Houses and buildings started out using cut timber from real forests. Time passed, the population grew and humans determined that it wasn’t such a good idea to use all of our natural resources. We need something stronger and more Earth friendly, ahhh cement and metal. Cement and metal are sturdy but lack the warmth that wood encompasses.
“Really we’re at the stage where we’re able to start to show what’s possible, a bit like that Eiffel Tower moment.” - Michael Green, architect -
Image courtesy of Arabian Gazette
In what seems like a bizarre scenario in a time when conservation is on the up, Architect Michael Green has plans for a 30-story wooden skyscraper in Vancouver. Norway and Austria are also in the middle of planning their own 17- and 20-story wooden skyscrapers.
Wooden skyscraper’s unknown facts:
- When sourced from sustainably managed forests it can be more “environmentally sensitive”
- Wood buildings lock in carbon dioxide for the life cycle of a structure
- Steel and concrete produces large amounts of CO2 — the International Energy Agency (IEA), for every 10 kilos of cement, 6 to 9 kilos of CO2 are produced
- Green’s “Tallwood” structure is designed with large panels of laminated strand lumber — a composite made of strands of wood glued together
- Other mass timber products use layers of wood fused together at right angels that making they immensely strong and able to be used as lode bearing infrastructure, walls and floors
- Large timber performs well in fires with a layer of char insulating the structural wood beneath
- One of the highest modern wooden buildings is Stadthaus, Murray Grove in London – nine story residential building
- Building codes are one reason there aren’t more tall wooden buildings
- Buildings are erected because of a strong bottom line
Green’s “Think Big” belief: “Really we’re at the stage where we’re able to start to show what’s possible, a bit like that Eiffel Tower moment. That was built when no one was used or understood tall structures, but it showed what could be done and just as importantly stretched the imagination.”
