Hours out from the Opening Ceremony, the Milano‑Cortina Winter Games are set to become the most geographically scattered Olympics in history. And with events spread across two host cities and four Alpine clusters, organisers have relied heavily on existing infrastructure, leaving the Games without a central hub and forcing spectators to make tough choices about what they can see. And with up to half a million visitors expected to pour into northern Italy over the coming weeks, developers have spent the past year racing to get “Games‑ready” for the surge.
Last year, Wood Central spoke exclusively with Gianluigi Traetta and Florian Hitthaler of RubnerHolzbau Srl, one of Europe’s largest mass‑timber fabricators, who said the run‑up to the Games had triggered a wave of vertical extensions across Milan and surrounding regions, as building owners tapped lightweight engineered‑timber systems to expand accommodation capacity.
“Timber is the perfect solution for these projects,” Traetta said, noting that mass‑timber technologies allow developers to add new levels to existing buildings without major structural reinforcement:
“The most important advantage is its lightness. In most cases, we do not need to reinforce the foundations. Sometimes we have to work in very constrained areas and be as quick as possible because you bring disruption to the people living there, so the fast‑paced nature of construction is also a major advantage.”
Gianluigi Traetta – Technical Sales Engineer for Rubner Holzbau Srl – on the potential for vertical extensions.
It comes after Wood Central revealed last month that Milan’s Athletes’ Village — the only permanent venue built for the Games — was delivered 30 days ahead of schedule using factory‑made modular units built around mass‑timber elements. Whilst at the same time, PEFC International on Monday revealed that large volumes of PEFC-certified local timber have been used in the retrofit of the Fabio Canal Cross-Country Ski Stadium, which will host the cross-country skiing.
- To learn more about the push to use vertical extensions, click here for Wood Central’s from last year.
