Over the next four years, the world’s tallest residential building with a load-bearing structure in wood will rise above the ridges in the Swiss city Winterthur, close to Zürich. The 100-meters-tall tower, Rocket&Tigerli, is named after locomotives produced at the previous industrial site.
The project marks a milestone in the construction of timber buildings – it introduces an innovative construction system that examines wood as a natural replacement for concrete. The Swiss company Implenia and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology of Zürich, ETH, have worked together in developing the new system, which allows the construction of taller timber buildings.
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.
SHL won the international competition by celebrating the construction itself, highlighting the wooden beams as distinctive elements that give the users a feeling of living alongside the construction itself.
