It’s official. T3 Collingwood is Australia’s top commercial timber project – with the high rise was one of four Victorian projects recognised at the Australian Timber Design Awards last night.
The latest accolade comes just months after the Victorian branch of the Australian Institute of Architects judged it to be Victoria’s top office building.
As Australia’s first project financed under the federal government’s Clean Energy Finance Corporation timber incentive program, the project is, in many ways, a frontier project. Its developer, Hines Global Real Estate, has dubbed it a “green magnet,” which the real estate giant is trying to replicate in Sydney, Brisbane, and Auckland.
The 15-storey tower, designed by Jackson Clements Burrows Architects, is constructed from mass timber. It encompasses two basement levels, five concrete podium levels, and ten levels of exposed glulam post-and-beam structure with CLT floor panels.
In total, Hines used 2,358 cubic meters of cross-laminated timber (CLT) from XLam Australia and an additional 874 cubic meters of glue-laminated timber (GLT) from Australian sustainable hardwood (ASH).
“T3 Collingwood is a ground-breaking, sustainable evolution of old-fashioned office buildings,” according to Hines Asia Pacific CEO Ray Lawler, who added that the asset is now part of Hines’s 27 Timber, Transit, Technology (T3) global portfolio – which replaces traditional structural systems with prefabricated timber systems.
Can T3 Collingwood be replicated in different cities across Australia?
According to David Warneford, the CEO of Hines’ Australia and New Zealand business, the local real estate market is primed for what he describes as more ‘timber magnet buildings’: “These ‘magnet buildings’ are sustainability-driven, well-located, technologically efficient, and adjacent to transit,” Mr Warneford told the Australian last year.
Significantly, he said, timber plays a major role in driving demand for these magnet assets, not just for the obvious embodied carbon benefits – with Hines now ‘eying a few’ sites in Brisbane and Sydney.
“The first thing people do is they go over and touch a column, rub it, smell it,” he said before continuing, “and I think it creates a very warm, feeling office environment. I think we often walk onto more conventional floors, and they just don’t offer the same depth of character.”
- To learn more about how Hines Global Real Estate is now using mass timber buildings, like T3 Collingwood, to attract the next generation of A-grade tenants, visit Wood Central’s special feature.
