Architect Michael Green notices how people react differently when they’re in a building made of wood. The touch wooden columns, smell the material, even hug it. In this TED talk he explains why wood is necessary as a building material in future.
The challenge for architects, is to house the 40% of the world who will need a new home within the next twenty years. In cities, one in three people live in slums. Over a hundred million people in the world are homeless. Building with steel and concrete is responsible for 8% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. This puts the problem of climate change almost on collision course with the issue of people needing a home.
The two challenges in combatting climate change are to reduce emissions and find storage. Wood is the only material that Green has found which does both of these things. Working with an engineer, he has been designing thirty storey buildings using enormous wood panels made from young trees glued together.
Green answers a few of the most common questions he faces about building with wood. There’s the issue of fire, to which he tells us that panels are as difficult to light as a single log using a match. Wood burns predictably once it is alight, making it easy to use fire science to design safe buildings. In relation to deforestation, Green has investigated a sustainable model for maintenance of trees and they estimate that enough wood for a twenty storey building is grown in America every thirteen minutes.
Wood is possibly the oldest building material available, yet this is a technological building revolution, as it represents the first new way to build a skyscraper in over 100 years. Green tells us there are already multi- storey wooden buildings in London and Australia and he hopes his hometown of Vancouver will announce the world’s tallest, at 20 stories in the near future.
Tag Archives: architecture
Day 169: Architecture that repairs itself
Rachel Armstrong wants to end the present one way system of architecture, where there is a one way transfer of energy from our environment into our homes. By developing new methods to make our living spaces more in touch with nature, she hopes we can one day save Venice.
Armstrong is working with a number of collaborators to develop metabolic materials for the practice of architecture. One of these is chemist Martin Hanczyc, who works with a system called the protocell. Protocells are little fatty bags with a chemical battery which can conduct themselves in a living manner. They can move around the environment, follow chemical gradients and undergo complex reactions.
Just like limestone, protocells can make a shell and deposit it in a complex environment, against natural materials. Using this knowledge, an architect has came up with designs to grow a limestone roof under the city of Venice. But how would it become crafted around the wooden poles? The correct species of protocells can be engineered to move away from the lights to the foundations of the study. The local marine life will be attracted to this architecture and find their own ecological niches. The metabolic materials have many of the properties of living systems. Finally, an observer in the future marvelling at a structure may be unable to tell if it has been created by a natural process or an artificial one.
Day 72- Grow your own home
If you’ve ever wanted a home that sucks carbon from the air, is part of the environment and looks, well, interesting, architect Mitchell Joachim has something for you in this talk.
Joachim presents images and data behind the technique of pleaching, or the technology of grafting trees together into a structure. Perhaps you want a house made of meat; with fatty cells for insulation and cilia to deal with wind chill. Or maybe vegetables are more your thing.
If you envisage a future where architecture and biology become one, watch this.
365 days of TED 