ABOUT

VISIONS:​

Tropical MET enables to sink carbon in building forms 

Our tropical rain forest in Southeast Asia is one of the oldest on the Earth, however it has been deforesting significantly. To illustrate the significance, Tropical forest occupy only 7% of the earth’s land surface, yet accounting for 68% of global carbon stock. Tropical deforestation contribute to about 10 % of Green House Gas emissions globally, among which 41% come from Southeast Asian region (2005-2010). One of the strongest motivations to review timber nowadays is that timber is renewable resource and effective carbon sink. Due to the year-round sunlight, fast-growing tropical plantations grow up to a few times faster than the ones in temperate climate, however, current main uses are limited to pulp, chips or plywood due to relatively weak mechanical property by their own. By developing the fast-growing plantation timber as tropical Mass Engineered Timber (MET), it may enable to sink carbon in building forms for long-term, which will be the true game changer of the global warming era.

MISSIONS:

SkyTimber™ Tropical Renewable Architecture Design Lab  

SkyTimber™ design lab was started at the National University of Singapore in 2013, when Singapore adapted to the Eurocode opened a way toward mass timber buildings legislatively. Since then, SkyTimber™ has grown into highly inter-disciplinary/international design and research platform across forestry, manufacturing, architectonics, built environment and legislation, as well as challenges in the tropics, such as constant high-humidity, harsh weathering and fierce termite attacks. Our key research areas are 1. Life-cycle sustainability assessment, 2. Tropical MET prototypes, 3. Tropical architectonics designs and 4. Tropical building performance. Our goal is not only to create tropical renewable architecture, but also to promote symbiosis between sustainable forestry and renewable urbanism in the tropics, ultimately to contribute to mitigate the global warming.