The 25-story Ascent apartment tower’s opening last year in Milwaukee won the project a unique distinction: world’s tallest mass timber building.
The unusual nature of the project, and the long road it took to complete, earned the project by developers New Land Enterprises and Wiechmann Enterprises a CoStar Impact Award as judged by real estate professionals familiar with the market.
Mass timber is a general term used for engineered wood products now used in buildings of ever-increasing heights. Ascent is 284 feet tall, four feet taller than a building in Brumunddal, Norway, that previously held the record.
Approvals for the project took two years, requiring rigorous fire testing with the U.S. Forest Service and Forest Products Lab in Madison, Wisconsin, involvement of experts on the building technique from throughout the world, and a change in Milwaukee building code.
COVID-19 and a Suez Canal blockage strained worldwide supply chains, adding further challenges. Although the Milwaukee project was using timber from Austria, the Suez blockage diverted traffic to ports throughout Europe, further challenging Ascent’s developers to keep the project on schedule.
About the project: The tower at 700 E. Kilbourn Ave. has 259 apartment units, 330 parking spaces, about 7,000 square feet of ground-floor retail and 20,000 square feet of building amenities on the seventh and 25th floors.
What the judges said: “Timber frame construction, size and scale make this one stand out,” wrote judge Chris Caulum, vice president of commercial brokerage at Oakbrook Corp.
They made it happen: Jim Wiechmann of Wiechmann Enterprises, Jason Korb of Korb + Associates, John Peronto of Thornton Tomasetti, Chris Johansen of C.D. Smith Construction and Matt Burrow of Catalyst Construction.
