The world’s largest hybrid building is “a timber building inside a much, much larger building,” that is according to Tim Allen, one of the Taylor Thomson Whitting (TTW) structural engineers working on the $1.5 billion Atlassian Central Tower – now out of the ground and rising fast in downtown Sydney.

One of the headline acts at Timber Construct, Australia’s largest timber construction conference, Mr Allen said one of the building’s key features is seven separate free-standing, three-level cross-laminated timber flooring systems sandwiched between steel-and-concrete mega floor plates, all over a seven-floor concrete podium and a structural steel exoskeleton.

“The timber floors are connected to the concrete floors via drag straps,” Mr Allen said, adding that the lateral design effectively makes the building quake-proof:

“Why build a 39-storey building partly out of timber?” Mr Allen told more than 220 architects, engineers, and building and timber professionals in the room, “because it comes down to using the right timber for the right application.”

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