That Swatch ceiling is pretty, but it looks like there's a few steel beams supporting the decorative wood and everything else.
2
All it’s going to take is one good fire, and all the lovely wood will go up in a puff of smoke, with a loss of life comparable to 9/11. I saw some of the slides that the National Bureau of Standards prepared from the World Trade Center disaster, and this is not the right way to go.
5
@William Malone
What people generally fail to realize is that for nearly all fire safety concerns, the structure of the building does not matter. It is the furnishings - the paneling, ceiling material, furniture, carpets, and any stuff that people bring into the structure that put people's lives at risk.
By the time the framing of the building catches fire, everyone in the building is dead, if they did not evacuate first.
Thus steel buildings are not safer from fire dangers than buildings made of wood.
And as the article states, if you read it, the large structural members of engineered wood (it is treated) forms an insulating layer of char before the strength of the member is greatly impaired.
72
In the 70's I worked in construction in silicon valley all the atari bldgs HP bldgs,Intel and others, We used glu lams as roofs on concrete tilt up construction.long spams but no snow load there. Later I build high rises and casinos in NJ up to 700 ft all concrete. Not so sure about having a fire in a wood high rise, plus all those laminated beams are glued and not fireproofed. It takes 50-60 years to grow a forest after clearcut, there's plenty of sand for concrete. A lot more to be learned about all of it
14
Sorry. It escapes me how cutting down more trees, whether they are from the Amazon (a pending environmental disaster) or from northern Canada (where it takes 100 years to grow a mature tree), is good for the planet.
21
@Blake They sequester carbon dioxide.
17
Instinct isn’t everything but this looks good to me. It’s not a waste of trees , like so many things are. It’s a permanent carbon sink and a naturally beautiful look. I think encouraging this building type along with ending deforestation and expanding forest cover are all related. They underline our dependence and respect for wood, and the trees that it came from.
24
We should be a lot more concerned with what people are doing inside the building then what the building is made of. It makes very little difference what a building is made of if the activity going on inside is basically devoted to ways to harm our health, our environment, undermine our freedom, or exploit our ignorance.
28
Wood excels in compression and tension. Only steel surpasses it in tension.Concrete only works in compression. Footnote;I love steel reinforced concrete.With wood, including strand lumbers, you have amazing possibilities,witness the Swatch building in Switzerland.
I salivate at the notion of 400 or 700 foot clear spans that wood could easily exploit, Warren type trusses with the warmth of wood....leave it to The Swiss and Germans to really understand all the plasticity of this beautiful medium.
31
The fire marshals are correct, aluminum clad structures like Grenfeld Towers are much safer.
4
That is a comment with no regard for truth or context.
18
That image of the proposed Sidewalk Labs building for Toronto gave me a visceral, physical reaction of joy. It is that beautiful. Build it! Build it!
9
Engineered wood is full of glues and epoxies that gas off like FEMA trailers.
30
Finally, perhaps some relief from the unrelenting domination of sterile steel, dull glass, and drab concrete.
15
Mass timber such as CLT is not climate friendly. Just the opposite.
When a forest is cut, most of its carbon is sent into the atmosphere. In most forests, half the carbon is stored in the soil. Another quarter is stored in branches and other vegetation. Only a quarter is in standing timber, and most of that is lost during logging, processing and construction. The wood that does hold its carbon in products, is usually lost in the coming years and decades.
It takes 15-20 years before a clearcut stand of trees switches from a net carbon emitter to a net carbon absorber. And trees are cut every 40 years or so. Plus, plantation monocultures provide little habitat for wildlife.
Had the forest been allowed to continue to grow, it would have stored much more carbon.
If you look at the whole forest carbon budget, the industry's analyses fall apart.
It also falls apart when you look at other assumptions. To make the numbers work, the industry compares wood buildings to concrete, which is carbon intensive. But new techniques cut the carbon footprint of concrete by 70 percent.
Also, after it is made, concrete reabsorbs massive amounts of that carbon. From 1930 to 2013, almost half that carbon footprint has been reabsorbed.
Also, burning biomass to make electricity is less carbon-friendly than burning coal to make the same amount of electricity.
The truth is, we need our forests to absorb CO2 from the atmosphere and store it. Wooden skyscrapers are not climate friendly.
64
I work in a very old six story converted textile mill in the Merrimack Valley of Massachusetts that has beautiful exposed structural elements of massive wood beams and columns up to 20 inches thick, obviously from very old trees. Old New England mill towns are still full of these buildings. Happy to see what's old is new.
23
The best wood comes from trees that grow slowly, how in the world can they be sustainably harvested to meet its voracious demand? So now, we build with trees because carbon dioxide is stored in dead wood, instead of the fact that live trees transform carbon dioxide into oxygen? The logic escapes me.
36
My biggest concern is those tiny bugs know as termites. These thrive on wood and would make mince-meat of any wooden structure. How do these wooden constructions prevent termite infection? More unsafe chemical insect sprays? Just asking.
27
I guess that I missed the part that told us what kind of wood is being used. Are the materials pine, Douglas fir, spruce, hardwoods, or imported exotics,or some combination of species? The kind of species will determine where it is harvested and by what techniques. In addition, very little detail on replanting. Trust it to a reporter from a city not to care about the important stuff.
45
Wood, bamboo, hemp, and other plant based materials all can be sustainably harvested and grown on lands not suitable for other activities. On the other hand, to produce Portland Cement is an energy intense process. And, some of the aggregates needed to produce concrete like sand are getting harder to find and extracting them can be disruptive to the ecosystems where they are extracted. As far as recycling the engineered products at the end of the useful life of buildings does happen; with the exception of building unwisely built on flood plains. There are more reasons to use sustainable materials for new construction than not. Test the concepts, update building codes and enforce them. It is not a complicated process.
39
Too bad most of these structures do not have any of the charm of Chinese and Japanese wooden towers, some of which are almost a thousand years old; they just look like standard boxes recast in wood, but when the developer dictates you maximize every square inch of salable space, a box is what you invariably get.
11
@stan continople , The developer is never a artist.....that is why plats, followed by subdivisions, lay out the roads for maxim returns on the investment. Homeowners than build square to the roadway with willy nilly attention to views and natural light. Frank Lloyd Wright understood all of this when sitting a home. Always choose a artist to realize what you need.
11