(Image: Getty)
Wood could hold up the skyscrapers of the future – now that it’s stronger and more versatile than ever before
As populations around the world grow and cities burgeon, more and more of us will be adopting a high-rise lifestyle. Perhaps the skyscrapers of the future will be built with our two conventional, energy-guzzling construction materials, cement and steel. Or perhaps they will be made from some lab-derived wonder stuff. Maybe graphene – that much-feted, carbon-based material whose strength, weight for weight, is 100 or more times that of steel. Or some other exotic nano-material, skilfully crafted atom by atom to optimise its strength.
Possibly. Or perhaps they’ll be made of wood.
This oldest of construction materials is easy to come by, produces little waste and is renewable if harvested the right way. Where it has fallen down is on strength: it simply doesn’t have what it takes to support tall buildings.
That is now changing. Wood-derived materials such as cross-laminated timber, in which softwood is glued together in a specific way to make a light, strong material, are leading to a wave of ever-taller wood-based buildings. Forté, a 10-storey apartment block completed in 2012 at Victoria Harbour in Melbourne, Australia, is currently the record-holder for an inhabited building, but will soon be usurped by a 14-storey timber apartment building under construction in Bergen, Norway. Treet (“The Tree”) will be 49 metres tall when it is finished in late 2015.
Plyscrapers
Last year the international architectural practice Skidmore, Owings & Merrill concluded that a 125-metre tall skyscraper made mainly of wood, using reinforced concrete only for connecting joints, would be technically…
