New 30-Story Cross-Laminated Timber Building to be Built in Winterthur, Switzerland

The Danish architectural firm of Schmidt Hammer Lassen (SHL) has designed a 100-meter (more than 30-story) housing block in the city of Winterthur, near Zurich, Switzerland, that will be world’s tallest cross-laminated timber building when complete. The second tallest project, the 25-story Ascent Building is still under construction in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The current tallest and complete cross-laminated timber building is the Mjos Tower in Norway.

The new building in Winterthur is being built on an industrial site that formally housed a railroad locomotive manufacturing plant. To honor that history, the building is being called “The Rocket & Tigerli” building, the name of two of the locomotives produced at the site.

The Rocket & Tigerli building will be terra-cotta clad, and the project will utilize a construction system developed by the Swiss company Implenia and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology of Zürich, ETH, according to a company statement.

According to Implenia, the concrete core has been replaced with wood, resulting in the individual beam coming in at a lower weight. This makes it possible to build taller constructions while, at the same time, ensuring that the entire building process achieves a lower amount of embedded carbon, the Zurich-based company said.