August 19, 2011

Column | Korky Koroluk

Eight-storey wood office building in Austria a cue for others

Two years of research and design work comes to an end at the middle of next month when ground is broken for an eight-storey hybrid timber office building in a small city in western Austria.

Dubbed the LifeCycle Tower, or LCT, the building will be a prototype intended to demonstrate the feasibility of the system for sustainable urban design projects and show the world the environmental advantages of the concept.

The building’s vertical members will be of glulam timber, with much of the wood left exposed, both inside and outside the building. Floor slabs will be of wood on concrete and manufactured off-site.

The façade will be of panels also built off-site, and the whole thing will meet Passivhaus standards, which means the building will produce as much (or almost as much) energy as it consumes.

The payoff, the developers say, will be a 90 per cent improvement in carbon dioxide emissions and a 50 per cent reduction in construction time. There will also be much less noise and dust pollution during construction.

LCT will be only eight storeys tall, but the principles it embodies will make possible structurally sound buildings of up to 30 storeys.

The lead architect, Austrian Hermann Kaufmann, is well-known in Europe for his work in sustainable construction.

The systems the building will use were developed by Creative Renewable Energy and Efficiency Group, or CREE, which is a subsidiary of the Rhomberg Group set up especially for the project. CREE’s work is supported by the Austrian Ministry for Transportation, Innovation and Technology, and by the Austrian Research Grant Agency, as part of its “House of the Future” program.

Some of the specialized design work, including fire engineering, was done by Arup, the British engineering giant.

People are often concerned about fire when wood construction is mentioned. So Arup specified a full sprinkler system. Core walls will be protected with fire-proof cladding to ensure the required fire rating is achieved. The floor slabs will be constructed so that the concrete in them will extend over the timber columns at each level, providing a break to prevent the vertical spread of fire.

The building will be in Dornbirn, one of several small cities clustered in western Austria near Lake Constance, where Austria, Switzerland and Germany meet.
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This first LCT will be an office structure, but the objective is to use key design elements that allow maximum flexibility in future towers, including building them as offices, hotels, apartments, or for mixed uses.

That’s why this prototype will have no load-bearing partition walls. This will allow maximum flexibility for interior layout.

Flexibility is evident in the façade, as well. Depending on client need, or the building’s orientation, façade treatments can be fitted as part of the prefabricated units in order to ensure proper ventilation, sunshading and noise control.

Part of CREE’s mandate was to come up with a building that could be built quickly, easily and economically on the tight sites common in many urban areas.

Faced with rising infrastructure costs, a lot of cities are striving to increase population densities in their cores, so the LifeCycle Tower prototype might be worth looking at.

That’s why the Rhomberg Group is confidently expecting the tower to draw visitors from around the world, all of them looking for ways to solve some of their own local problems, and doing so in a sustainable way.

Projections for the world’s population by 2050 range from 7.4 billion to 10.6 billion, with nine billion being the most commonly forecast. Anywhere in that range means the world is going to need a lot of new, sustainably built housing.

That means we still need other public and private organizations in other countries to take their cue from Austria, and begin work on innovative ways to build.

Korky Koroluk is an Ottawa-based freelance writer. Send comments to editor@dailycommercialnews.com

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