The World’s Tallest Timber Tower Rising Over Sydney Is Nearly Twice as High as the Previous Record Holder

A 39-story timber skyscraper is changing what cities can build with wood.

Sydney’s newest skyscraper looks like another glass-and-steel tower. But behind its facade, wooden beams and panels climb more than 180 meters above the city — farther than timber has ever reached in a hybrid tower.

Atlassian Central, a 39-story office building beside Sydney Central Station, has officially topped out, meaning its structural frame is complete. The milestone makes it the world’s tallest hybrid timber tower, according to an official project update from developer Dexus. It stands nearly 100 meters taller than Milwaukee’s 86.6-meter Ascent tower, the previous completed record holder.

This is not a wooden skyscraper in the complete, storybook sense. Concrete cores hold elevators and provide much of the structural resistance against major forces, while an external steel frame braces the tower. Roughly 10,000 cubic meters of engineered timber — including glued-laminated columns and cross-laminated floor panels — forms much of the structure inside.

Timber makes the building lighter and allows factories to produce large modular components before workers assemble them on site like Legos. Steel and concrete provide the stiffness and strength required at skyscraper scale, hence the hybrid design.

“Hybrid mass timber has done more than reduce embodied carbon, it has fundamentally shaped how tower buildings can be delivered, enabling prefabrication, dry construction and a faster, lighter vertical build,” said BVN principal architect Peter Titmuss. “As a prototype for mass-timber towers of the future, this is a moment of global significance.”

A Tower Built as Seven “Habitats”

Architecture firms SHoP and BVN divided the 75,000-square-meter building into seven four-story clusters, or “habitats.” Each contains exposed timber, planted terraces, atriums and naturally ventilated areas intended to break up the sealed, uniform feel of a conventional office tower.

“It’s particularly rewarding to begin experiencing the spatial qualities of a high-rise that reimagines a natural habitat within an urban tower — connecting people to each other, nature and to the city around them,” said SHoP associate principal Andreia Teixeira.

The tower will become the Australian headquarters of Atlassian, a major software company. It will also include a hostel, rooftop gardens and the restored Parcels Shed, a historic railway building incorporated into the lobby. Contractors digitally sequenced the design before work began, coordinating the timber with about 8,000 tonnes of steel and 30,000 cubic meters of lower-carbon concrete.

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Its scale marks a sharp jump in a field advancing quickly. Norway’s 85.4-meter Mjøstårnet, completed in 2019, showed that an almost entirely timber structural system could reach 18 stories. Milwaukee’s Ascent pushed a hybrid design to 25 stories in 2022. The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat’s timber database now lists dozens of completed, proposed and rising projects.

The Carbon Claim Comes With Caveats

The developer Dexus says Atlassian Central targets 50 percent less upfront embodied carbon in its structure than a conventional steel-and-glass premium office tower, along with a 50 percent improvement in operating energy efficiency. The building is designed to run without fossil fuels and use renewable electricity.

Producing cement and steel releases copious amounts of carbon before a building opens. Timber can replace some of those materials and store carbon absorbed by trees. A 2024 study in PLOS One found that widespread mass-timber adoption in taller American buildings could deliver substantial climate benefits.

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But wood is not automatically carbon neutral. The outcome depends on forest management, manufacturing energy, transportation and what happens after demolition. An Australian life-cycle analysis found that timber buildings generally performed better than concrete ones, but by a smaller margin than some earlier estimates suggested. It’s unclear how the developers of Atlassian Central arrived at the carbon reduction figures they cite.

There are also questions about moisture, cost and fire hazards. Mass timber is combustible, but its thicker area chars at a measurable rate, leaving an inner core that can keep carrying loads. There are also sprinklers, protective layers and engineered connections.

Atlassian Central’s facade and building systems remain under construction, with completion expected by the end of 2026. But its frame already answers one question: timber no longer belongs only in cabins and mid-rise apartments. It has entered the skyline.