Van firm proposes timber tower for Reinventer Paris
July 25, 2015
Michael Green, a Vancouver architect, is hoping to build the world’s tallest timber skyscraper as a part of Reinventer Paris. The 35-storey tower would need an exception to Paris’s limits for the heights of wood structures, but Green and his team are hoping that getting such an approval would revolutionize the way people think about tall timber buildings.
Green sees this potential as akin to Gustave Eiffel’s building of the 301-metre tower that shares his name, and “blew the socks off the entire idea of how tall you could build a building.”
The Reinventer Paris is a competition that’s hoping to promote innovative design and sustainability that will revitalize the Parisian architectural landscape.
He sees the opportunity to showcase wood as a sustainable, carbon-sequestering building material in Paris, and make as grand a statement as the Eiffel Tower did in 1889.
In 2012, Green and structural engineer Eric Karsh co-authored the report “Tall Wood,” which made the case for wood buildings 30 storeys and higher. The report got architects and engineers talking about the possibility of using wood in contemporary highrise construction. Many of their hypotheses about highrise wood structures were proven through the construction of the 29.5-metre Wood Innovation and Design Centre in Prince George, a smaller structure which uses many of the same techniques they would employ in their Reinventer Paris entry.
In order to enter the Reinventer Paris competition, Green’s team had to endure a grueling selection process. For the competition, Paris officials are taking proposals that are architecturally, socially and environmentally innovating to redevelop 23 sites around the city.
On Reinvinter Paris’s website, Paris Mayor Anne Hidaldo offered the following statement: “We are launching this call for innovative urban projects in order to prefigure what the Paris of tomorrow might be.”
Of the 815 applications submitted from around the world into the competition’s first stage, 650 have passed to the second stage.
Green and his team were invited to bid on a team with French architects DVVD Paris and developer REI France. They chose to compete for the largest spot, which would eventually be seen from the La Defense business district to the Arc de Triomphe: the Boulevard Pershing site.
What sits there now is a bus depot parking lot. The proposed development would feature a mix of social and market housing, a student hotel and urban agriculture. The bus depot would remain at the base of the development.
Despite the fact that Green’s design surpasses zoning limits, it promises to reduce the jarring effect that the 44-storey Palais de Congres (which sits next to the Boulevard Perishing site) currently has on the Parisian skyline with its stepped design.
What’s more, the French government has also been showing interest in using more wood in construction, and Green hopes that this will prove beneficial to his team's proposal.
Generally, wood construction is gaining momentum these days, but Green’s team is still in competition with those stronger materials more traditionally used in highrise construction— steel and concrete. Whether or not Green and his team finally win the right to redevelop the site, their proposal is another contribution to the current advent of wood.