Timber high-rise tops out in record time

A new 18-storey residential tower has reached its full height in just under eleven months, several weeks ahead of the original programme. The structure is built almost entirely from prefabricated mass-timber elements, and the project team credits the speed to decisions made long before the first panel arrived on site.

Why it was faster

Floor cassettes and wall panels were manufactured off site in a factory running to a fixed production schedule, then delivered in the exact order they were needed rather than in batches that had to be sorted and stored on a congested site. On site, the crew installed a full floor roughly every five working days, a pace that would be difficult to sustain with cast-in-place concrete, where each floor has to wait for formwork, reinforcement, the pour itself and then curing before the next level can begin.

The factory environment also removed weather as a variable for the bulk of the structural work. Panels were cut, drilled and finished under cover, arriving on site ready to lift and fix, which meant a run of wet weeks during the build affected the installation schedule far less than it would have affected a cast-in-place structure at the same stage.

What the team learned

The project manager points to early coordination between designers, the timber supplier and the crane operator as the single biggest factor in keeping the pace consistent. Every lift was planned in advance, sequenced against the factory’s delivery schedule so that the crane was never waiting on a panel and the yard was never so full of stored panels that later deliveries had nowhere to go. That level of sequencing took considerable upfront planning, well before construction started, modelling the whole delivery and erection schedule floor by floor rather than leaving it to be worked out once the job was under way.

A second lesson was about tolerances. Mass timber panels arrive cut to a precision that left very little room for on-site adjustment, which meant errors upstream, in the model, in the factory, or in how accurately the foundation and lower floors were built, would have compounded quickly if they were not caught early. The team ran a full model check against as-built surveys after each of the first few floors specifically to catch this before it became a pattern, and found the discipline paid for itself many times over as the building rose.

What comes next

Interior fit-out is now under way, with handover planned for next spring. Because the structural frame went up so quickly, fit-out trades were able to start on the lower floors while the upper floors were still being erected, a form of overlap that is harder to achieve safely with a wet-trade structure still curing above. The developer says the approach will be reused on two further sites, with lessons from this build, particularly around panel tolerance checks and delivery sequencing, already being folded into the planning for the next one.