Looking at wood sky high

Micheal Green Architecture (MGA), a Canadian architecture firm based in Vancouver, has proposed a timber skyscraper for the Paris Skyline. The firm would be participating in the Reinventer Paris Urban revitalisation competition. Its main feature is its sustainability and has a roof garden that would be a community space housing restaurants, cafes, garden spaces and bicycle rentals.

Vancouver-based architect, Michael Green, who specialises in building skyscrapers out of wood timbers, has a role in this audacious proposal to search for innovations in urban design and sustainability capable of revitalising Parisian Architecture. At 35 stories, the wooden tower Green’s team is proposing would have to be approved as an exception to Paris’s existing height limits for wood structures. Michael sees the opportunity to showcase wood as a sustainable, carbon-sequestering building material in Paris, and hopes it’ll make as grand a statement as the Eiffel Tower did in 1889.  The company proved its method by building the more modestly scaled, 29.5-metre Wood Innovation and Design Centre in Prince George, British Columbia, which opened late last year. That included testing to prove the timber panels and beams wouldn’t easily catch fire and would meet the same building code requirements that apply to steel and concrete structures.

Now, with the Reinventer Paris competition, Michael says that wood has become a great opportunity and that Paris is the perfect platform for them to celebrate it first. For the contest, the Paris authorities offered 23 sites around the city for potential redevelopment, seeking proposals that demonstrate architectural, social and environmental innovations to help revitalise the city. “We are launching this call for innovative urban projects in order to prefigure what the Paris of tomorrow might be,” Mayor Anne Hidalgo said in a statement on the competition’s website.

And the city has approved 650 of 815 applications submitted into the first stage of the competition. The response has been global, with proposals coming from 15 countries as far away as Brazil, Singapore and South Korea. “This is the largest site that was available, and it will be highly competitive,” Michael said. At this point, Paris officials haven’t even told them how many other proposals have been made on the same site.

The development would revitalise what is now the surface parking lot for a bus depot with a mix of market, social housing and urban agriculture.  Michael said the depot, the main bus link to the Beauvais airport outside Paris that serves mainly low-cost airlines, will remain at the development’s base. The buildings will be elevated over top with walking and bike paths, not unlike New York City’s High Line.

He is hedging that although the height of the buildings exceeds zoning limits, its stepped design will help soften the impact of the other big exception on the skyline. The French government has also taken a renewed interest in increasing the amount of wood used in construction, Michael said, which they hope is good timing for their proposal.

Michael’s firm is writing something of a sequel to his original report, a book documenting the rise of tall wood buildings, and he said he is “blown away” by the momentum building behind wood construction.

MGA is working on the 18-storey student residence at University of British Columbia and has made proposals to build similarly tall “hybrid” structures in Vancouver - buildings combining a lot of wood with concrete and steel.