Building Sustainable Skyscrapers from Laminated Veneer Lumber

Some architects believe that in order to build the sustainable cities of the future, we need to look back to the log cabin era and build “skyscrapers” out of wood.

Just over a century ago, the architects and engineers who invented the skyscraper set us on the path to becoming an urban world. Tall buildings of concrete and steel helped make urban density—and the increased sustainability that comes with it—possible.

But the buildings themselves come at a heavy, and often hidden, environmental price. Concrete and steel are some of the most energy-intensive materials on the planet. The manufacture and transport of concrete, for example, is responsible for about five percent of global CO2 emissions, more than the entire airline industry.

“When we talk about sustainability of buildings, we’re really tinkering around with the little minutiae”—a green roof here, a solar panel there, says Michael Green, an architect in Vancouver, Canada. “Those things are good, but they’re not even close to good enough.”

Green thinks that in order to build the sustainable cities of the future, we need to look back to the log cabin era. That is, we should be building skyscrapers out of wood. His design concept for a “woodscraper” is based on mass timber, a class of wood products that come in panels up to 64 feet long and eight feet wide. These materials, with names such as cross-laminated timber, laminated strand lumber, and laminated veneer lumber, look similar to plywood but are thicker and much stronger...

“Anything that they promote shouldn’t even be given a moments serious debate.”

“Even a broken clock is correct twice a day.”

I agree with you on being skeptical of anything the environmentalists promote. However, just because they advocate something for spurious reasons does not mean that thing is necessarily bad or even wrong.

Just as the environmentalist is often “spring-loaded” to the “Eco/Sustainable” position, we conservatives are sometimes spring-loaded to automatically reject ANYTHING which the environmentalist advocates.

The environmentalist looks naive & often foolish whenever he breathlessly endorses anything with “Eco” or “Ecology” attached to the name or description. However the definition of Ecology, “The branch of biology that deals with the relations of organisms to one another and to their physical surroundings”, apples very well to a septic tank.

Both sides need to evaluate ideas & programs on their own merit, not strictly on whether they are being promoted by red, blue, Dem, Rep, Black, White, North South, Urban or Rural.

As my grandmother used to tell me, “Don’t cut off your nose to spite your face.”

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