by Web Editor | Dec 5, 2018 | News
Thanks to innovative construction materials like cross-laminated timber (CLT) and laminated veneer lumber (LVL), wooden buildings are no longer mere houses made of sticks.
Attracted by the aesthetic and environmental benefits of timber, structural engineers have overseen a lumber comeback, from Landlease’s International House development in Sydney’s Barangaroo district to Brisbane’s newly completed 25 King, which is the world’s tallest commercial timber building.
But with ambitious projects in Tokyo, Chicago, and London eyeing far greater heights for timber as a building material, engineers and the public need to be assured wood can match up with concrete and steel when it comes to safety and stability.
That’s why Griffith University’s Associate Professor Benoit Gilbert has been putting timber to the test, using high-tech machinery to better understand how timber behaves in a variety of situations.
Gilbert’s current tests focus on progressive collapse, a term that describes the severe failure of a structure due to something going wrong in one part of it. That could be a gas explosion, a fire or if a car were to collide with the building.
Read more on this from Create at https://www.createdigital.org.au/strength-safety-tests-timber/.
by Web Editor | Dec 4, 2017 | News
Congress Gears Up For A Fight Over Mass Timber Legislation
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The battle over the 2017 Timber Innovation Act is gaining momentum in Washington, D.C., where two new Senate sponsors and four new Congress members have signed on to it since this past May. The pending legislation would provide funding for research into innovative wood materials and mass timber structures above 85 feet. The bill’s proponents are hoping that it will be an impetus for transforming cities and towns across the country with a bevy of mid-rise and high-rise mass timber buildings.
“I am very impressed with the large cross-aisle support,” Chadwick Oliver, director of Yale University’s Global Institute of Sustainable Forestry, said. “You have Bruce Westerman, a Republican congressman from Arkansas and Peter DeFazio, a Democrat from Oregon who has been on the side of environmental groups. This looks like a bill that is quite serious about moving forward.”
However, the concrete and steel industries are vigorously lobbying to derail the legislation, and have established a website called Build with Strength that contains a detailed critique of the new generation of wood buildings. “It is a piece of legislation that props up one industry over another and we think that it is misguided and dangerous,” Kevin Lawlor, a spokesperson from Build with Strength, said. “We don’t think that it is safe in three-to-five story buildings, and we don’t think that it is safer in taller buildings.”
The wood products industry, the U.S. Forest Service, and other advocates claim that technological advances make the new generation of tall timber buildings more fire resistant. In fact, according to Dr. Patricia A. Layton, director of the Wood Utilization + Design Institute at Clemson University, that is because of the way it chars in a fire: By insulating its interior, an exposed wood beam can actually be structurally stronger than a steel one. “Steel loses its strength at a lower temperature than does wood,” she explained. “If you expose concrete or steel it is combustible, and it does feel the effects of fire.”
Many of the act’s supporters say that allowing buildings to be built from wood technologies such as cross-laminated timber (CLT) will result in a host of economic and environmental benefits. Most of the Timber Innovation Act’s sponsors hail from states where the wood industry is struggling to recoup from the recent housing downturn and also suffering from the decrease in demand for paper that is a result of the increasing digitalization of the economy.
From The Architects Newspaper: archpaper.com
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by Web Editor | Feb 10, 2016 | News
Last month we saw cross-laminated timbers installed at the Albina Yard project in Portland. It was the first use of U.S.-produced CLT in a building-wide structural system.
The first level of CLT (4,000 square feet) on Albina Yard went up in fewer than four hours. Last week, the second level was installed by a crew of seven in under two hours. Pretty remarkable, considering the contractor says it would have taken at least twice as many people two days or more to frame the same amount of floor space using traditional methods. Albina Yard is a four-story, 16,000-square-foot creative office project in north Portland. Besides its snazzy design by LEVER Architecture, the project is most notable for being tangible evidence that the U.S. CLT industry is officially off the ground.
There’s been a lot of buzz around CLT and mass timber in general over the past several months in Oregon and around the country — and rightly so. Besides drastically improved speed of construction (and the savings that go with that), mass timber offers significant environmental benefits. This includes tremendous carbon-storing capacity. Half the dry weight of wood is carbon. It got there when the trees were growing and absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. That carbon remains locked up for as long as the wood remains in use (a nine-story wood structure in China is now 959 years old—nearly a millennium). The new trees planted to replace those that were harvested start the carbon cycle all over again.
According to a quick, back-of-the-napkin calculation, Albina Yard, which is small by commercial construction standards, stores about 80.5 metric tons of carbon. That’s equivalent to offsetting 295 metric tons of CO2 emissions.
A larger Portland mass timber building, Clay Creative (60,000 square feet), stores more than 1 million pounds of carbon. Its total of 457.5 metric tons offsets 1,678 metric tons of CO2 emissions. “An additional 3,574 metric tons of CO2 emissions were avoided by using wood rather than concrete and steel,” says Dr. Jim Bowyer, an expert on the subject at Dovetail Partners, Inc.
From the Oregon Forest Resources Institute: https://oregonforests.org/blog/mass-timber-rising
by Web Editor | Jan 18, 2016 | News
Wood is a go-to material for floors, doors, furniture, and now, a skyscraper—the very first of its kind in the U.S. Construction on Portland, Oregon’s wood high-rise, Framework, is slated to begin this October. The 12-story mixed-use building—a collaboration between local firm Lever Architecture and real-estate developer Project—will be made primarily from timber. Thomas Robinson, Lever Architecture’s founder, says his company is interested in “exploring the relationship between materials, experience, and the environment—how the way we build impacts the way we live and the environment as a whole.”
To highlight the innovative design, the structure will be centered around a visible vertical core and capped with a roof deck framed by wood columns. Flexible, sturdy, and lighter than materials like concrete or steel, timber has a high strength-to-weight ratio. Framework’s design includes cross-laminated wood panels, engineered of stacked lumber, for floors and ceilings, and glue-laminated timber for beams and columns.
Inside, a double-height community space will feature a public exhibition documenting the building’s creation and impact, plus a second-floor garden terrace. Visitors will be able to roam retail spaces on the ground floor, while above there will be five floors of offices and five floors of affordable housing.
The “forest to frame” philosophy behind the building reflects its relationship between urban construction and rural lumber manufacturing. This project creates more opportunities in both industries, which were gravely affected in the recession. “Framework stands as a model for sustainable urban ecology,” says Robinson. And there are copious environmental benefits: Buildings made primarily of wood have significantly lower carbon emissions and use less energy than those made from traditional materials. Earlier this year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture took notice. It solicited designs for a tall wood building competition, and the Framework team won an impressive $1.5 million grant to fund further research and development—the structure is expected to be finished by December 2017.
From Architectural Digest: https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/first-wood-highrise-building-portland
by Web Editor | Apr 1, 2015 | News
When completed, a new wood products plant at the Columbia Falls Industrial Park north of town will be the largest cross-laminated timber (CLT) plant in the world, Sen. Jon Tester learned during a meeting with city officials and business leaders at Freedom Bank on March 20.
SmartLam general manager Casey Malmquist said he’s in talks with the industrial park’s new Canadian owners about plans for construction of a new manufacturing plant to produce the giant wood panels. “We plan to quadruple our capacity, which will make us the largest CLT plant in the world,” Malmquist told Tester.
SmartLam’s panels are made with low-grade dimensional lumber from F.H. Stoltze Land & Lumber Co. that are sawn into smaller pieces and finger-jointed and planed into a 2-inch product that is then cross-laminated into large, heavy and very strong panels.
Currently the panels are being used in the oil industry for drilling rig platforms, bridges and roadways, but SmartLam wants to start producing panels for building construction, which is common in Europe.
Malmquist enumerated the environmental benefits of replacing concrete and steel with renewable and sustainable wood products.
From Hungry Horse News: https://www.flatheadnewsgroup.com/hungryhorsenews/expansion-will-make-smartlam-no-in-the-world/article_03c59e1c-d48a-11e4-90b8-fb43c4b37825.html
