Natural ventilation also influenced the building's design - occupants can open the windows. Each curtain wall window module has an outer glass sheet with top and bottom vents, an air gap, and a two-skin inner window which pivots inward. About 900 square miles and 21 percent of Australia's East Gippsland Forest is old growth forest. About half of the old growth is protected from logging. But Australian loggers grind other old growth timber into wood chips and ship it to Japanese manufacturers of paper products and fiberboard, a building material.
Loggers say they chip only twisted waste logs that are unsuitable for lumber.
But environmentalists say 9 out of 10 old growth logs are headed for chip mills, not saw mills. Kevin Parker, director of the Wilderness Society, says that particular Japanese companies prefer wood chips from only the straightest logs. What's left on the ground, he says, is material that the Japanese companies would refuse. Economists question the wood-chip industry's contribution to Australian jobs and the economy. They suggest that young eucalyptus trees grown on plantations, not old growth timber, can meet all of Australia's future construction lumber needs.