8 COMMENT
three-storey glulam columns rise up within the hyperboloid tower form, this slender basket weave grid shell creating a dynamic ‘airframe’ silhouette (see image below). Oakwood Timber Towers 3 is the most recent investigation and a
further iteration of the concept. The Lodge 2/Treehuis, again in the Netherlands, employs a cellular ‘tube within a tube’ construction.
Timber benefits
Our team has long been investigating the myriad benefits of engineered mass timber. As a tower, engineered mass timber has the potential to create an architecturally more pleasing, relaxed, sociable and creative urban experience; free, abundant, renewable and sustainable.
Beyond the engineering and the sequestering of CO2, we as humans have an affinity for nature, and timber. We are calmer and
more sociable when this natural material is in sight, our heart rate slows, we are less stressed, and apparently, more sociable; such settings evidently promote healing.
People naturally associate timber interiors with the out of doors, and some believe that the ‘phytoncide’ VOCs produced by timber are similar to the benefits of walking in a forest glade, claiming they boost our immune system. Tests have shown that it lead to increased concentration in children of all abilities. Claims have also been made that in timber buildings one half of our brain gets ‘smarter’, we recover faster from surgery or illness (perhaps related to timber interiors’ restfulness), energy levels increase, and sleep improves. As a harvested natural material, mass timber has a high visual appeal to the human psyche, encouraging a sense of wellbeing among residents. Modular cross-laminated timber (CLT) establishes a new level of precision, quality control and fire protection; bringing a new structural aesthetic and elegance in form. As well as being faster in construction, and less disruptive to the local neighbourhood, modular CLT construction is quieter, so could also conceivably be used to extend many existing concrete buildings upwards substantially. For example, we understand that a recent feasibility study was done in Toronto to double the height of an existing Four Seasons Hotel. As a provocation to the industry, we are stretching the theoretical limits of plant-based materials with our tall timber concepts, nearing, or going just beyond the easily feasible. This requires further collaborative study including establishing ongoing testing programmes.
Mixed-use residential high-rise
The use of timber as a structural material in tall buildings is an area of emerging interest for a variety of potential benefits; the most
obvious being that it is a renewable resource, unlike prevailing construction methods using concrete and steel. The research is also investigating other potential benefits, such as reduced costs and improved construction timescales, increased fire resistance, and significant reduction in the overall weight of buildings. There is 40 per cent less waste immediately, and greater potential for second and third use for the material.
Our disruptive research into tall engineered timber buildings also looks towards creating new design opportunities. Timber construction may have a wider positive impact on urban environments and built form than we have currently envisioned, and offers opportunities not only to rethink the aesthetics of buildings, but also the logistics and cost; in light of this new technology and potential savings of production based from computer-driven precision – BIM, GC, and Blockchain – and robotic staged construction methods. Building faster, lighter, at better quality, with improved resilience, and in a significantly more environmentally responsible way.
The light and high precision prefab components lead inevitably to automated and robotic construction methodology and ‘flat pack’ cost efficiency. In Canada, which uses a high degree of modular timber, construction is 10-15 per cent cheaper now – one can well imagine with a far greater sourcing and a great volume and potentially doubling of product perhaps a 50 per cent reduction could be achieved. The 20 per cent time savings should be possible to be reduced as well to say 50 cent with fuller production take up.
Housing future
The average home in London is £540,747, thats £135,000 or 25 per cent higher than say Boston in the US. One wonders can all the promised efficiencies of Big Data be brought to bear on to meet an oncoming demand. Can the market achieve new efficiencies in the housing market, what would happen to the London market if the price were halved, and construction times were significantly reduced, would London see a renaissance as a vibrant home of young new ideas post-Brexit ?
Despite harnessing new technology and new forms of shared financing like crowd-sharing, and with Big Data and Blockchain logistics brought to bear, we can only streamline an already overly complex and burdensome methodology. We are better to invest the notion of people and cities, and harnessing their new ideas for the future, than to promote older, laborious and uneconomical methodologies. We need to look again with new eyes at established methods which are now lacking. One new idea, crowd-sharing debt for new micro-housing developments, can make the broader populace direct investors in the quality of their cities. This could be part of the solution to establishing new housing models better suited to young urban professionals in idea industries, and key workers. Similarly, we are finding engineered mass timber to be a truly 21st century material, as a response to several challenges
including increasing CO2, and growing high residential demand, globally. As our society moves by necessity towards the creation of smart cities and valuing idea creation, this ‘New’ 21st century material seems to also answer future potential by making our cities better places to live together; better places to think a new and act anew.
Courtesy of PLP Architecture for developer Provast NL
Kevin P. Flanagan is senior partner at PLP Architecture International
WWW.ARCHITECTSDATAFILE.CO.UK ADF AUGUST 2018
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