Earlier this year, Dan Doctoroff, the C.E.O. of Sidewalk Labs, Google\u2019s sibling company under Alphabet, answered a question about what his company \u201cactually does\u201d during a Reddit \u201cAsk Me Anything\u201d session, replying, \u201cThe short answer is: We want to build the first truly 21st-century city.\u201d Quayside, a Toronto neighborhood the company is developing in partnership with a Canadian tri-government agency, is the first step toward Doctoroff\u2019s goal. It has been in the news because it could inspire a Black Mirror plot: It will be built from \u201cthe Internet up,\u201d according to a project document, a merger of \u201cphysical and digital realms.\u201d Fittingly, according to the New York Times, \u201cNo obvious way to opt out of Quayside\u2019s surveillance systems exists, except by staying out of the area.\u201d<\/p>\n
But Quayside\u2019s newsworthy for another, more encouraging reason: The plan is to build the place, not out of concrete and steel, but wood\u2014and wood is looking good. A recent advance in wood technology should interest the neighborhood\u2019s developers: Teng Li, a University of Maryland mechanical engineer, created with his colleagues wood that\u2019s as \u201cstrong as steel, but six times lighter,\u201d he said. Liangbing Hu, Li\u2019s co-author on the study, added, \u201cThis kind of wood could be used in cars, airplanes, buildings\u2014any application where steel is used.\u201d Making it is just a two-step process. The scientists first boiled natural wood in a mixture of sodium hydroxide and sodium sulfite, to remove some of the lignin and hemicellulose, substances contained in the walls of wood cells (the former retard parasite and bacterial attacks, the latter cover and bind fibers). Then they put the wood in a hot press, which leads, as they say in the paper, \u201cto the total collapse of cell walls and the complete densification of the natural wood with highly aligned cellulose nanofibres.\u201d The result, they conclude, is a \u201clow-cost, high-performance, lightweight alternative\u201d to \u201cmost structural metals and alloys.\u201d
\n\u201cOur proposal is that we need timber to save us.\u201d
\nThe idea of future wood cities has been hanging around for at least a few years. In 2014, for example, the Boston Globe wondered, \u201cWill cities of the future be built of wood?\u201d The rise of both human population and global temperature prompted much of the interest in the sustainability of city-scale timber construction. By 2050, we will number almost 10 billion; and since two-thirds of us will be city dwelling\u2014up from just over half in 2014\u2014cities will have to grow. It\u2019d be ideal to do that without curtailing efforts to combat climate change; it wouldn\u2019t be helpful, for instance, to keep extracting and transporting the raw materials needed to build steel and concrete structures, which are more expensive and have large carbon footprints. Wood, on the other hand, is \u201ca plentiful resource that grows back relatively quickly, and even pulls carbon out of the atmosphere as it does,\u201d the Globe noted. Yugon Kim, an architect passionate about timber construction, said, \u201cWe all are hard-wired to see the city as being steel, glass, and concrete. Our proposal is that we need timber to save us.\u201d
\nThe proposal hasn\u2019t been ignored. The Economist published a video titled, \u201cWooden skyscrapers could be the future for cities.\u201d The main obstacle to this outcome\u2014what a 2016 paper called \u201ca full timber building renaissance\u201d\u2014is the public\u2019s fear of city fires, which has been reflected over centuries in construction codes globally. Some researchers, like Alastair Bartlett, at the University of Edinburgh, see in these obstacles an \u201copportunity,\u201d as he wrote in a 2017 study, \u201cto revisit compartment fire behaviour and to quantify the impact of these new construction technologies on the compartment fire dynamics.\u201d
\nBartlett, along with some colleagues, tested the sort of wood mid- and high-rise buildings\u2014like Framework, in Portland\u2014have recently been made out of, known in the industry as \u201ccross-laminated\u201d or \u201cmass\u201d or \u201ctall\u201d timber, which is how Quayside\u2019s developers refer to it. Bartlett set up three rooms of equal size, about as big as a large walk-in closet. Two of the rooms had two exposed surfaces of timber (one with two walls exposed, the other a wall and the ceiling); the last room had two walls and the ceiling exposed (non-exposed surfaces were covered with plasterboard). Each room had four wooden \u201ccribs,\u201d or pallets, for the \u201cfuel load,\u201d placed on the ground, one of which was lit using fiber strips soaked in paraffin. Bartlett then documented how fast and how hot each room burned. The room with an exposed wall and ceiling managed to \u201cauto-extinct\u201d\u2014the fire went out by itself. This depended \u201con the char layer [of the wood] remaining attached\u201d rather than falling off while the cribs were burning, Bartlett concluded. He wants to do many more experiments because it\u2019s still not clear how, in mass timber buildings, to get compartment fires to reliably burn out on their own, a \u201ccornerstone of fire safety engineering design,\u201d he writes. \u201cThe failure modes of common compartment construction systems and materials are relatively poorly documented from a scientific (rather than compliance testing) perspective.\u201d
\nThe combustibility of this wood depends partly on its size, according to Daniel Safarik, editor of the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, a Chicago-based non-profit. \u201cMassive wood walls and structural beams and columns comprised of engineered panels have demonstrated fire performance equal to concrete and, in some cases, superior to steel,\u201d he told The Architect\u2019s Newspaper. \u201cMass timber has to burn through many layers before it is structurally compromised\u2014basically it \u2018chars\u2019 long before it collapses.\u201d Still, as a 2016 review concluded, \u201cLarge-scale and full-frame tests are also necessary\u2026to determine the variety of possible fire induced failure modes that may occur in real mass timber buildings.\u201d The same will no doubt be true of the new densified wood Li and his colleagues recently created.
\nThere is also, alongside the environmental and economic, an aesthetic-psychological case for wood cities. Clare Farrow, who is co-curating a current London exhibit called \u201cTimber Rising\u2013Vertical Visions for the Cities of Tomorrow,\u201d\u00a0wrote in Dezeen, \u201cStudies are showing that the presence, scent and touch of wood can have remarkably positive effects, not only on people\u2019s wellbeing in a general sense, but more specifically on stress levels, blood pressure, communication, learning and healing.\u201d A 2015 review in Wood Science and Technology supports her claims and also suggests that \u201cspecific aspects of wood such as colour, quantity, and grain pattern should be examined\u201d in future studies.<\/p>\n
I certainly have a fondness for wood. On work errands with my father, when I was a child, I remember being drawn to the plywood section of Home Depot. I\u2019d run my hands against the surfaces of large slabs, sometimes still damp after being cut, and I\u2019d smell the fresh sawdust piled up at the cutting station. I still have my 7th and 8th grade woodshop projects\u2014gumball machine, foldable stool\u2014and for some reason, to my wife\u2019s chagrin, love making my apartment\u2019s wood floor creak. Recently, I was bummed to learn that, last year, a plan to build a 10-story\u00a0timber condo\u00a0in New York City was scrapped (\u201cthe cooling-off of NYC\u2019s condo market,\u201d according to the website Curbed, \u201cmade the deal seem less attractive.\u201d) But Quayside\u2019s wood-centric vision of future cities has me feeling optimistic. \u201cTimber construction is possible at all scales and at pioneering height,\u201d a Quayside document\u00a0states. We\u2019ll have to see if that confidence catches on, in\u00a0Newark\u00a0and beyond.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Earlier this year, Dan Doctoroff, the C.E.O. of Sidewalk Labs, Google\u2019s sibling company under Alphabet, answered a question about what his company \u201cactually does\u201d during a Reddit \u201cAsk Me Anything\u201d session, replying, \u201cThe short answer is: We want to build the first truly 21st-century city.\u201d Quayside, a Toronto neighborhood the company is developing in partnership […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":59,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","nova_meta_subtitle":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5572],"tags":[12430,12958,5820],"supplier":[15052,11602,4428],"class_list":["post-57791","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bio-based","tag-buildingmaterial","tag-timber","tag-wood","supplier-sidewalk-labs","supplier-university-of-edinburgh","supplier-university-of-maryland"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57791","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/59"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=57791"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57791\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57791"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=57791"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=57791"},{"taxonomy":"supplier","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/supplier?post=57791"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}