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Timber Towers Are On the Rise in France (citylab.com)
A reader shares a report: Spurred by concerns over climate change and the negative impacts of concrete manufacturing, architects and developers in France are increasingly turning to wood for their office towers and apartment complexes. Concrete was praised through much of the 20th century for its flexibility, functionality, and relative affordability. In France, the material ushered in an era of bold modernist architecture including housing by Auguste Perret and Le Corbusier. Today, however, wood is lauded for its smaller environmental footprint and the speed with which buildings can be assembled. "Wood had largely disappeared and was seen as a quaint material," says Steven Ware, a partner at the architecture firm Art & Build, whose latest wooden office building opened in Paris's 13th arrondissement earlier this summer. "[But] the energy it takes to put a concrete building up, to run it, and then dismantle it when it becomes obsolete was too much. Using mass timber in office buildings seemed like something we had to do." The production of cement, one of the main ingredients in concrete, generates an estimated 5 percent of the world's carbon emissions. Trees, in contrast, capture CO2, helping offset emissions produced by a typical building process. And then there's the string of other construction advantages that make wood economically appealing. It's lighter, which means digging smaller foundations in the ground. Crane costs come down, as they're no longer hauling blocks of cement hundreds of feet in the air. Driving a nail into a slab of wood requires a lot less energy than driving one into concrete. Months can be knocked off the construction timeline.
If demand for wood goes up a lot more deforestation occurs. That means less oxygen and ironically, more carbon dioxide! Irony can be pretty ironic some times.
We'll make great pets
Isn't one of the factors involved in having moved away from using wood for building construction is that steel and concrete are stronger and allow you to build taller?
Also, while wood does sequester CO2, isn't cutting down more trees to make more buildings kind of ass-backwards, environment-wise, i.e. cutting down forests just to build more office buildings?
Sounds like a good way to have a towering inferno. The stuff we put inside large buildings burns quite readily. But the fire generally stops in a single room. But if you suddenly make everything out of wood, what's to stop the fire from spreading everywhere?
Are they really comparing the energy cost of driving a nail?
Wood has a place but IMO if you want a durable structure use reinforced concrete. Maybe this wave of construction is only expected to stand for 30yrs?
>> Today, however, wood is lauded for its smaller environmental footprint and the speed with which buildings can be assembled.
There's no reason we can't just stack IT people in cubes in pole barns. Fortunately, nobody with any talent actually needs to work in a crappy office, so most companies are smart enough not to try this.
Last two /. articles share a theme:
"Timber Towers Are On the Rise in France"
Mysterious Void Discovered In Egypt's Great Pyramid
Death traps
Recently, as in this week, they completed a low-emission earthquake-resistant timber tower in Portland, Oregon.
Fire risks tend to come from inefficient fire suppression systems and lack of coatings. Or inadequate emergency exits. As we've seen from London, England, concrete towers clad in flammable plastic are more of a fire trap than wood timber buildings are. It really depends on the full architectural design.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Would hempcrete represent the best of both worlds? Mitigate the reliance on concrete somewhat while storing the carbon from renewable hemp fiber in the building. Why is this not standard practice?
Wood Burns, Concrete Doesn't. When wood burns all that carbon stored up in the wood is released into the air. Foolish people.
CLT and mass timber is the shit. They are also working on LVL veneer based types that are like super plywood vs. the current finger jointed lumber version You trade material cost for labor but you can have a house framed in a day. Also concrete is a carbon emitter for a long time. It is not prone to fire. You can have them CAD CAM all the windows, doors, conduit, and plumbing into the walls at the factory, and it is renewable.
Wood can be grown and harvested sustainably on tree farms where generation after generation of trees selected for structural properties and rapid growth are cultivated. Any such "green" inspired building program should/would ensure that all the timber used comes from such sources. And so yes, building permanent structures out of wood does lock up CO2 as long as the structures stand - whereas CO2 released in the production of concrete is in the air for centuries.
The actual material used for framing a structure has nothing to do with the fire safety (or lack of same) in an inhabited structure. Metal and concrete framed structures are no safer on that count than wood. The fire hazard that threatens life is entirely due to the furnishings and utilities inside the structure. By the time a frame of wood frame building starts to burn the interior is already destroyed, and the inhabitants have either escaped or are dead. Note that modern construction techniques using fire proof gypsum board that isolates the structure from the interior (gypsum does not burn and actually absorbs energy as it decomposes).
Wood is a pretty remarkable material. It is in fact an advanced composite material produced by natural nano-factories. It compares favorably with far more expensive synthetic composites, and beats them all in cost. Used properly (taking advantage of the anisotropic properties of wood beams) a good wood beam comes with a factor of 3 in stiffness/weight ratio of the best performance ofunidirectional carbon fiber epoxy composite, and beats structural steel. Sitka spruce is used in the upper stage of Trident II SLBM missile since it had the best properties for the role, over all other candidates.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Nails suck. Use screws.
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I'm buying termite-related stocks
Table-ized A.I.
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World is running out of sand for concrete. Please note much of the sand in the world are too fine to be used for concrete. Anything that can reduce the use of concrete is a good thing.
I hope rents are at most half of the concrete buildings. Because otherwise I do not know why one would want to live in a huge wooden building with many flats. One of the flats catches fire and the whole structure is in ashes.
I'd expect the Slashdot crowd, even today's, to be fully aware that concrete must recapture every atom of carbon driven off during production, as it sets.
The only net emission is the fuel burned heating the crushed limestone, turning calcium carbonate into calcium oxide; this can be done today with zero-emission induction heating.
In fact, if one took the trouble to bottle up the CO2 emitted during production, concrete would instantly become the most strongly carbon-negative technology in human hands today.
Termite populations soar as the the rise of timber towers brings the buffet to the buggies!
Subterranean building still ain't catching on??
The "Insulated Concrete Forms" construction of concrete housing was what I was aspiring to if I ever built a house. Probably won't, unless a tornado knocks this one down, but the advantages were that the ICF house is highly insulated, almost in the class of superinsulated, and it takes a really big tornado to knock it down. What's "inefficient" about that? I don't even live in "tornado alley" any more, but had a "tornado aloft" take down my ham antenna and turn one mighty oak into a very distracted looking oak that somehow survived (but I was betting against that at the time." Didn't touch the house, but if it had knocked it down, an ICF house would have gone up in its place.
Although concrete may seem t to take more energy to put up and take down, what about the maintenance you must do with wood? That requires a lot of materials that take energy to produce also...
Not to mention that unlike a wooden structure, concrete can scrub CO2 from the air after it is built.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
That's solid wood, however, possibly dense old-growth wood. These are modern composites. I have no idea if that makes them more or less durable over a century.
What it likely makes them is hard to repair, unless the particular composite method they used becomes the dominant one. With a quick skim, I see about 4 competing technologies for pre-engineered, mass-produced wood composites. If you build with one and it falls out of favor, it might be tricky in the future to do any repairs. If nobody is making nail laminated timber and you need to sub in cross laminated timber, what are the ramifications?
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
It's not about the energy required in the construction of concrete buildings, it's about the energy required in the creation of the concrete in the first place. Lime, one of the main ingredients in concrete requires LOTS of energy to be created from limestone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lime_kiln
But the carbon is released again when the buildings burn to the ground.
Wood is highly flammable.
Wait till a fire starts and they'll see the error of their ways.
Did they learn nothing from London Bridge?
I've seen a lot of this in my area, generally what they call podium construction, where you have a 1 to 3 stories of concrete construction and then build wood frame up to the maximum height allowed, typically 5 stories of wood. As TFA outlines, it is cheap and very fast compared to all concrete, and has become a go-to for mid rise residential. Unfortunately, it makes it possible to cut corners to an even greater degree when it comes to flooring, and fire safety is entirely dependent on active suppression. I have actually seen one of these buildings survive a fire during construction (with a great effort by the fire department), but afterwards it was demolished back down to the podium.
In the end it comes down to labor cost, concrete is surprisingly labor intensive and labor costs are a huge part of construction in first world countries. I've seen some beautiful concrete work done in South America that would be impossible in the US simply because of labor costs - Imagine a 20 story concrete facade entirely finished by hand: Beautiful, but impossible to do in the states.
Driving a nail into a slab of wood requires a lot less energy than driving one into concrete
Seems like a desperate attempt at coming up with advantages... Does the energy of driving a nail into concrete really have some measurable impact? How many nails are driven into concrete in modern buildings?
In TFA it mentions that they come prefab in panels. A panel goes bad somehow, pop a new one on. Also, I wouldn't lay money on the laminate rotting easily.
burn baby, burn.
Like where do you think the wood is going to come? Finland? Sure but mostly Russia.
You know it's gonna happen..
Got Wood?
Wood is a really scarce resource. What are the French going to do, cut down even more trees to build tall buildings? Trees are a necessary part of the ecosystem as they do big things like help to reduce carbon dioxide and they provide shade. So cutting down trees to save the environment is like fucking for virginity.
And he huffed and he puffed and they all fell down.
I'll take stone and concrete, thank you very much. Not to mention, there are not very many century year old wood building still around now are there? While it certainly still requires maintenance, rock is a lot more permanent.
"wood is lauded for its smaller environmental footprint and the speed with which buildings can be assembled"
This is something only someone very bad at math would say, or someone with a bias or agenda.
I do sustainable logging so you would think my bias is towards wood but I built my house, farm buildings and USDA/State inspectable butcher shop out of concrete.
The reason is that concrete has a far lower carbon footprint, lasts far longer, makes for far more energy efficient buildings and at lower costs. Both the short term and long term cost of my buildings are lower because of my use of stone -concrete is almost entirely stone plus a small amount of cement.
Wooden buildings don't last as long, don't have the build tin thermal mass of masonry (concrete) and cost more as well as actually having a higher carbon footprint.
Anyone who claims otherwise is hoodwinking you with their agenda.
The production of cement, one of the main ingredients in concrete, generates an estimated 5 percent of the world's carbon emissions. Trees, in contrast, capture CO2, helping offset emissions produced by a typical building process.
It sounds like dead trees aren't such a bad idea after all.
The idea can be carried forward to things like books. Why read obsolete and impermanet ebooks when you can, for often the same price, get a book printed on paper? The paper book encourages tree production, which captures CO2, helping offset emissions produced by server farms and the factories producing ebook readers.
Well, not really. Driving a nail through concrete typically is achieved with a powder-actuated tool. This means that you are shooting a firearm cartridge (without the bullet) for every nail you put in.
On top of wood being flammable, termites don't eat concrete ...just saying ...
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
The place was always subject to earthquakes, so during the nineteenth century buildings were made of wood. It was found that New Zealand kauri pine was an ideal material: it was strong enough to build high, grew straight and knot-free for hundreds of feet, and was flexible enough to resist the strongest earthquakes. By the end of the century, the entire city was made of kauri.
Two problems arose. NZ realized that a kauri takes a thousand years to grow, and that their export rate was totally unsustainable. They stopped exporting it just in time to save the species. One day in 1906, the other problem became evident: kauri was earthquake-proof, but not fireproof.
That was my point - they come prefab in panels. What happens when the tech changes and those panels are no longer made? In the future, how will one modify the current prefab panels to fit them into a 50 year old prefab structure if the prefab sizes are different?
Structurally, how does one incorporate a different panel with different physical properties possibly modified to fit into existing prefab construction? Remember, we're not talking about 2 story houses here - we're talking skyscrapers. Sure, one different panel won't make it fall down, but at what point do repairs reach the point where you need a structural engineer on site?
Pure wood is easy, because you can just cut it to fit. And how you stick wood to wood is pretty well understood. Sticking a wood laminate to a 50 year old other type of wood laminate I'm guessing is slightly more complicated.
And no, laminate probably won't rot. But will the binder deteriorate over time? Will it become brittle after 50 years? We understand wood extremely well, and when it fails it's easy to fix. This could be stunningly good multi-century technology, or 50 years from now we may need to be tearing them down, because we've moved away from the technology used to build them and can't repair them.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
The globe is warming, let's cut down more trees.
Idiots.
That article claims that concrete reabsorbs up to half the CO2 that was used to make it, I'd hardly classify it as "scrubbing CO2". (And, by comparison, when you "make wood", you grow a tree, cut it down, and grow another tree in its place, so wood really does constitute a CO2 sink.)
Making concrete is actually one of the worst carbon dioxide production systems out there. It's horrible stuff. If there are ways to make wood do what we need it to, we really need to switch back to it.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
That article claims that concrete reabsorbs up to half the CO2 that was used to make it, I'd hardly classify it as "scrubbing CO2"
That's even just normal concrete - there is concrete that has been developed that really does scrub CO2, and a lot more of it.
And, by comparison, when you "make wood", you grow a tree, cut it down, and grow another tree in its place
Yes but as I said you are expending a LOT of energy, and a lot of chemicals, on maintenance of that wood - even in dry climates you can't simply leave wood out and untreated. Concrete requires much less maintenance, so in balance I'm not sure the wooden structures are any better from an environmental standpoint. However I would say wood (to me anyway) sure does look a lot nicer generally...
Making concrete is actually one of the worst carbon dioxide production systems out there.
Look into wood treatment products and the chemicals involved, I would argue they are much worse in terms of sheer pollution (which you should care about more than CO2).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Customer: "I need a nanofabricated, self-assembling, self-perpetuating 300 ft tall photo-voltaic tower. For free."
Human Contractor: "Are you crazy? Even if that technology existed, it would cost a fortune."
Nature: "Text me."