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Tokyo To Build 350m Tower Made of Wood (theguardian.com)
A skyscraper set to be built in Tokyo will become the world's tallest to be made of wood. From a report: The Japanese wood products company Sumitomo Forestry Co is proposing to build a 350 metre (1,148ft), 70-floor tower to commemorate its 350th anniversary in 2041. Japan's government has long advertised the advantages of wooden buildings, and in 2010 passed a law requiring it be used for all public buildings of three stories or fewer. Sumitomo Forestry said the new building, known as the W350 Project, was an example of "urban development that is kind for humans," with more high-rise architecture made of wood and covered with greenery "making over cities as forests." The new building will be predominantly wooden, with just 10% steel. Its internal framework of columns, beams and braces -- made of a hybrid of the two materials -- will take account of Japan's high rate of seismic activity. The Tokyo-based architecture firm Nikken Sekkei contributed to the design.
the same as a duck?
I hope this doesn't end as a huge candle.
...the same as msmash's brain?
I mean, come on. Clickbait title is clickbait. The structure is not made of wood. If it were 97% wood and 3% steel, you could make that kind of statement. 10% steel is a LOT of steel.
They could stand to make mention about replenishment and what about all the chemicals that are used to treat the wood?
It's as if these concerns don't even exist.
Nails???
Nope. You'd never get that kind of weight out of nails. This certainly has I-beams, girders, etc.
Hopefully Trump doesn't learn of this challenge to his manhood.
... for the highest wooden building in the world is either a 37.5 m high russion orthodox church [http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2360473/Kizhi-Pogost-The-biggest-building-world-thats-entirely-wood.html] if you require something 'house shaped', or it is the 180 m tall ATLAS-I EMP testing apparatus built near the Sandia National Laboratory facility in New Mexico, which isn't quite as house-shaped [https://www.google.com/maps/place/35%C2%B001'47.6%22N+106%C2%B033'27.3%22W/@35.0296017,-106.5587137,310m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x0:0x0!8m2!3d35.029898!4d-106.557574?hl=en]
high-rise architecture made of wood and covered with greenery "making over cities as forests."
LoL Is Japan so urbanised that its inhabitants can imagine that buildings* covered in greenery can seem like a forest?
* Created by chopping down a forest. The guys in the Amazon Basin hacking down the last of the rain forest must be having wet dreams over this news.
Ask Curtis LeMay if building Japanese cities out of wood was a good idea.
What's Japanese for The Matchstick Building?
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
ARTHUR: What happens now?
BEDEMIR: Well, now, uh, Launcelot, Galahad, and I wait until nightfall,
and then leap out of the rabbit, taking the French by surprise --
not only by surprise, but totally unarmed!
ARTHUR: Who leaps out?
BEDEMIR: Uh, Launcelot, Galahad, and I. Uh, leap out of the rabbit, uh
and uh....
ARTHUR: Oh....
BEDEMIR: Oh.... Um, l-look, if we built this large wooden badger--
Wood certainly has it's uses, but it seems to me that a high rise is not one of them. Wood needs to be protected from the sun and elements. Who wants to have to paint or weather proof this thing every couple of years? I lived in a house with wood siding as a kid. I hated having to go out to scrape the old paint off and repainting it. I know paint and weather proofing has come a long way since I was a kid, but it's still going to need this done periodically.
This is why aluminum siding and later vinyl siding became a thing. It also sounds like they plan to have plants draped all over it. That will rot most wood even faster. Do they have carpenter or wood bees in Japan? If so, those little bastards will bore holes in damn near any wood they can find.
When it gets humid outside, the elevator sticks sometimes.
Where I am, building code prohibits wood for buildings over 4 stories (though they're talking about allowing it for up to 5 or even 6 because the builders don't want to pay for concrete, and their lobbying is amazingly effective) Combined with the requirement for all buildings over 4 stories to have elevators, we have a ton of 4 story apartment buildings. We've also proven repeatedly that wood is a HORRIBLE material for any multi-family building, as we've had quite a few burn to the ground leaving hundreds of people homeless. Of course each time they say that if only they'd made this minor tweak to the building code the disaster wouldn't have happened, but then the next one happens despite whatever tweak they say will solve it.
That they did many feasibility studies on how it can withstand earthquake or even storm level wind for that matter.
I'm confused if this is supposed to be a "green" project or not... Made from renewable resources, I suppose, but at the cost of thousands of massive trees..
When I read this, I immediately wondered why it was even possible to build a 1,100 ft tall wooden building, more than eight times taller than the current record for the tallest wooden building. This Guardian article goes into more detail about the engineering of tall wooden buildings, and cites this Canadian Wood Council case study for some of its information. In short, the wood materials to be used are highly specialized fireproofed laminate composites. Calling the finished product wood is like calling Splenda sugar; just because it's a derivative of the original doesn't mean it's the same thing.
From an engineering perspective, a skyscraper undergoes incredible stresses. The building has to be capable of supporting itself and all the weight within it. It has to withstand the tremors of earthquakes, the forces of wind and water, and not lose its strength over time, even as it's exposed for decades to UV rays. The building materials need to have a unique combination of sheer strength, tensile strength, and compressive strength. A combination of steel and concrete give you all three. But natural wood is inconsistent. Flaws like knots and cracks in the grains weaken its sheer strength. Wood has great tensile strength in the direction of the grain, but is very weak against the grain. And it works the opposite way with compression. The only way to overcome these weaknesses is with laminates, which are very expensive (currently, due to the lack of demand) to produce.
Not to mention wood burns much easier.
My personal opinion is that there are some architects trying to get name recognition by coming up with something unique. I hope anyone considering to fund such imaginations take a lesson from the Spruce Goose and use wood when it's advantageous, not avant garde.
This has already been done.
Termite Candle
As a showcase point-of-pride project, it will know doubt have a wow factor of the highest magnitude. Read the article and links within it - wood skyscrapers seem to be an idea on the ascendancy. Many of the putative benefits from a social, engineering, and ecological point of view no doubt have merit. However, there is a potential downside which was the first thing that came to my mind. Fire.
Looking at the concept renders in the article, try this estimate: 20 residential units per story, times 70 stories, average occupancy 3 people per unit, then add public crowds in office and retail space, and there could easily be 5000-6000 people present at a time. New York's twin towers were steel and concrete, and no one thought they could burn, yet the 2001 incident revealed unanticipated fire induced failure. In contrast, wood burns, no secret there. If there ever was a fire in such a structure, it would be a nightmare.
The article states that the company itself estimates a construction cost double a steel and concrete high rise of same size. That seems like a recipe to cut corners or overlook features, to trivialize the things that no one will overtly see. The recent June 14, 2017 Grenfell Tower high rise fire and deaths in London were a testimonial to crappy architectural design, crappy construction and oversight, and inept public administration. Nearly every high profile multi-fatality fire that makes the news can be traced to problems of that nature. The money goes into the gee whiz what-you-can-see-features (or in the case of the recent article about Apple's new glass walled headquarters, the things you can't see). Safety issues get trivialized, ignored, excluded.
Any building as proposed needs to have peremptory and big bucks attention to fire retardant design, fire recognition and suppression systems, human factors engineering, evacuation and rescue systems, first responder access. No doubt the sponsors, developers, and engineers will claim they did, but nearly every fatal building fire can be traced back to lapses in such. It will all look beautiful until the day it burns down, and then it's too late. One can only hope that they put safety up there with or even ahead of visual design and high concept.
... the wood will be retarded.
Nope. You'd never get that kind of weight out of nails. This certainly has I-beams, girders, etc.
Or at least big heavy bolts and metal reinforcements. Maybe something like a wooden roller coaster, but on a totally different scale.
If you're iron for reinforcement, it's cheaper to use concrete instead for taller buildings.
Cheaper isn't always more appropriate though. In this case they're talking about concrete and earthquakes, which don't go together real well.
iron reinforcement
Or maybe steel.
Japan's Kobe Steel announces more cases of faked inspections data
"Made in Japan" is now a laughing stock
No. Wood because wood is better in earthquakes. Wood because wood is renewable. Wood because wood stores carbon.
Seems there may be an issue here
In the short-term maybe. In the long-term? Progressively worse for humans.
Not only is this removing useful nutrients from the ground to be locked away in a building for many decades, it is a MASSIVE fire risk.
Concrete, steel and even glass CAN have plants living in and around them you know. It isn't a hard thing to do.
Not only that, being inorganic, it is more environmentally friendly since it is, you know, inorganic!
The toxicity levels of most construction materials have dropped dramatically in recent decades, especially the past 15 years. It's almost a non-issue now.
The whole "but the production of the materials" argument can be defeated with renewables.
Trees have environmental costs too, you know, as does harvesting and making them useful for building. (arguably more so for building when it comes to treatments in some situations!)
Just use some fucking rocks. Stop wasting useful and more limited organic material for construction, for fuel and any other nonsense when inorganic is better and much safer!
Christ, I'd rather see powdered metals be used for fuels than continued use of hydrocarbons.
Environmental nutjobs are going to ruin the world with these short-sighted ideas. And probably kill a bunch of people on the way!
How's that coal power holding you over, Japan? Good job killing off Nuclear, YA IDIOTS!
It's in Japan, boss; thas why it's in meters
Well, you know what they say: if you build it; they will come!
It will have so much glue and additives in it that it will even be fireproof and waterproof, bugs certainly won't like it.
Buildings eventually need to be demolished. What can be done with this engineered wood at that point? If we chop it up small and burn it, or dump it in a landfill, will the additives cause pollution? For that matter, if you drill a hole in a new piece of engineered wood, can you treat the debris like ordinary wood chips, or does it require special disposal?
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
First of all, that story is from 2017. It isn't news.
Second, from the story, "The latest problems were discovered with shipments of more than 11,000 tons of steel, copper, and aluminum products made by Kobe Steel and its affiliates in Japan, China, Malaysia and Thailand."
So the actual true claim closest to the lie you told would be, "Being owned by a Japanese company doesn't magically cause product inspections to happen."
They're one of the world's biggest steel company, so 11k tons isn't actually very much.
No reports of problems at this point, only of faked test data. So some steel plants in "Japan, China, Malaysia, or Thailand" didn't do the testing for some of the products. This doesn't mean that there was a quality problem, only that there was a quality control problem. The people running the factory probably saw a long history of passing the quality tests, and decided to save some money and not do them. That's bad, especially if the parent company doesn't detect it and correct the problem.
But the story seems to really be that because Japan is so good at quality control, they discovered the faked test data even before it resulted in undetected problems in actual product quality.
It is already well known in the world that if you product comes from "Japan, China, Malaysia, or Thailand" that there might be variations in quality. Duh. I think people understand that whenever a product came from "Country A, Country B, Country C, or Country D." Duh. Does that mean that Country A had a bad reputation? No. No it does not.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I sure hope they have a No Smoking rule that is enforced.
Creimer lives in K-729. That's building K, seventh floor, apartment 29.
So it's quite possible for a concrete building to become a fire trap;
True, but how many more would have died if instead of just the cladding the main structural support material was inflammable? Most highrise buildings have staircases which are made of solid concrete to provide a safe, non-flammable escape route from most fires. When that fails, for example in the 911 attacks, the death toll can be one or more orders of magnitude larger because there is no safe escape route and the building will eventually collapse killing everyone who is trapped.
creimer is way too stupid to get the nuance between iron and steel.
According to Nancy Guerrero from special ed, he has the intelligence of an ameba, That means no brain but still some form of prehistoric form of intelligence.
Google for "Pyramidenkogel" and "Rubner Holzbau" - you will be astonished, what's possible with wood.
I love the number of people telling the Japanese, of all people, how to build using wood, and using such mundane problems like rot as reasons it won't work. It's hilarious.
That's very odd Chris, google street view of 1919 Fruitdale shows a nice two-story complex.
http://www.thegroveaptssanjose...
Twy again, you fat fuck!
MOD THIS KARMA-WHORING FUCK DOWN!!!
Thanks to everyone who's still making the effort to keep this serial digital defecator safely contained at -1!
Chris: "Please don't feed" is advice you should take yourself.
This doesn't mean that there was a quality problem, only that there was a quality control problem.
This pedantry doesn't matter because you have lost all guarantees about the material. Even if the material is perfectly fine, you don't know that it is.
I could give two shits about what some ACs have to say about my mod points. Try posting under a real name and we might take your accusations more seriously.
"I could give two shits "
So you DO give a shit?
"about what some ACs have to say"
Says the AC...
"Try posting under a real name"
Says the AC...
"and we might take your accusations more seriously."
There's this perception that there's a "we". Most people know there's no "we".
"about what some ACs have to say"
Says the AC...
"Try posting under a real name"
Says the AC...
Last time I criticized this nonsense you fuckwits harassed me for a week. I've got better things to do.
Feel free to disregard my AC post. If that makes me a coward, then what the fuck does it make you? First Coward?
If it had been discovered by a third party and the company had to be forced to do anything about it, then you'd have a point.
But the company discovered it themselves, and chose to not only correct it but also notify affected customers.
This story increases confidence in the test results given out by Kobe Steel, it doesn't decrease it. Which company are you posting for, anyways? lol
No, it does not increase confidence in either their product or their testing methodologies.