Pioneers in high-rise wood construction

29 March, 2019

The Peñuelas Tower was presented at the World Conference of Timber Engineering WTCE 2018 in Seoul, Korea, with great interest in advances in Latin America in wood construction.

With more than 20 years of presence in the market, Tecno Fast was chosen to build the first of 3 wooden towers of the Torre Experimental Peñuelas project, in collaboration with the UC Corma Wood Innovation Center (CIM UC CORMA), the Ministry of Housing and Urbanism (MINVU), the National Forestry Corporation (CONAF) and the Municipality of Valparaíso. The Peñuelas Tower, a project that was born from a joint effort between the public, academic and industrial world, seeking to raise standards and expand the development of modular technology in wood from the mining world, in which it has been used for many years, to housing and in particular for apartment buildings. This initiative, which seeks to build the first wooden tower in the country, will be located in the Peñuelas National Reserve, V Region, and will be a 6-story building, 3 of them open to the general public. The construction will be developed with ventilated wall technology, which regulates the temperature and provides energy efficiency to the construction of this wooden building. Thanks to the above, it will be possible to empirically experiment with the use of wood for housing, applying attributes of energy efficiency and sustainability, which will improve the useful life of buildings. Torre Peñuelas will be the first of a series of 3 buildings that will be built in the next 2 years by CIM UC CORMA. It should be noted that Tecno Fast has vast experience in the construction of this type of material at height and has developed similar projects in important mining operations.

Under the highest standards The first advances were verified by a delegation made up of the organizations that are part of the project, and according to the head of the MINVU’s Technical Division of Study and Development, Erwin Navarrete, “The construction of the Peñuelas Tower and other initiatives that we are promoting, within the framework of public-private collaborative work, is part of the wood agenda that we have been working on in recent years and marks a more than auspicious beginning of what is to come for the future of this resource ”. Meanwhile, the General Manager of Tecno Fast, Rodrigo Prado, recognized that as a company it is a pride to be part of this initiative: “It fits perfectly with our desire to promote the use of this material for multi-story residential buildings,” he concluded.