Wind- and waterproof wooden CubeHouse reaches full height

In just a few blinks of your eye, an office tower appears – at least it feels a bit like that with The CubeHouse. Around 18 months ago, the first piles were driven into the ground on the so-called ‘Boog’ plot, on the corner of Clause Debussylaan and Parnassusweg. For a long time, the contractor was working on the foundations and the concrete plinth (ground floor) of the building, which was partly built on top of the existing Mahler car park. In October 2024, work began on what makes the building so special: its wooden structure. It reaches from the first floor all the way to the eleventh, and the joinery work has now been completely finished. All but a few of the glass façade elements around the building are also now in place. ‘Columns, floor beams, almost everything inside is made of wood. We completed the façade on each floor as soon as possible after the wooden structure, to protect the wood from the weather’, explains Stijn Mars, project coordinator for the contractor Visser en Smit Bouw & Homij.

Over the last six months, it looked roughly like this: in the middle of The CubeHouse, the contractor built a concrete core that will soon be used as a lift shaft. This gave the building some solidity and was the first part to be erected. While the core was under construction, three floors down work started on the wooded structure across an entire floor. Almost immediately after that, the glass façade elements for that floor were added – rapidly reaching up to the highest point. ‘We spent about two weeks on each floor’, says Mars. ‘The wooden columns remained in thick protective wrap to prevent discolouration or damage. As soon as the façade on each floor was completed, this wrap could be removed. In the end, the weather was on our side: there’s been hardly any rain these last six months.’

The wooden structure itself was like a Lego kit. The wood was delivered in ready-to-use sections by a supplier in Austria and these were then assembled on site. ‘It’s quite nerve-wracking at the start – will it all fit? In the end, it was all very easy and fast’, says Mars, as we are standing on the second floor. ‘This kind of prefab construction kit forces you to think everything through very carefully. Take a look at the beams across the ceiling. They’re full of grooves and openings where cabling and other systems need to be installed. If these are too small or incorrectly positioned, it’s easy to drill a hole in concrete. That’s more difficult with wood. There’s more chance of damage and it also creates a lot of dust.’

A big advantage of building with wood is that it is lighter, explains Mars. ‘That enables us to go higher. It’s all to do with the load-bearing capacity: The CubeHouse has partly been built on top of the existing Mahler underground car park. Foundations can only support a certain weight – if this building had been built using concrete, it would never have been able to reach so high.’ But the lightness of wood also has its challenges, he adds. ‘A wooden floor like this also means that, if we stamp our feet hard on the ground, you can still hear it two floors down. That’s while we also opted to have a floating floor on each level. There’s the wooden structure, with insulation and foil on top of it, and then the deck floor on top of that. It’s separate from the structure itself, which is how you reduce the noise.’

As we go down a floor – to the first – it is noticeable how much progress has been made inside: the climate ceilings are in place, the walls have been built and even the toilets have already been tiled. ‘That’s a big advantage of doing the façade straight away’, says Mars. ‘As soon as the outside of each floor is sealed, you can start on the finishing work. On some floors, we’ll soon even be installing the flooring and partition walls.’ This also has an advantage for the contractor, which has had to manoeuvre on a very tight construction site since the start of building work. ‘Our construction hut in Claude Debussylaan will soon be disappearing. We’ll then be setting up a room on the first floor, where we’ll be based until completion. That means we’ll be the first people to be able to enjoy the building.’