Singapore Builds in Timber

From the fortieth floor of a half-finished office tower in Jurong, the smell is the first surprise. Not concrete dust and diesel, the usual perfume of a Singapore construction site, but something closer to a sawmill — resin, cedar, the faint sweetness of cross-laminated spruce panels stacked six storeys high, waiting to be craned into place.

This is Tembusu Grove, a 12-storey commercial building that will be, when it tops out next year, the tallest mass-timber structure in Southeast Asia. It is also, more quietly, a test case for whether a city built almost entirely on concrete and steel can change its mind about what a skyscraper is made of.

A regulatory nudge, not a mandate

Architect Wong Kah Meng, whose firm designed the structural frame with a Vancouver-based engineering partner, is careful not to oversell the moment. "Nobody at the Building and Construction Authority is telling developers they must build in timber," he told me on site, hard hat under one arm. "What changed is that the code finally makes it possible to build tall in timber without a special exemption every single time."

That regulatory shift, finalised last year after nearly four years of fire-testing and consultation, raised the permissible height for mass-timber and hybrid timber-concrete structures and streamlined a process that developers here have long described as glacial. It did not happen because Singapore suddenly fell in love with wood aesthetics. It happened because the city-state's construction sector, chronically short of labour and under pressure to cut embodied carbon from new buildings, needed an alternative to business as usual.

The carbon argument, tested against reality

The pitch from timber advocates is by now familiar to anyone who follows global construction trends: cross-laminated timber sequesters carbon rather than emitting it during production, and prefabricated panels can be assembled faster with smaller crews than a conventional concrete pour. Both claims hold up reasonably well in Tembusu Grove's case. The developer, a joint venture between a local family-owned contractor and a Japanese trading house, says the building will go up in roughly two-thirds the time of an equivalent concrete structure, largely because panels arrive pre-cut and pre-drilled from a fabrication plant in Sarawak.

"We are not doing this because timber is fashionable. We are doing it because we cannot find enough formwork carpenters," said site manager Faizal Rahman.

What gets less attention, and what I pressed Wong on, is durability in Singapore's climate — heat, humidity and the occasional termite are not incidental concerns here the way they might be in Scandinavia, where much of the mass-timber literature originates. The answer, somewhat unglamorously, is chemistry: the panels are treated with borate compounds and sealed behind a rain-screen facade that keeps timber surfaces from ever touching ambient humidity directly. Termite inspection is now a monthly line item in the building's maintenance budget rather than an annual one.

What comes after the first tower

Three more mass-timber projects have been approved since the code change, including a residential block in Bidadari and a school building in Tampines, and the National Parks Board has floated timber for a new visitor centre at MacRitchie Reservoir. None will individually reshape the skyline the way glass towers did in the 1990s. But taken together, they suggest a government-led sector willing to treat timber less as a novelty material for boutique architecture firms and more as a genuine third option alongside steel and concrete for the next decade of public and private building here.

Whether that ambition survives contact with Singapore's next major fire-safety review, or the next cost shock in imported softwood, is an open question that even the project's champions concede they cannot fully answer yet. But standing on that fortieth floor, timber under my boots instead of rebar and formwork, it was hard not to register that something in this city's basic material vocabulary is quietly being rewritten.