Detail: Dalston Works Building Envelope

摘要

The 155,000-square-foot Dalston Works in London is the largest CLT building in the world, but passersby would never know. Comprising five- to 10-story-tall volumes, the mixed-use project is clad entirely in brick. "It's counterintuitive to clad a lightweight building in heavy stuff," acknowledges project architect Dave Lomax, a senior associate at the local firm Waugh Thistleton Architects. But normalizing mass timber construction is a priority for the firm. "We don't think that sustainable buildings always have to ... have a whirligig on top that spins in the wind," he says. "We want to develop beautiful architecture that shows no sign that it's sustainable." Except for a concrete podium, the structure is CLT, from the floors to the walls to the elevator cores. As a result, Dalston Works weighs just one-fifth of its hypothetical concrete counterpart, enabling developer Regal London to increase the number of housing units by 25 percent. "In real hard pounds and pence, if you have 25 percent more homes to sell, that's going to win the debate for our clients," Lomax says. "And that means we get our narrative: taking carbon and locking it away in our buildings." Copenhagen-based structural engineering firm Ramboll-which, along with B&K Structures in Derby, England, helped design the timber skeleton-estimates that Dalston Works sequesters 2,866 tons of carbon dioxide in its 136,000 cubic feet of CLT.