignia on the back, and ships in a rather eye-catching Hogwarts-themed box too, along with a branded case, an ‘Acceptance Letter’, a Marauders Map, and even Platform 9¾ SIM ejector pin. The special-edition phone’s launch aims at promoting Warner Brothers’ latest multi-platform AAA game, Wizarding World.

Designer: Redmi

Each phone ships in an incredibly decked-out box that looks like something right out of the Potterverse. Open the lid and you’ve got an acceptance letter on the left, and your smartphone on the right, underneath an ornate card. The phone ships with its own charger, packed within a lightning bolt-marked paper box, along with a faux leather case, a copy of the Marauder’s Map, a few HP-themed stickers, and an adorable SIM ejector tool with the iconic 9¾ symbol.

Quite like other themed smartphones, this wizardly Redmi device is merely an aesthetic overhaul, with the same performance specs on the inside. The phone comes with a 6.67-inch display with a 12-bit flexible OLED panel with an FHD+ resolution as well as 120Hz refresh rate, and is powered by a powerful Snapdragon 7+ Gen 2 processor under the hood, along with up to 16GB of LPDDR5x RAM and 1TB of UFS 3.1 storage. To keep things cool, it features a 3725mm vapor cooling chamber. The special-edition Note 12 Turbo is fueled by a 5,000mAh battery that supports 67W fast charging, although I wonder if it has an HP-themed fast-charging animation that uses the signature lightning-bolt scar design.

The cameras on the phone are cleverly Potter-themed too, with the two main lenses designed to look like Harry’s circular glasses and the scar right above it. The two main shooters are a 64MP main lens (with OIS support) and an 8MP ultra-wide-angle lens respectively, with the third lens being a 2MP macro shooter. Flip the phone over and you’ve got a 16MP front-facing camera for selfies.

The Harry Potter-themed Redmi Note 12 Turbo is now available in Mainland China for 2399 Yuan ($348) for the 12GB+256GB variant, and we’re waiting to know whether Redmi plans on making this available globally too.

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