As well as providing Parisians with housing, LAN Architecture’s 16-storey tower has also served as an experimental research project for the development of timber as a building material, with each of its elements requiring laboratory testing from scratch. Is timber a functional proposition for housing in Europe’s densest city? …With their proposal for a 16-storey tower on the banks of the Seine, competition winners LAN Architecture and REI Habitat undertook to achieve the necessary density. …Wood Up is a hybrid structure, with a three-storey concrete base tackling the complexity of the site’s 7m drop to the Seine and creating new connections between river and neigbourhood. …The glulam timber structure above is braced by the concrete of circulation areas, while floors are fabricated with a wood-concrete composite. But the principal material is beech. Wood Up is the first building constructed from France’s most plentiful timber, transported to the site by barge from Normandy.