2024-04-13 09:17:59
The world is used to using four basic building materials: concrete, steel, brick and wood. Three of them have a huge carbon footprint, with construction as a whole generating over 30 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions.
Canadian architect Michael Green, winner of some of the most prestigious international architecture awards, chooses the fourth material – wood – to build functional and beautiful buildings, changing the way we think about construction.
“If we had known a century ago how badly concrete and steel would affect climate change, we would have thought about new materials, we would have become more familiar with natural materials and their potential. If a tree can grow to 30 or 40 meters, as in the place where I live, we can certainly learn from nature to make strong and tall buildings,” he told BTA at the New European Bauhaus Festival in Brussels.
Green and his team are currently designing a 55-story wooden building in Milwaukee, USA, which will be the tallest in the world. Projects of similar height are being considered in Australia and elsewhere in the world.
“Height is important, in part because it’s how we show the public that any building can be built this way. If you build a skyscraper like that, you can build anything, any building in cities. We use height to draw attention to the engineering behind this type construction to ignite people’s dreams and aspirations,” says the architect, noting that in fact most of his work involves buildings of all sizes.
Nearly a decade ago, Green’s team constructed the seven-story T3 building using insect-damaged wood, which, at 21,000 square meters, was the largest wooden building in the United States at the time, and subsequently provided invaluable information on the characteristics and properties of large structures. from wood. His studio is currently working on a wooden building to house the headquarters of a global IT company in California.
“We don’t necessarily think the world needs a lot of skyscrapers. I really don’t like skyscrapers. I don’t think they’re a great place to live, and there’s a certain inefficiency in building really tall buildings. That goes for all materials and means, construction is actually less carbon efficient,” he points out, adding that most of the buildings he would like to build are of medium height – up to 16 stories.
However, wooden buildings are not suitable for all areas. For regions of the world where there are strong earthquakes, such as Canada and Turkey, wood is a very good material. For places with strong hurricane winds, however, it is more difficult to work with, but with proper design, such buildings can be safe practically everywhere.
Another issue is the sustainability and protection of forests – forests that could not be regenerated should not be cut down for construction purposes, Green emphasizes. The natural conditions are right in the Northern Hemisphere, in places where there is actually sustainable forestry and enough trees are planted that grow fast enough.
“There are many parts of the world where I won’t buy wood because I don’t believe it’s sustainable. In those regions, I don’t want to build from wood, I want to build in other ways,” says the architect, pointing to parts of Africa and the rain-fed forests of Brazil.
For such areas, you can work with other plants that are typical of the place, grow quickly and in abundance. Green’s team is researching plants such as flax and hemp to develop new building materials.
“Today, such materials do not yet exist, but I hope that in 20 years this will become the way we think and build,” says Green, pointing to one of the main problems preventing the “greening” of the construction sector – grossly insufficient investment in scientific research.
“As an industry, we need to think bigger than we do now, because really right now we’re trying to solve very small problems. We’re trying to make bad materials a little bit better, or we’re trying to solve things very, very, very locally level – houses made of straw bales, made of earth… They are all good, but they won’t solve people’s problems on the necessary scale, right? We have to build big cities from the new materials,” he emphasizes.
Plant-based technologies allow to think in this different way and, if we invest and change building codes in the necessary way, I hope that in about 20 years this will be the way the world will be built,” says the architect.
Artificial intelligence can also greatly help in the search for better building solutions, as it makes it possible to collect a huge amount of data extremely quickly, to test theories, “to understand the true cost of a building, its impact on human health and well-being , on productivity and efficiency to make construction faster and more efficient.
At the end of the day, everyone is interested in the cost of a building, Green explains, but it should include not only materials and labor, but also components such as costs resulting from pollution and environmental degradation, social impact, indirect costs such as closure of access to objects due to construction, to form the real price of a building.
For now, however, according to Green, the big ideas that will radically change the construction industry, like Tesla (Tesla) turned electric cars into a mass concept, are missing. “You have to invest in bigger ideas, not small ones. Small ideas are important, I don’t want to belittle them. Small community projects will always be important, but time is of the essence and we have to think much bigger.” he points out.
It is also necessary for big ideas to meet with big capital so that changes in construction can unfold on the necessary scale.
Where can we expect to see a large-scale deployment of a new type of construction first?
“In a way, what’s so exciting about today’s world is that these big ideas can come from anywhere on the planet. Because people have access to the Internet, to the tools of artificial intelligence that they will increasingly have, they have access and the necessary education. Explore these ideas and the breakthrough can come from anywhere,” concludes the architect.