A 50-storey hybrid timber tower in Perth, comprising 245 apartments promises to be the world’s tallest timber building if the $350-million development application lodged by Melbourne’s Grange Development is approved.

The plans, for the City of South Perth at 6 Charles Street, envisage a height of almost 183 metres. The development, to be known as C6, will lay claim to be the tallest timber building in the world, outreaching Atlassian’s approved skyscraper in Sydney’s Tech Central precinct by three metres. 

The tower will offer apartments in one-, two-, three- and four-bedroom configurations and offer 18 square metres of communal space per apartment.

Grange Development Managing Director, James Dibble, says the rapidly shifting climate was the main driver behind the carbon-negative building.

“The built environment is one of the three major drivers of catastrophic climate change, alongside transport and agriculture,” he says.

“With promising technological advances in both the transport and agriculture industries now working towards drastically reducing global carbon footprints, the property industry is lagging dangerously behind.”

Designed by architecture firm Elenberg Fraser, the tower will be built from cross-laminated timber (CLT), and glue-laminated timber, or glulam. 

“Timber as a building material has been around for centuries, but only recently has mass timber construction and fabrication methods made it a viable option en masse,” Mr Dibble says.

There will be an open source sharing of the project’s research, design and construction documentation, to encourage other developers to incorporate, evolve and further progress the building’s methodology across other projects, he adds.

“If we can accelerate a paradigm shift into the use of more renewable building materials such as mass timber in a hybrid nature and see even 10, 15 or 20 per cent of future projects use mass timber in their construction in the next few years, we will have succeeded.”