WORLD'S TALLEST MASS TIMBER TOWER

FALL 2025

Imagine the world's tallest building re-engineered through the lens of contemporary timber design.

Burj Model-T(imber) looks at how the Burj Khalifa's iconic form could be reinterpreted using mass timber and hybrid systems, exploring what stays, what changes, and what becomes possible when you push engineered timber to its limits. It is about simplicity, clarity, and sustainability.

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Developed as part of SOM's Tall Buildings: From Archetype to Prototype studio at IIT, the project reinterprets the Burj’s iconic buttressed form through a mass-timber and hybrid structural system. The study keeps the logic of the original tower, but rethinks its material reality, replacing steel and concrete wherever possible with engineered Douglas fir while retaining a reinforced concrete shear core where performance demands it.

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At 828 meters and 185 floors, the proposal explores the structural, environmental, and architectural consequences of pushing mass timber far beyond its current limits. A system of glue-laminated “hammerhead” walls steps and overlap vertically, creating a continuous load path that resists overturning while directly shaping the tower’s tapering geometry. Structure, form, and material are deliberately inseparable.

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Beyond structure, the project integrates program, vertical transportation, façade systems, and energy strategy into a coherent high-rise ecosystem. Quantitative metrics - embodied carbon, operational energy, material quantities, and forest impact - are treated not as abstractions, but as design drivers.

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It is not a proposal to replace the original. It is a way to test the boundaries of material performance, rethink supertall strategies, and speculate on the future of sustainability.