While this isn’t really about tall wood, it is about wood. Treehugger‘s Lloyd Alter covers the 2015 winner of the Canadian Wood Council’s Wood Design Award – which didn’t use fire-resistant cross-laminated timber, but instead nail-laminated timber:
Whenever one builds with wood, the question of fire protection comes up. The floors here are built up out of 2×8 Douglas Fir, engineered to have a sacrificial charring layer. There are also sprinklers throughout.
There is a lot of other interesting stuff going on in this building:
The building is heated and cooled through a series of 20 geothermal wells optimized by a ground-source heat pump system. Geothermal heat pumps are located between two large thermal storage reservoirs, limiting the number of heat pumps required and reducing electrical use. Heat pumps operate during off-peak hours to cool the reservoirs, and during the day, when demand peaks, the extra energy stored in the reservoirs is transferred to the building.
Nail laminated timber is described by the ReThink Wood website:
Nail Laminated Timber (NLT or Nail-lam) is created by fastening individual dimensional lumber, stacked on edge, into one structural element with nails. In addition to being used in floors, decks and roofs, nail-lam panels have been used for timber elevator and stair shafts. NLT offers a consistent and attractive appearance for decorative and exposed to view applications. Sheathing can be added to one top side to provide a structural diaphragm and allows the product to be used as a wall panel element.
