The Wooden New Yorker

December 7,2015 | By Juliana Kagami

The real estate magazine The Real Deal published last week, a video of an interesting NYC project by the SHoP Architects: a 10-story condo building made almost entirely from wood. The first of its kind in America, the project isn’t the first on Earth. The “Baobab” in Paris will be the tallest wooden building in the world with 35 stories when completed. And there are some other to-be-completed wooden buildings around the world, like the “Hoho” in Vienna, Austria, expected to be finished in 2017.

The New York development 475 West 18th Street won the first U.S. Tall Wood Building Prize Competition, and because of that, it is being partially funded by a federal grant with the purposes of studying the use of engineered wood, or man-made composites, in high-rise construction. The building will be located in the neighborhood Chelsea, in New York City, and it is made of wood all the way down to the elevator core.

“The science of wood construction has come a long way in the past several decades,” Chris Sharples, a principal at SHoP, said. “Every element of the building, right down to the elevator core, can be constructed in wood.” [WSJ] – Rey Mashayekhi