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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Project Orange’s West Stow Lodge has a pared-back interior



  • West Stow Lodge was designed by London architects Project Orange for a family with three young children in a village near Bury St Edmunds.
  • To emphasise the sense of visual continuity throughout West Stow Lodge, Project Orange spaced the mullions of all the windows evenly, at 600-millimetre intervals.
  • Oak joinery, white-painted bricks, and concrete flooring were used to make the interior of this new house in Suffolk, England, more contemporary than its traditional pitched-roof exterior (+ slideshow).
  • “The interior materials echo the exterior, and are intended very much as an honest expression of the construction,” said Ash.
  • “Within this setting, the house can be seen as a nuanced, contemporary exploration of the domestic vernacular architecture in Suffolk,” said Ash.


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