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Good wood for a green building future

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In an increasingly urban world, there is a demand for big buildings that can be built with greater concern for environmental and climate impact. This has seen wood emerge from the building archives as a possible material for the future.

Canada-based architect, and perhaps appropriately-named Michael Green has been talking big about the potential of wood. Very big indeed, in fact his firm has drawn up plans for a 30-storey wood tower for Vancouver.

So convinced is Green that he’s giving away his 200-page manual Tall Wood away for free in a hope to push things further and faster. It’s not necessarily about higher though, Carla Smith from Green’s practice MGA says:

To be honest, it’s not like we really care about being the tallest. We really do see a wooden future for cities, and our aim is to get others to jump on board too.”

Wood’s positives are plenty: trees take in carbon dioxide during their lifetime and store it during time as a structure, as opposed to the net carbon emissions of concrete and steel. There is particular potential in earthquake-hit areas given the durability of wood under such tensions. And this is not just wood in its raw form; it’s engineered timber that can compete with existing structures in almost all respects.

But clearly there are worries too; not least about wood being famously flammable. But experts say this is not the problem if fears with the new engineered wood having ‘charring layer’ and more predictable structural integrity in the event of fire.

Green’s practice is not the only place to find wood’s architectural prophets. Swedish architect practice, C.F. Moller, has its own model for an even bigger ‘plyscraper’ – 34 storeys worth – which it revealed last year. The firm argued, too, that wood is more fire resistant than concrete and steel.

This September saw a conference on Nordic wood building techniques in Trondheim which invited a mass sharing of best practice in wood construction. It is rarely a surprise to see Scandinavian nations lining up for any sustainable innovation crown. Nigel Sagar from Swedish construction firm Skanska offers final word:

Wood ticks all the boxes from a sustainable point of view… It is a renewable resource, can have recycled or reused content as a product, and can be reused or recycled at the end of a building’s life. It also has good product transparency, via a chain of custody schemes like FSC, PEFC.” 


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