GRIP Global Tower

If we want to live in more healthy urban communities, we need an approach to city making that is based on a more comprehensive model of health. While the Market Bridge Project and CafeTO Main Street Pavilions rethink the way we experience our high streets and what they communicate to residents about city life, the GRIP global tower aims to communicate the nature of its primary building material - mass timber - in the context of a high-rise structure. We wanted to explore whether the “nature” of timber could be expressed in a building’s form, beyond wood’s altered, manufactured state as rectilinear planks and beams.

In its early use, the plastic, fluid properties of concrete were conveyed in the work of Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen. German-American architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe revealed new possibilities for steel when he designed repetitive, rectilinear, modular steel frames. What about wood? We try to communicate the growing, twisting nature of this organic material in a fourty-four-storey, CLT tower. The design begins to explore the use of fractal patterns at a city scale, combined with the positive ambiguity of the fractal and twisting forms of the tower’s section as it is expressed on the city skyline.