Since I appear to live in a hole in the ground (pun fully intended), I had not heard of this effort by some architects to do their bit in reducing carbon emissions: building skyscrapers using wood, which will sequester carbon, rather than steel & concrete, which emits carbon (and is hardly sustainable). Michael Green makes the case at TED:
These are my buildings. I build all around the world out of our office in Vancouver and New York. And we build buildings of different sizes and styles and different materials, depending on where we are. But wood is the material that I love the most, and I’m going to tell you the story about wood. And part of the reason I love it is that every time people go into my buildings that are wood, I notice they react completely differently. I’ve never seen anybody walk into one of my buildings and hug a steel or a concrete column, but I’ve actually seen that happen in a wood building. I’ve actually seen how people touch the wood, and I think there’s a reason for it. Just like snowflakes, no two pieces of wood can ever be the same anywhere on Earth. That’s a wonderful thing. I like to think that wood gives Mother Nature fingerprints in our buildings. It’s Mother Nature’s fingerprints that make our buildings connect us to nature in the built environment.
Helen Waters, also at TED, gets more information from Michael in a visual essay, which covers a number of topics, including the common concern: fire.
Peter Wilson at the Discover Magazine blog The Crux discloses the CO2 cost of concrete:
This ability to use a renewable material to provide a positive response to a key environmental issue facing the construction industry, namely global warming, is nothing short of transformational. The use of concrete is already responsible for 5% of global greenhouse-gas emissions.
CityMetric covers a proposed wooden skyscraper in Vienna:
Unlikely as it sounds, wooden skyscrapers are a thing these days. As we noted last year, concerns about the environmental impact of steel and concrete are driving some architects and designers back to wood as a more eco-friendly alternative. There’s already a nine storey tower built from specially laminated timber in London, and a 12 storey wooden building under construction in Bergen, Norway.
A planned tower for Vienna, however, is due to leapfrog both in terms of scale and height. The HoHo project in Vienna’s Seestadt Aspern area will feature two wooden towers, the tallest of which will stretch to 25 storeys and 84m. The towers will be 76 per cent wood; Kerbler, the firm behind the designs, claim the material will produce 2,800 tonnes of CO2 when compared to a similar sized tower built from concrete.
The fire brigade in Vienna was a trifle irate, but they’re working with the builder to certify the construction materials. Meanwhile, Lloyd Alter @ TreeHugger reports on the next step up:
Some think that architect Michael Green is pushing the envelope and perhaps his luck with his proposals for 30 and 35 storey buildings. Now he is working with Finnish lumber giant Metsä Wood to design and build a virtual Empire State Building, just to show that they can. The point of it all: “To challenge preconceptions and explore the possibilities of wood construction.”
Given that Michael is based in seismically active Vancouver, you have to think the seismic challenges for wood have been assessed; I probably just missed that section.
Here is Wood Skyscrapers.
