A wooden home for the students

Plans have just been approved for an 18-storey residential tower made almost entirely of wood to rise on the University of British Columbia (UBC) campus in Vancouver, Canada.

When completed in 2017, the Tall Wood Student Residence will become one of the tallest wooden towers in the world. At 52 metres, the student residence would dwarf North America’s current tallest wooden building, a six-storey structure in Prince George, also in British Columbia and the world’s tallest wooden building, a 10-storey, 32-metre-high  tower in Melbourne, Australia. The $51.5 million project will ultimately house 404 upper-level university students in 272 studio units and 33 four-bedroom units. There will also be a ground-floor lounge and ‘collegium’ space for first-year and community students to gather.

Wood is currently enjoying a renaissance as a building material around the world, offering a sustainable alternative to concrete and steel. In fact, as many as 17 ‘tall wood’ projects are currently in the works, says an article in The Vancouver Sun. The UBC
tower meets or exceeds both fire and seismic safety codes, according to the managing director of infrastructure development  at UBC. 

The first floor will be composed of concrete, while the floors above will be built from wood. Inside, two concrete cores rising through the building will house elevator shafts and stairwells. Importantly, the wood used in construction is different from the type of wood used in normal homes. Called ‘mass timber’, it has a high ignition point. If it does burn, generally only the outside will char, leaving the inside structurally sound. Load-bearing columns and beams, meanwhile, are composed of layers of wood bonded together under high pressure, yielding a material much stronger than normal lumber.

The Tall Wood Student Residence is one of a total of five separate housing projects underway on the UBC campus to ease a serious housing crunch. UBC currently houses
nearly 10,000 students, but another 6,300 students are on the waiting list for residential accommodation.