Going up in the world

Anyway, I digress: Back in 1930, the Chrysler building at 319m was the tallest in the world, but not for long. The very next year some other developer with a similarly trouser-felt inferiority complex and a fatter wallet threw up the Empire State Building at 381m (and if that did not ensure the survival of his genes, I don’t know what else would have done). This same one-upmanship is also clearly evident here in Europe. The Shard in London was for the shortest imaginable period the tallest building in Europe. Erected in July 2012 to a height of 309.6m, it was unsurpassed until the following November when it was overtaken by the Mercury City Tower in Moscow at 338.8m. This competition all seems rather pointless, since no one has deeper pockets than the Arabs – and the tallest building in the world, The Burj Khalifa, completed in 2009, now stands at 829.8m, well over 4.5 km taller than any puny European erection.

I know, I’ve told you nothing new and I admit it: I like talking about tall buildings for the same reason I like talking about sports cars, which is that I don’t have enough money to buy my own. In this macho world, we all know that the fact I have two children counts for naught. My manhood must remain under question because I, personally, cannot dream of competing with the Arabs. But neither can any other European developer. However, for those who wish to try I have a suggestion: wood. I mean, we all know that retro is hunky. What could be more masculine than a caveman clubbing down his mate? And obviously a 3 km high cave is out of the question, but a return to wood seems feasible. Currently, the world’s tallest wooden building is an 18-storey dormitory at the University of British Colombia in Canada, a measly 53m in height, but that does not mean that we can’t do better. The Tratoppen residential building in Stockholm, if it is ever built, would reach a height of 133m with 40 storeys – and even this is not the tallest wooden building currently on the drawing boards. A 300m London skyscraper has been designed by researchers at the University of Cambridge together with PLP Architecture and engineers Smith and Wallwork. OK, construction work on a building in London only dwarfed by The Shard seems unlikely, but you have to applaud the idea.

And there’s no reason I can see why Poland cannot outdo such grandiose plans. Canada may have the world’s tallest wooden building, but Poland has the world’s tallest wooden structure. At 118m tall, the Gliwice Radio Tower is currently only used as a base station by mobile telephone companies. Had it been built in recent years, it would have indubitably been constructed out of something boring like steel, but the structure dates back to 1935.

Obviously, if I’m serious about getting developers to buy my idea, I’ve got to extol the green credentials of building out of wood. Cement production accounts for app. 5 pct of global CO2 emissions with around 50 pct of this figure resulting from the chemical process of calcination (which means heating limestone, to the likes of you and me). Admittedly, chopping down trees is not normally considered to be eco-friendly, but farming them might be. The weight of such wooden structures is about a quarter of that of the equivalent structure made out of steel and concrete – and overall, that means deep foundations needn’t be dug so, as ‘The Economist’ reports, the carbon footprint could be reduced by 60–75 pct with such structures.

Perhaps developers are unlikely to ditch tried and tested construction methods and perhaps we can only expect them to be cautious with the application of unfamiliar materials and technologies. Indeed, I don’t expect the announcement of any major wooden developments, so for the time being we’re certainly stuck with living in an over-towering concrete jungle.