25 May 2024
Mass timber is on the rise in Brisbane, home to the 2032 Olympic Games, with the team at Barber Studio, led by Gottstein Fellow Kim Barber behind a new five-storey “expressive timber structure” made from Australian-sourced cross-laminated timber and glulam. As reported by the Urban Developer today, the 18 Racecourse Road site—which neighbours the Hamilton Hotel—is close to the site of the proposed 2032 Athletes Village, which will also be constructed from mass timber.
Under the proposal, a 24-metre high, 948-square-metre office building will rise on a narrow 478-square-metre site, with planning reports lodged by the developers, Godfrey Esmonde’s Holm Developments revealing that:
“The architectural design is defined by an expressive timber structure behind a shaded transparent facade that includes a combination of glazing, metal cladding and a lightweight perforated metal screen.”
According to the design statement, the timber building “offers a unique identity integral to its materiality and expressed structure,” with mass timber providing “a visual demonstration of the project’s pursuit of sustainable development, with a significantly reduced carbon footprint”. The design includes a range of energy consumption and greenhouse gas reduction strategies—notably, “engineered timber and light-coloured cladding to reduce heat loads on the external building fabric as well as solar panels on its saw-tooth profiled roof.” Importantly, “the majority of the building’s structure is carbon negative, with significant carbon sequestration values through the use of renewable, re-growable Australian timber.”
The new building continues a trend of mid-rise and high-rise timber buildings evolving across Brisbane, with the Queensland government also committed to using mass timber in its Olympic infrastructure – as part of a pledge to use cleaner, greener and more sustainable construction materials.
Kim Baber, the studio’s principal behind the Racecourse Road design, is part of a growing breed of architects working with mass timber fabricators to create buildings that explore “material, space, and structure.” Australia is now one of the world’s fastest-growing markets for cross-laminated timber, and this is not before time, according to Mr Baber, who was awarded a Gottstein Trust Fellowship in 2016 to study timber architecture and fabrication.
The project, The Expressive Capacity of Timber in Architecture, saw Mr Baber review technologies in Austria, Switzerland and Japan, “seeking to identify why the use of expressed timber structure in construction may be considered beneficial and pragmatic…can be implemented effectively in construction.”
Since then, Mr Baber has travelled to Oslo, Norway, as part of the ARC Advance Timber Hub, where he co-presented a paper on timber’s fire resistance at the World Timber Engineering Conference.
First published on 25/05/2024 at: https://woodcentral.com.au/timber-building-to-rise-near-brisbanes-olympic-village-site/