Urban jungle: wooden high-rises change city skylines as builders ditch concrete



  • Mass timber could prove to be a viable alternative to concrete and steel for mid-to-high rise buildings.
  • We don’t see mass timber replacing those, it just becomes another option when certain parameters and goals apply to a project.”
  • Called mass timber, the material is an umbrella term for large, solid chunks of panelized wood.
  • Out of the mass timber initiative, CLT might prove to change the construction paradigm.
  • Two urban building projects, in New York City and Portland, Oregon, will be changing their city’s skylines with an environmentally sustainable, cost-competitive building material.


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London’s garden bridge: the end of the road?



  • But Transport for London (TfL) and the Garden Bridge Trust have carried on regardless, egged on by powerful Bullingdon backers, mayor Boris Johnson and chancellor George Osborne.
  • The president of the Metropolitan Public Gardens Association has described it as a “vanity project of a windswept garden on an unneeded bridge”, while leading bridge engineers have called it a “private garden platform pretending to be a bridge”.
  • The National Audit Office has been ordered to examine the “rationale” behind George Osborne’s pledge of £30m of Treasury funding for the bridge.
  • Their correspondence over funding the bridge was recently uncovered by the Architects’ Journal, in which Osborne spelled out his £30m grant and urged Johnson to “do the same”.
  • Opponents have objected to the £60m of public funding and the £3.5m annual maintenance costs, to the restricted access for bikes and to the murky procurement process, which saw Thomas Heatherwick appointed ahead of other experienced bridge designers.


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