Wood Buildings

Eduardo Souza: In recent years, we have published many articles about wood. Addressing trends of use, possibilities for log wood, panels, curves, and finishes, innovations in tall building structures, and wood's behavior towards fire, these articles have explicated a wide variety of the material's applications and characteristics. A specific type of wood, Cross Laminated Timber (CLT), has emerged as highly structurally efficient with thermal, seismic, and even sensory benefits, described by specialists as the concrete of the future.

Buildings around us create a whopping one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions – that’s about ten times more than air traffic worldwide. In Europe alone about 190 million square metres of housing space are built each year, mainly in the cities, and the amount is growing quickly at the rate of nearly one percent a year.

Tobias Roberts: Wood is widely used for outdoor purposes in North American home construction — for decking, siding, and fencing, to mention just a few uses.

What is sustainable (or not) about using wood outdoors? Lumber comes from trees—a natural, renewable product considered carbon-neutral because trees absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere before eventually decomposing and releasing that CO2 back into the air.

Matt Simon: Concrete and steel come with massive emissions. So let's ditch them and build towers out of wood. Yes, wood. THE MODERN INDUSTRIAL era was literally built on steel and concrete, readily available materials that gave buildings the strength to stretch hundreds of stories into the sky.

Sponsored: Wood is an extremely versatile material. It allows for the construction of robust and strong structures, while it can also be used as the raw material for delicate objects such as musical instruments. Understanding all its particularities, properties, and behavior is a journey of knowledge that could take a lifetime.