Woodscraper – Building a timber high-rise you can take apart

Woodscraper - Building a timber high-rise you can take apart

In Wolfsburg, two twelve-storey residential towers are being built from timber and straw – the firsttimber high-rises in Niedersachsen (Germany), with 106  apartments, about half of them subsidised. Designed by Partner und Partner Architektur for GLS Bank, the Woodscraper combines a glulam skeleton and cross-laminated timber slabs around a concrete core with visible timber surfaces and straw drywall. Planning and construction were accompanied by research funded by the German Federal Environmental Foundation (DBU), together with the Natural Building Lab (TU Berlin), CAALA and ee concept: a BIM-based life cycle assessment that already gave reliable results in early design, a method to assess circularity, and a 1:1 demonstrator that was built, taken apart and rebuilt. The talk shows how the towers were approved under high-rise fire regulations, what made it from research into the building – and what did not – and what a Woodscraper 2 could look like.

Tjaša Kogovšek, Kathrin du Hamél

Tjaša Kogovšek and Kathrin du Hamél are architects at Partner und Partner Architektur in Berlin. Tjaša worked mainly on the DBU-funded research project that accompanied the planning of the Woodscraper towers. Kathrin is part of the team realising the towers in Wolfsburg and continues to work on the project through construction.