Moholt Timber Towers
Student housing often drown in mediocrity, with simple units stacked on top of each other in the cheapest way possible and left to themselves without support programs. The Moholt 50|50 project is a reaction to this. By inserting new housing collectives and a wide range of support services and public programs into an existing student village built in the sixties, a new active central area is created, erasing the psychological border between the student village and the surrounding area.
The project is shortlisted for the Mies van der Rohe Award 2017.
The project is located in Trondheim, Norway. The title Moholt 50|50 represents a turning point in the history of the student village. Fifty years after the inauguration of the first student units at Moholt student village a competition for young architects was arranged, looking for a vision for the coming fifty years. True to the ideals of the student organization – offering both private space for individual needs and collective space promoting collaboration, social responsibility and tolerance- the winning project proposed Y-shaped towers where each floor is one student collective. Every collective consists of fifteen units with individual bathrooms. The habitants share kitchen, dining/living room and an entrance hall with wardrobes. The ground floors of all towers offer different types of public programs: gym, hairdresser, medical center, laundry and a grocery store. In addition to the housing the masterplan consists of a kindergarten and a library with spaces for student activities. All buildings are constructed in crosslaminated timber (CLT) and have an ambitious energy concept.
Moholt 50|50 is the largest CLT project in Europe.
The five towers are all nine-storeys high with a height of 28 metres. The basement and ground floor levels are made in cast reinforced concrete. From the first floor to the nineth floor the structure consists of prefabricated CLT-elements.
The approach to building with CLT was to take advantage of the finished surface of the CLT elements and expose as much as possible of the wood in the interiors. By utilizing the technical and aesthetic qualities of the CLT system, a robust and honest expression was achieved. The towers, with their relatively short spans and Y-shaped volumes, were statically optimal for this type of load bearing wood construction.
The use of CLT has reduced the CO2 in building materials by 57 % and the CO2 emissions associated with energy use are reduced by approximately 70% compared to standard Norwegian requirements.
Like regular wood structures, CLT wood structures have the characteristics of shrinkage in tangential and radial direction. The façade cladding system of the student towers is designed to give it a telescopic characteristic whichcharacteristic that can absorb the shrinkage of the floor elements without creating tensions in the cladding.
The façades are clad with Kebony treated pine wood panels.
