New NTU sports hall makes waves with innovative timber construction technology

Singapore

THE Nanyang Technological University (NTU) on Monday officially unveiled its new S$35 million sports hall called The Wave, the first large-scale construction project in South-east Asia to use Mass Engineered Timber (MET) - an innovative timber construction technology that reduced on-site manpower for the project by 25 per cent and structural construction time by 33 per cent.

This is because the building process involves assembling parts that were pre-fabricated off-site.

The adoption of such new technologies will set the scene for the construction sector in the coming years. Currently, only about 10 per cent of construction projects use such methods that boost productivity and efficiency; the government aims to increase this figure to 40 per cent by 2020, Minister for National Development and Second Minister for Finance Lawrence Wong said at the ope…