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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.
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?
Lumber supply forests are harvested and replanted these days.
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.
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I recall a prominent global warming alarmist getting kicked out of the group he was in because he advocated the using of wood as a building material, since using wood in this way is an effective carbon sink.
Using wood as a building material only causes deforestation if people don't plant new trees in their place. No one does that since it's not only bad for business, they'd run out of trees, but it's illegal in any place I can think of. If there is a place in the world that allows for clear cutting of trees and not planting new trees in that space then I'll show you a place that lacks any real government.
Using wood for buildings is good for the environment. If you believe that steel and concrete is better then I'll ask you to show me your math. If you believe that we just shouldn't be building new structures then I'll ask you to show me your age. Saying we shouldn't need new office buildings and homes is something that I'd think would come from a child or someone suffering from senility.
If someone knows who that was that advocated using wood as a building material as a carbon sink, and got shunned for it, then I'd appreciate a reply on who that is.
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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.
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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?
My (small) multi-unit in Canada is built with wood timbers and is 218 years old. As long as you keep it dry, wood can be very durable.
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?
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Also there is a fair amount of carbon sequestered in the building itself. That's assuming the building doesn't burn, which is why I won't get into a tall wooden structure.
The type of wood buildings they're making nowadays don't burn very easy. (not talking about timber framed houses like the US, but the kind used for taller buildings such as this article). They take wood- cut it in strips, arrange the strips in alternating directions (for added strength) and then glue them together with a fireproof glue.
They're actually more fire-safe than steel buildings. Steel will melt or lose strength with fire (as in 9/11 twin towers)- the modern timber buildings resist fire at higher temperatures than it takes for steel to lose integrity.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
You're on the right track to some of the "devil in the details".
Soft woods like pine grow quick, but the wood is, you know, soft. Wouldn't want to live in a skyscraper made of that!
Calling pine a soft wood, and implying that it wouldn't serve well in a structural sense, is perpetuating a myth. SPFs (spruce, pine, fir) are highly regarded for their structural properties. Douglas fir, Southern Yellow Pine, Sitka Spruce, Hemlock...all have excellent MOE/MOR ratings, while yes, having low Janka Hardness ratings. Along with time-to-yield and price, these structural properties are why SPFs rule the US stick-built construction supply.
AFAIK, the hardier the wood, the longer it takes for the tree to grow. That means a long-term investment in your re-planting, and a lot can happen to your plot of re-planted little sprouts (bugs, deer, fires, suburban sprawl, drunk kids on ATV's, massive natural gas deposits) while you wait the lifetime or two for your trees to grow to full size.
Harder wood trees, do "generally" take longer to grow. However, today's new-growth trees pale in comparison to the mostly gone old-growth trees from a properties comparison. The hardness may be there, but their MOE, MOR, and density are usually lower, and their stability and durability are much more volatile. But, again, those are generalities. The science behind wood is quite fascinating; much more in depth than I imagined when I got into woodworking.
The Wood Database is a great resource.
The vast majority of CO2 emissions from cement manufacture is not from the energy used to heat the kiln but as a produce of the chemical process itself when limestone (calcium carbonate) is decarbonated into lime (calcium oxide).
This means that it is not enough just to change into using clean energy for heating the kiln.
Luckily, cement could be produced CO2-free using a heated electrolysis process but the process if very new and untested and it would require that the a huge chunk of the cement factory would have to be rebuilt. The world can not wait 20 years for clean cement.
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You don't rate a fire-resistant structure by its ability to sit baking indefinitely at a certain temperature, but by the number of minutes or hours it provides safety while people evacuate and/or extinguish the fire. And once you have a fire-safe structure that doesn't collapse and compromise its egress paths, you worry about fire safety of the building which includes ventilation, fire suppression, and materials to avoid asphyxiating the occupants in a poison gas chamber.
Thick timber chars on the outside when exposed to extreme heat. This is almost a self-healing, temporary insulation to slow the heat transfer to the rest of the wood on the inside of the timber. That's why a big log in your fireplace burns for many hours and doesn't immediately explode your house from over-pressure. The timber continues to be able to bear most of its rated load while this outer surface is burning.
Meanwhile, steel will quickly conduct heat throughout and soften until it suffers a load failure, long before it has reached its liquid phase. The twin towers didn't collapse because the steel was solid one minute and liquid the next. It collapsed because it became soft enough for large horizontal spans to sag and separate from their supports, fall a whole story, and exceed the load-bearing capability of the level below.
Steel structural members have to have fire insulating layers to mitigate this type of problem and allow people to escape. The violence of the plane impacts in the twin towers destroyed egress routes, trapping people. It also tore away a lot of the fire insulation (asbestos) meant to protect structural steel, so the collapse happened sooner than it might have in a typical fire.