World's Tallest Timber Tower Could Be Coming To Chicago's Riverfront

By Stephen Gossett in News on Oct 11, 2016 9:21PM

It's been a long time since Chicago could claim the world's tallest skyscraper; but if a design from a leading group of engineers and architects were to come to fruition, we could be home to tallest timber tower.

The massive, 80-story design, called River Beech Tower, is still in the conceptual stages, but the team behind it—high-profile architecture firm Perkins + Will, plus engineers Thornton Tomasetti and the University of Cambridge—told Arch Daily that the skyscraper could culminate in time for a "masterplan along the Chicago River," which Curbed speculates would be the mammoth Riverline development, slated for the South Loop.

As Arch Daily notes, other large-scale wood-framed buildings are in the works across the world, including a 34-story, wood-structured tower in Stockholm, along with smaller designs in Vancouver and Melbourne. But River Beech could be by far the tallest of its kind, should it happen.

[H/T Curbed]