VANCOUVER — The University of B.C. has approved building an 18-storey student residential tower made out of wood.
Once the building is completed in two years, it would be one of the tallest wood structures of its kind in the world.
"Our principal goal is to build a great residence for our students," said John Metras, the managing director of infrastructure development at UBC.
"We've got a huge demand for student accommodation. We're taking the opportunity to utilize an innovative building material."
Called the Tall Wood Residence, the building won't be entirely made out of wood. The first floor will be concrete with 17 floors of wood construction built on top. It will have two 18-storey concrete cores containing the elevator shafts and stairs.
The $51.5 million project will house 404 upper year and graduate students.
The building, to be located on Walter Gage Road to the north of the North Parkade, is expected to be completed by 2017. It was approved Tuesday by the Board of Governors, the administrative body that governs the university.
The UBC tower would be 53 meters tall. The current tallest wood residential building in the world is the Forte Tower in Melbourne, Australia, at 10 storeys or 32 meters.
In Bergen, Norway, a 14-storey apartment building called Treet (The Tree) is under construction. Once finished, it will be for a while the tallest residential tower at 49 meters.
In North America, the tallest wood building is the six-storey Wood Innovation and Design Centre in Prince George.
Metras said UBC hasn't focused on the building being the tallest residential wood structure in the world because it won't likely hold that position for long. He estimated that there are as many as 17 similar or taller projects around the world, including a 35-storey mixed use tower in Paris made out of wood designed by Vancouver's Michael Green.
He said there is growing interest around the world in using sustainable materials such as wood in buildings.
"It's important to differentiate between this type of wood and the type of wood you might see in a home or four-storey apartment building, where you would have two-by-fours," he said in a phone interview.
"This is what would be called mass timber. It's really a different type of material than the wood used in a standard wood-frame building."
Metras said wood will form the majority of the building's structure. Columns will be made out of glulam and the floor plates of cross-laminated timber (CLT). Glulam is layers of wood bonded together with adhesive; CLT is layers of wood glued at right angles to one another.
Even though the building will use wood structurally, exposed wood will likely only be seen on the lounge on the top floor. The rest of the wood will be encased in other materials such as multiple layers of drywall, he said.
"The important thing to note about mass timber is that it doesn't ignite easily," he said. "If it does burn, it burns really slowly and chars on the outside. The structural integrity is maintained because of this charring effect."
Metras said the building will meet or exceed fire and seismic safety codes.
"It will be a perfectly safe building," he said.
The Tall Wood Student Residence is designed by Vancouver's Acton Ostry Architects working in collaboration with Austria's Architekten Hermann Kaufmann, which is advising on the use of tall wood.
Andrew Parr, managing director of student housing and hospitality services, said the Tall Wood Student Residence is one of five student housing projects under design or being built on campus. By 2020, they'll add accommodation for 3,000 students at UBC.
Parr said research has indicated that sound transfer between floors and units could be less and certainly not worse than in a traditional concrete building.
"The biggest thing for us in student housing and hospitality services is that we wanted to build a building (that is) functional, livable and meets all the safety requirements," he said.
The new student residence will include a Collegium. With membership of 300, it will give first-year students who commute to classes a place to meet during the day when they have long gaps between classes or are staying late and waiting for intra-mural sports to start. It will be able to accommodate up to 50 students at a time.
"This is one way for commuter students to feel more connected to the community and have a place they can call their own," he said.