We don’t need to necessarily only use wood, we just need to drastically reduce concrete which is good. Additionally, most buildings in the world aren’t skyscrapers, so eliminating concrete from these shorter buildings is of paramount concern
I lived in Istanbul once and although I don't expect it to appeal to many architects, there is a kind of almost standard 5-story building style there which seems to house most people with shops underneath. I can see how they have copied the same thing over and over again with slightly different decoration possibly. It struck me that rather than artworks we might do better with a range of useful standard designs that provide a big, steady market for the makers of the CLT etc and that allow everyone in the construction industry to pick up skills that they can make use of more than once or twice.
I guess my question is "do we need to be able to build higher?" Esp in places like Europe, where even in large cities, the height of the buildings is rather low when compared to other cities around the world. Seems like timber could be the gold standard for renewable small to medium size buildings. Skyscrapers are cool, but are they even necessary?
In my opinion it's 50/50 skyscraper could fit hundred or more housing so less land will be used for housing so it will save more space,besides in dense growing country where a lot of people living low life their living conditions could be boosted insted of they living in broken ugly house they can live in better palace and the space used for their house can be turned into park or green space and because of high wind on high palace wind power can be used for ventilation using the power of the wind can be made into electricity or ventilation,wind blow from the top floor to bottom floor of building and with series of pipe it'll blow into their compartment replacing old air with new air without needing to use power for ventilation
@@jonathan100yearsago The idea skyscrapers save space or save money is false. When additional fees and building requirements are added to final cost skyscrapers are more expensive than 2 shorting buildings. Looking at the most density populated cities in the world it is not New York or Manhattan, its paris, Barcelona, and Athens with consistent 5-7 story buildings throughout the entire city and not just a few tall buildings downtown. Also these cities have significantly skinnier roadway infrastructure.
@@RedShoesSmith is more than 4 story tall building not a skyscraper? I know building with 3-4 floor build with low budget for housing is called stacked housing, but if it has more than 4 floor it's consider as skyscraper right? I heard somebody said for a buildig to be called skyscraper it's must be taller than 150 feet...? Or meter... probably...i don't really remember and to lazy to google it now
Been working with White Architects a couple of times in different projects. They're really professional. Thanks for this interesting video. Keep em coming!
The problem with timber construction is that the manufacturing of the building material is not optimally standardised for economies of scale. With steel and concrete in conventional building methods, the steel bars and concrete mix is standardised and hence cheaper and therefore the go-to choice in the industry. Breakthrough innovation is probably not what we need at the moment, instead standardisation of parts and production scale of those are necessary. If we start building affordable 2-3 story houses and 3-8 story utility buildings with this technology, we'll be building skyscrapers with them in no time.
I'm from wisconsin and I'm going to school to work in the forest industry! That's so cool that the tallest timber structure is in milwaukee, never knew that before! I love this channel because it gives me hope for the future :)
Milwaukee is a very architecturally innovative city by North American standards. Really becoming a leader in mass timber with several other mass timber projects proposed and underway.
Timber is so much more inviting building material than steel, concrete or glass. I really hope timber in large buildings takes off, if only to increase demand for sustainable forests.
@@purpleheadedmonster8735 Actually, logging in the right way (selectively logging the right trees) makes for healthier, more diverse and more productive forests that extract more CO2. Culture needs to shift, but using timber doesn't necessarily lead to the devastation of forests.
I really would love to see timber become the default for most buildings. The fact that they look way nicer than concrete and feel more warm is already a big plus
Timber facades get black rather quickly, if they aren't again and again painted. Such a problem won't matter much financially with skyscrapers, but it will matter financially with single-family homes. A black facade, also already one of a darker gray, transforms terribly much light into warmth. A completely blackened wooden facade also does not look pretty, any more.
@@HansDunkelberg1 on wooden facades you are right, but at scyscrapers most facades are made of glass. Wood gets only gray because of uv hurts the outide layers and gets washed down by rain. The remaing part is cellulose which is gray. If the wood is protected by glass you don't have this issue
I live in Calgary AB, and when I graduated from AT my group and I designed a 10 story hybrid mass timber/ concrete hotel for our capstone project. The code is changing rapidly for canada. However, it’s still more expensive than steel and concrete to build.
I'm not sure you should tell people you're from Calgary, I've been to Calgary and everyone was drunk or high on drugs. Even the waiter at Boston pizza she was clearly doing coke it was all on her nose
@@pauline4193 I think that's just the food service industry as a whole. I've heard many things about the food industry in any city. Lived in Calgary for about 4 years and it was one of the best cities I've lived in, but I also lived in suburb, so many that was a factor to being 'shielded' xD
@@juzoli timber is really expensive right now, and because of the building code, for most occupancies you have to fire rate all the columns or just make them thicker for the char layer. That makes people not want to invest in mass timber because developers want to show the wood and if you have to cover you might as well not use it. Most people are waiting for the code to develop before they spend their money on it.
I actually just recently moved into an apartment in an 8-storey mass-timber building. Not super related, but it is nice knowing my building is made out of the stuff.
It's really cool seeing Ascent featured in one of your videos! I'm from Milwaukee and one of my friends actually lives in Ascent. Being so close to Chicago, you don't really see Milwaukee talked about very often.
Most people don't live in skyscrapers but in 3 to 20 stories buildings, today's technology is more than enough to cover those kinds of buildings, market availability of quality timber and people's trust in the technology are the two things that are going to slow the spread of timber buildings the most
How much wood in the construction would make it "a proper timber skyscraper" to qualify? Base is concrete? Steel crossmembers or beams? How much wood would have to be mixed with other material to be considered a wood composite?
Gotta say, i LOVE LOVE LOVE videos on wooden skyscrapers and hope you continue to update every time a record is broken. I have no idea if we will break 150-200 meters in my life time but I am excited to see the news from this channel first if it does happen!
Cheers and thank you for bringing greater awareness to the benefits of mass timber construction through this channel. We look forward to sharing and have already embedded this video onto our website as a great source of information. It was our pleasure to provide drone footage of the exciting Ascent project. Adam Savage was so great at reaching out to pull everything together with us and Korb + Associates Architects. Thank you!
The tallest tree in the world, The General Sherman, is 84m tall, so they've done really well to get this high. I wonder what technology will allow them to go realistically higher. Eddie: I stand corrected. Hyperion is the tallest at 116m. Gen Sherman is the chunky boi. So we still have 15m to go to beat the natural record.
Not tallest. General Sherman (giant sequoia) was famous for being big. Largest by trunk volume. The tallest tree is a coast redwood by the name Hyperion which was over 100m tall.
Wood and the old conventional brick or stone building have a similar problem at a certain high exceeding 60 or 80 meters the pillars or beams on the lower level have to become so massive that they limit those floors.
We really can’t rule anything out anymore ! There’s so much happening and so many people working on amazing projects such as timber skyscrapers ! I think an important thing to keep in mind is doing the life cycle assessments of such projects to understand where we can reduce emissions and how we can live in better harmony with the systems that keep us alive and allow us to thrive! Great video as always !
How do you "fully protect" wood from fire? Any physical object that disturbs the fireproof coating will expose the wood and allow it to catch fire. I hope they fit sprinkler systems as standard.
the wood itself IS the fireproof coating. the beams and walls have extra material that's essentially sacrificial. like it says in the video, the purpose is for the wood to char the surface layers, but it can't burn through to the core and weaken the structural integrity. believe it or not charred wood is one of the best fire barriers out there. there's an old fireproofing technique that's been getting more popular again lately, where you intentionally char the exterior layers, then seal it with oil. not only does the black charring effect look REALLY cool, how it kind of reflects light and almost shimmers slightly, but it's SUPER fire resistant. like could save your cabin from a small brushfire kinda resistant.
All new multi habitible buildings have to have sprinklers and like the video stated these are engineered to and have to prove fire survivability before ok'd
The char concept is marketing wank. Put a log on a campfire and see for yourself. The reality is the fire rating. The longer the better and hopefully measured in hours, not minutes. Eventually fire rescue crews will abandon the building and retreat to a safe distance before it becomes structurally unsafe and falls down. In an ideal world they would have had enough time to rescue all the occupants.
One of the downsides of this loosening of regulations on mass timber high rises is the proliferation of cheap five over ones in every city I’ve been to. They mostly aren’t clt, and disturbingly many of them aren’t fully glulam either. I mean, with full honesty, those things are just a bunch of paneling to make their stick frame construction look more substantial than it really is. I really hate how it seems a half dozen developers had plans to plop one down the second it became legal to build like that. Gives me the creeps. And these buildings, despite being marketed as “luxury apartments” are absolutely not built to last. It’s cool to see what the high end projects are doing with timber, but the cheap massed produced midrises that are being built right now are hideous flint boxes that would have been better made if they choose to actually spend money on good material.
Well it is ticking time bomb. With what will happen. Imagine leaking pipe of plumbing on wooden stick framed house. It is not going to last. Also fire protection is done often in proper manner.
My favorite place to study at Umass Amherst was the John Olver design building. From my understanding, it was the largest wooden structure by area when built in 2017. The atmosphere inside of one of these buildings is absolutely unparalleled to the artificial reinforced concrete structures we’ve considered attractive living spaces for so long.
Man i haven't been to amherst in almost 10 years now. Thing i remember the most was the steel drums guy that always seemed to be playing somewhere near antonio's. That new building sounds cool. I might have to go back and visit sometime, see how things have changed, get some pizza then head over to south hadley for some wings.
My favourite thing about timber is that I spent the last decade thinking about how new buildings can move away from the idea of glass or gardens, and it never even crossed my mind to use wood without cladding. It creates a delicate strength whilst looking clean (at least at first) and healthy.
How are the vocs from laminate timber buildings? People have raised concerns over laminate flooring. How do they solve this problem with these buildings?
This is very similar to what's happening in the rollercoaster industry atm, originally in the late 1800s right up until the late 1970s like 90% of rollercoasters were wooden and stood at about the 70ft - 100ft mark but once a company called Arrow started using tubular steel ride heights and lengths exploded all over the world in a period in the mid 90's - early 2000s know as the coaster wars where theme parks rapid and aggressive expansions directly competed with each other for world records until they were halted by the 2008 recession. Then in 2011 a company called Rocky Mountain Construction debuted their hybrid coaster model combining wood and steel at Six Flags Over Texas on the New Texas Giant rollercoaster. Fast forward to now and these hybrid coasters are all over the world and pushing 250ft tall with rides like Steel Vengeance in Ohio, Iron Gwazi in Florida and Zadra in Poland. It's a really interesting topic with its ties to construction I think it would fit in well if you covered it here or on The B1M.
I feel like we can reframe the question. It may be difficult and expensive to build skyscrapers out of wood, but the midrise buildings we would like to use to fill out density with better urban zoning especially in NA can absolutely be built with wood. Canada's forestation is increasing due to climate change, so I'm hoping that economies of scale and professional experience will make building those midrises easier and cheaper, which could help to solve the housing crises in Toronto, Vancouver, etc without excessive carbon emissions in doing so.
I think this limit at about 85 meters is good. Once buildings start getting too tall they become less practical and more expensive with larger foundations, more elevators, increased support, and higher unit and building costs. This 85ish meter cap also allows for a more balanced skyline with no one building standing above the rest and, aesthetically, makes a city look more pleasing. Examples of this are places like Barcelona, Paris, Amsterdam. Compared to cities like London, Rotterdam, and Brussels, they are orderly and neat with the latter cities being chaotic and messy with skyscrapers jutting across the skyline competing with one another for height. This can even be seen now in New York where it used to work having so many skyscrapers because there was a time when building with steel and stone limited heights. Now, these supertall skyscrapers are going up overshadowing the other buildings in heights and destroying the once fairly even skyline. These supertalls are also plagued by inconveniences like: taking 5 minutes to reach the bottom floor, massive wind sway, exorbitant construction costs, cheap construction, and just the phycological effects of being so removed from society on the ground; you don't really get that sense of community and locality when you're living 100+ meters above the ground. I think the question is more should we built taller rather than can we build taller.
Shot in the dark but how do you get into this kind of business? Love your videos they have me wanting to make a career change into some form of development.
I am very curious what the sound quality is like in these units when compared with their concrete brethren. The US already has some of the thinnest walls in the world and I am curious if this has any sort of negative consequences sound wise.
Walls are usually hollow wood structures with gypse sheets, and sometimes isolation in the hollow part. Or in more industrial buildings, walls have 2x4 thin steel C sections that support the gypse. If you have a massive CLT or gluelam wall between two units, rather than either a thin fire-retardant concrete or some cheap isolation, the massive wood wall will provide way more tranquility. Possibly more than equivalent concrete, the stiffness of the concrete will propagate low freqencies, and I would be lead to believe the wood to have some level of dampening. Take my opinion with a grain of salt, i'm studying engineering, i'm not licenced yet hehe
I instantly thought of this. Every shared living space built out of wood I've had noise transfer issues. An issue that not many people think about till they experience it themselves.
I just saw a Video on RU-vid about an 8 or so Level Apartment building recently constructed mainly from Timber. A good start but Chinese manufactures are worried that there will be reduced demand for their Plastic Coated Re-Bar.
I live in Costa Del Sol Occidental and I have never seen new technologies on the sites. Except distantly controlled cranes maybe... No forwarded materials or tools. Is Spain that behind other countries?
A Lego like building system factory mass produced with Timber is needed to bring costs down. Steel wrapped and bonded timber might also have some synergy benefits, fire protection, buckling optimized, surface damage resistance.
What if we use graphene in the glue between the laminations of wood? How much more would the beams be able to handle? And could they be made smaller, with te same loud capacity?
Using timber for construction is also a good carbon capture and sequestration move. Capture carbon from the air and seal it down in a building structure.
Timber towers are cool but if we want to eliminate most of the waste of concrete and steel we need to get the low hanging fruit. There are exponentially more structures as you go down in size. In Vancouver it’s so normal to build 4-5 story apartment buildings with timber no one even thinks about it. In Australia EVERYTHING is concrete
I looked into the sustainability of various options as part of a RIBA Stage 2 report from a structural engineering perspective not that long ago. For the scheme we were looking at, timber actually came off worse from a sustainability point of view compared with concrete and steel. First was the volume of material required to achieve the same stiffness in beam and column elements. CLT and Glulam options required more material than their rivals. So although the kgCO2/kg of material was less for timber, it was offset by the volume required. Second, was fire. The building required a 2h fire rating and the treatments and materials being looked at were not exactly environmentally friendly in their own right. Thirdly, cradle to grave analysis was also unfavourable. Although timber construction kg to kg seems more sustainable (though note the first point above), sourcing timber is not exactly a zero carbon endeavour. It is not like steel or concrete where you are mining otherwise inert materials out the ground, harvesting trees removes the carbon sink. The volume of timber use in the project would not be able to be replaced within the lifespan of the building given the speed at which trees grow. Forthly, raw timber is not suitable in its own right. Standard C24 timber would not be suitable for a project that we were looking, or the video alluded to, so CLT or Glulam was considered. From the analysis we carried out, the resins and glues used to bind CLT and Glulam together are in their own right toxic to the environment, albeit inert when insitu. This leads to the fifth and final point we found - grave. Timber in the form of CLT and Glulam is not currently recyclable, and does not biodegrade in the same way as raw timber does. So unless we are able to re-engineer the materials to be reused on other projects, then they'll just be sitting on landfill. In fairness, this is a problem all materials have, concrete especially, but steel less so. Happy to discuss any of these points in case our previous studies have not shown something out there that could've been considered etc.
I am pleased to see timber playing a more important role in the construction of high-rise structures. Wood will give designers new vistas to explore. Wood should show remarkable performance in seismically active areas. Wood should work well with more traditional high-rise materials such as steel, with metal providing additional strength in areas such as lateral stress-bearing. And wood is a renewable resource, making it more affordable in the long run.
Carbon nanotubes only have a high tensile strength, so they could make a super strong cable, but they aren't suitable to carry a load under compression like where you would use steel or concrete.
100m timber houses are on the horizon like the woho in Berlin. for even bigger buildings securing that much wood is probably a challenge. clt production has to scale up massively i imagine.
Here in the UK, timber buildings and timber facings look so beautiful when they are erected. Then, when they have aged, they all look a very dreary and unappealing grey! I have become accustomed to being highly disappointed with UK wood buildings and wood finishings How long, before everything starts to rot? How can water be kept out of the joints? Do these wood buildings need to be regularly coated/treated, if they are not to deteriorate? Interestingly, I live in a Victorian house, built in 1870. Recently, while working on the roof bargeboards, and also the timber lintels, they were in perfect condition, almost zero rot, after 150 years. They smelled like cedar? The wood was definitely pink-red Thank you Chris Moyler
So the building won't just burn to the ground if there's a fire, but what happens afterwards? Do they have to replace all of the scalded beams? Would you need to do any structural rebuilding for steel or concrete? Also, how is cutting down trees sustainable or green? Aren't trees better at scrubbing CO2 as fully grown and mature trees, rather than just during growing? If the key motivation is CO2 emissions, wouldn't it be better to just offset it by planting more plants? Don't get me wrong, it's beautiful, but it presents some downsides that might make it impractical, especially with huge skyscrapers.
Why not a superstructure of conventional materials, say a sky scraper with 5 stories between each cement floor and then fill in the floors with timber construction?
What kind of glue is used? Is it biodegradable? Non allergic? Why even use glue? There are methods to connect the wood layers for example with wooden plugs or screws.
@@artjom01 They could have wooden slides built into the walls like laundry or garbage chutes. You might get splinters on your way down but oh well. At least you won't be BBQ.
My question is that will it stay sustainable, if the timber buildings are adopted on mass scale. Afterall the sustainable forests from where the wood is being extracted have a limit.
It is a great material, but it's difficult to source in the appropriate quantity. I am not an construction engineer yet and I don't really have a thing for skyscrapers, but I'd imagine skyscrapers use it for stiffening, because it's incredibly light, stiff and tough. Graphene (the miracle material that's been hyped up for like 30 years now with very little result) is finally being deployed in the UK as an additive to concrete, to make a certain structure strong enough to not be braced with steel, as load bearing concrete structures usually need to be. Graphene would have a future in this for sure, if it is possible to produce it to the necessary extent. But prices are important, the reason concrete is so common as a material is that it is near impossible to challenge it on price.
Limited height is really not a concern. Most of the buildings in the world don't even get close to 80 meters. I hope timber will be the new construction standard soon. The impact on emissions reduction would be massive!
Currently the highest timber skyscraper is planned in Winterthur (Switzerland), which should be built by 2026 and 100m high with 32 stories. Anyone interested can search for "Rocket and Tigerli"
