![]() "The challenge is steel and concrete have about a 100-year head start on these new wood concepts. On the cost of building with wood compared to other materials And those trees stand and can be harvested and quite effectively turned into the products that build these big buildings." "We are using a lot of what's called mountain pine beetle wood, which is trees that have been killed off by a pine beetle that's unfortunately ravaging the forests of Canada and now into the United States. We need to move to these organic materials, and so wood, if harvested from very responsible forest practices, gives us incredible capacity to build more environmentally and more climate-sensitive buildings." We should build out of renewable materials rather than these high-carbon materials of steel and concrete that together represent 8 or 9 percent of our manmade greenhouse gas emissions just for the making of those materials. We should build out of materials, wood, that has the capacity to sequester carbon dioxide and help us address issues of climate change. "There's so many reasons to that, and I think the first reason for me is that we should build out of natural materials. If the market wants it, we certainly can get there. And so we're gonna get to 30 stories, we're gonna get to 35. And now, we've re-picked up the conversation with new engineered wood products and starting to push our heights increasingly higher, but it's a matter of step by step. We have a building in Vancouver that's nine stories tall, for instance. ![]() So these ideas are really picking up on what we were able to do 100 years ago in tall buildings in wood. On the outlook and demand for taller wooden buildings So, of course wood can carry that weight and go that high." And I sort of again point out that if you take three of the trees that grow in our forest out here in western North America and stack them end to end on top of each other, three trees equal the height of the Empire State. So, it really is, the capacity of wood to carry its weight over these huge heights is absolutely there. But we did some schematic engineering, and sure enough we could've. About a year ago we were asked to do an exercise to see, could we have built the Empire State Building in wood? And the Empire State, being 102 stories, we thought well that should be a challenge. "So, what's interesting about this is the sky is almost the limit. On the limits of skyscraper construction with wood So, we always protect the structure from that." Building structure is what we're talking about, it's the skeleton, and we cover up in layers that protect our skeleton and we do the same in buildings to prevent them from weathering conditions and insects and so forth. So it's a lot like, if you think about our bodies, we are a skeleton. "What we do with all the buildings is we cover them in a envelope. And so the premise is we use huge-scale wood that resists fire naturally and burns very predictably in a very similar way to control a fire as it would be in a steel or a concrete building." Little sticks will start a fire, but if you tried to light a big log, it will never catch, or it will be very hard to catch. And so the analogy I often use is, little pieces of wood catch fire, big pieces of wood are very difficult to catch fire. "It is always the first question and with any building you have to worry about fire, and of course with a wood building there are some special conditions that we work with. On the safety of a skyscraper made out of wood It's also planning construction of a 35-story tower in Paris, which, if completed, would be the world's tallest residential building made out of wood. a seven-story office building in Minneapolis called T3. His firm, Michael Green Architecture, just finished construction on the first tall timber building in the U.S. A digital rendering of T3 in Minneapolis. Here & Now's Jeremy Hobson talks with Michael Green, a Vancouver-based architect who says wood is just as strong as concrete or steel - and more sustainable. But advances in structural engineering have sparked new interest among architects in one of the world's oldest building materials: wood. (Courtesy Michael Green Architecture)įor more than a century, the designers of tall buildings have used mostly concrete and steel. ![]() Facebook Email The seven-story Wood Innovation and Design Centre, designed by Michael Green Architecture, in Prince George, British Columbia, Canada.
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