In the 19th Century it was steel. Then later, in the 20th Century concrete rose to prominence. Now in the 21st Century, wood is the rising star of the building industry, for its low carbon footprint and renewable resource attributes. To truly build Eco Cities of the future, many of the materials used today will eventually be swapped for more renewable resources. Wood, specifically engineered wood, is already making strides in large buildings today.
The use of wood for tall building construction is not a novel idea. In fact, the five story Horyu-ji pagoda in Japan is over 1500 years-old. Today, the increasing number of code-approved, engineered wood construction projects are reaching five, six and even ten, stories in Europe and Australia. CREE by Rhomberg has two buildings in Austria, its global headquarters called the LifeCycle Tower ONE and the IZM Montafon, set to be one of the largest tall timber buildings in Europe by area.
Two main types of engineered wood products dominating the tall wood building race today are Cross Laminated and Glued Laminated Timber (glulam). These “engineered” wood products combine smaller sections of wood into larger posts, beams and mass timber panels. These wood products are strong and rigid enough to replace steel and concrete as structural elements in large buildings, even up to 30 stories.
As timber is a carbon storage mechanism, buildings built primarily from wood inherently have a low carbon footprint. With proper forest management, trees and their timber can be a sustainable, renewable resource. One aspect of managing sustainable forests is to replace old and damaged trees with young ones, which grow faster and absorb more carbon from the atmosphere. Older trees, absorb less carbon and if allowed to die all the carbon they stored is released back into the air or ground. It therefore makes sense to sustainability harvest forests and produce engineered lumber and other wood products to store carbon.
While most tall buildings are still built using on-site processes, one firm has developed a prefabricated, systemized timber based approach.