A Behind-The-Scenes Look At Asia’s Largest Timber Building at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University

Global Construction Review is taking a behind-the-scenes look at the “Gaia” project at Singapore’s Nanyang Business School, which is located on the campus of Nanyang Technological University (NTU). The project, completed in May, was designed by Toyo Ito & Associates and is currently the largest timber building in Asia.

Gaia was built using mass timber elements prefabricated by Stora Enso in Austria and shipped 9,000km (5,592 miles) to site. Stora Enso prefabricated 7,673 cubic meters of cross-laminated timber (CLT) elements—including walls, floors, roofs, and stairs—with wood certified sustainable by the Program for the Endorsement of Forest Certification, or PEFC.

Stora Enso packaged the elements in the correct assembly sequence and sent them with trackable labels to Singapore in 29 shipments over 639 days between September 2019 and June 2021. It was the biggest delivery Stora Enso has ever made to a single site. The company says that if each container was placed end-to-end, they would form a line 2.8km (1.74 miles) long.

Stora Enso estimates that the timber in Gaia removed 5,401 tons of CO2 from the atmosphere, even when the 422 tons emitted during shipping and the 21 tons emitted in producing the CLT elements are counted.