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The Conversation
Environment
Lisa Ottenhaus, Lectuer in Structural Timber Engineering, The University of Queensland

Tall timber buildings are exciting, but to shrink construction's carbon footprint we need to focus on the less sexy 'middle'

Developer Thrive Construct recently announced the world’s tallest steel-timber hotel to be built at Victoria Square, Adelaide. Australia has caught onto the trend of building taller in timber, with other plans for three buildings 180-220 metres high submitted in Perth and Sydney. These would more than double the current world record for a timber building.

Tall timber buildings, made entirely of mass timber (layers of wood bonded together) or steel-timber and timber-concrete hybrid construction, are gaining popularity worldwide. Every couple of months a yet taller timber building seems to pop up somewhere. My colleagues and I joke that we have stopped trying to keep up.

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