Brisbane needs to find thousands of rooms to meet demand for the 2032 Olympic Games. And whilst the Steven Miles government was looking to tap cruise ships, boarding schools, and other “alternative styles” of accommodation to make up 50,000 rooms, it still fell thousands short of meeting the 61,000-plus room requirements to host the games.
“Brisbane needs more hotel rooms,” according to Michael Healy, who, in May 2024, was acting as minister for the 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games, Tourism and Sports, and was preparing a report to identify the number of rooms needed for the games: “We need thousands more rooms.”
Yesterday, Wood Central spoke to Gianluigi Traetta and Florian Hitthaler from Italian-based RubnerHolzbau Srl, who said the answer to Brisbane’s puzzle could lie in vertical extension—an emerging type of building where developers use lightweight materials (like cross-laminated timber and glulam) to build new structures on top of existing assets.
“Timber is perfect for these projects,” according to Traetta, who said Australia, through 55 Southbank in Melbourne, the world’s tallest vertical extension, has a proud tradition of using mass timber technologies to effectively double the floor area of assets:
“The most important advantage is its lightness. In most cases, we do not need to reinforce the foundations. Sometimes, we have to work in very constrained areas and be as quick as possible because you bring disruption to the people living there and so on – so the fast-paced nature of construction is also a major advantage.”
Gianluigi Traetta – Technical Sales Engineer for Rubner Holzbau Srl and a Partner Investigator at the Australian Government ARC Advance Timber Hub. Traetta has worked on several Australian projects through partner Theca Timber including the Sydney Fish Markets, the Northcote Aquatic and Recreation Centre, the Macquarie University Law School in Sydney and the Eric Teedale Stadium in Cumberland.
According to Traetta and Hitthaler—who will travel from Brixen, Northern Italy, to Brisbane next month to attend the World Conference on Timber Engineering (WCTE)— vertical extensions have been a big hit for developers in Milan, who are now busy getting ‘games-ready’ for the Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics: “One of our recent projects is a vertical extension to accommodate the overflow of spectators,” said Hitthaler, which will eventually cater for the 500,000 visitors expected to visit the region in February.
It comes after IOC officials wrapped up talks with the Brisbane 2032 organising committee – including Andrew Liveris, organising president, and Cindy Hook, CEO – in the first round of in-person talks as preparations for the 2032 games start to ramp up. On Monday, Wood Central spoke to Clarissa Brandt from Timber Queensland and Andrew Dunn of the Timber Development Association. Both said that the use of timber in venues and infrastructure offers a compelling path to surpassing the legendary 2000 Olympic Games.
“A key starting point in this journey is to embrace sustainability through more extensive use of timber structures than we saw in Sydney,” according to Andrew Dunn, a structural engineer instrumental in helping deliver timber-rich venues and infrastructure for the Sydney games.
Please Note: Wood Central will have coverage of its exclusive interview with Gianluigi Traetta and Florian Hitthaler in the coming days, the fabricator of the mass timber used in the Sydney Fish Market, the southern hemisphere’s largest timber roof structure.
