The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat has designated the 284-ft-tall Ascent in Milwaukee as the world’s tallest timber and concrete hybrid structure. The 25-story Ascent has broken height and size records both for pure timber and composite timber and concrete structures anywhere—but by only 4 ft in height.
The 488,000-sq-ft residential building barely exceeds the height of the world’s tallest pure-wood building—Mjøstårnet, a 122,000-sq-ft mixed-use building in Brumunddal, Norway, completed in March 2019. Measured in meters, Ascent is 86.6 m, Mjøstårnet is 85.4 m and the timber-concrete hybrid mixed-use building, HoHo, in Vienna, is a close third at 84 m.
Construction of Ascent, designed by Korb + Associates Architects, began in August 2020. The first tenants began moving in through the 14th floor on July 15. The rest of the building is expected to be finished at the end of August.
Completion was originally set for July 1. “We had supply chain issues,” says Tim Gokhman, managing director for Ascent’s local co-developer, New Land Enterprises, which is in partnership with Wiechmann Enterprises.
Construction of the superstructure’s timber frame went “as well if not better than expected,” says Gokhman. Contractor C.D. Smith eventually reached a 5.5-day cycle, decreasing it from the initial 10 days.
Ascent also exceeds Milwaukee’s 85-ft height limit for wood buildings, which is why it took two years to get approvals from the city. In Milwaukee, there was no permitting path for such a tall timber building. There were also no U.S. precedents for grand-scale “supertall” timber-and-concrete building development, financing, insurance, design, detailing, material procurement, fabrication and construction.
