No timber-clad tower has ever reached so high.
Down Under, a cloud-scraping pillar of a building has received the go-ahead from local authorities in Western Australia.
If completed, the structure on South Perth’s Charles Street will be the tallest wooden building in the world.
On Thursday, Perth’s Metro Inner-South Joint Development Assessment Panel gave Grange Development the green light for the behemoth, called C6 and slated to be composed of a hybrid of materials, 42% of which will be timber and the core of which will be reinforced concrete, CNN reported.
The current title-holder for the tallest wooden tower — Wisconsin’s 284-foot, 25-story Ascent building — is less than half of C6’s proposed 627-foot height and 50 stories.
C6 also trumps Sydney’s in-the-works Atlassian Headquarters, which is slated to stand at 599 feet once complete in 2026, meaning it may get a few years with the tallest wooden tower crown before C6 takes it.
(A completion date has not yet been announced for C6.)
Both C6 and the Atlassian building will combine a steel exoskeleton with laminated timber beams in what is being hailed as a more eco-friendly construction style.
“We can’t grow concrete,” developer Grange’s director, James Dibble, wrote in a building proposal given to authorities, which referred to C6’s plan as “a new open sourced blueprint that utilizes hybrid construction methodology to offset the carbon within our built environment, which is the single biggest contributor to climate change,” CNN reported.
“This is our opportunity to state that we genuinely care about both the housing crisis before us and the climate crisis we are doing very little about as an industry,” Dibble added.
Other Earth-conscious features of the record-breaker will include a rooftop garden and an urban farm.
Also, residents of its over 200 apartments will have access to 80 entirely-electric Tesla Model 3s.