Two new cross-laminated timber production facilities will be built in Australia, while Portland, Oregon’s, 12-story high rise in the Pearl District made out of Cross-Laminat– ed Timber is moving forward into its next phase of design, development and testing.
New Multi-Storey Wood Framed Building Projects
The Border Mail reports that XLam, which makes structural timber, plans to have a site up at Albury-Wodonga, somewhat near Melbourne, Australia, and running by June next year. The raw timber would be plantation-sourced.
The exact location would be determined later, but the area at the NSW/Victoria border was ideal for XLam for reasons including logistics and local labour availability, said the company.
The Australian Financial Review reports that XLam has been manufacturing in New Zealand for five years, and cross-laminated timber was only just beginning to catch on in Australia. A prime example of its use was a Lend Lease ten-storey tower in Docklands, Melbourne.
Lend Lease is also opening a CLT factory through its Design Make business. The 15,000 square metre site will be in western Sydney and operational this year, according to a report in December last year.
“The reason for that is location to the Hume Highway and also the ability to source skilled labour for the 54 direct and indirect jobs we’ll require to bring this development to fruition,” business development manager Rob De Bincrat told the ABC.
Thirty of these jobs would be direct, the company said.
Portland, OR, 12-Story Wood Building
A project from Portland-based LEVER Architecture and project, Framework would rise from the corner of North- west 10th Avenue and Glisan Street on a quarter block that is currently home to Albina Community Bank.
The building will be home to 60 units of workforce housing and office space for socially minded businesses. When the building is completed, it will include ground-level retail — likely including space for Al- bina Bank — five floors of office space for B Corp businesses and social enterprises and five floors of workforce housing, which slides in somewhere be- tween affordable and market rate housing.
According to information from the project leaders, the initial phase of the project included research and design development into using CLT in a high- rise mass timber building, something that’s not been done much in the US
Last September, the teams won a US$1.5 million prize in the Tall Wood Building Prize Competition, money that was put toward that initial research.
The latest designs have also incorporated features designed to help the building better withstand a seismic event.
In addition, Framework’s residential units were initially geared toward households earning up to 80 per cent of the annual median income. That benchmark has been adjusted to 60 per cent, which could make the units more accessible to more residents.