Category Archives: Wood, Paper & Green Building

Bressanone, a small town nestled among Italy’s northern mountains, is 15,000 kilometers from the Australian metropolis of Sydney. The prefabricated wooden components traveled around world to Sydney to build Australia’s first sports stadium made entirely of wood. The idea of a wooden stadium was born to create an infrastructure that would be perfectly integrated with the natural park in which it is located. And it answers the ever growing demand from Australia’s largest cities for sustainable infrastructure to develop new ways of living based on green mobility and civil engineering. With this in mind, the Eric Tweedale Stadium, erected within Cumberland’s Granville Park, a vast green area near Sydney, was built using wood. The Italian wood …crossed seas and oceans inside eight containers carrying not just the wood but also the complex structure for the roof that covers the stadium’s 750-seat grandstand, conceived to withstand vibrations and hold up to strong winds.

London studio Waugh Thistleton Architects has unveiled the Black & White Building, a mass-timber office building designed for The Office Group in Shoreditch with a slatted tulipwood facade. The six-storey office building, the “tallest mass-timber office building in central London”, was built from a combination of beech, pine and spruce timber. Constructed from structural timber, they clad the exterior of the in tulipwood timber louvres from the street level to the roof. “The design means that you also get the beauty of the timber internally,” co-founder Andrew Waugh told Dezeen. …Waugh Thistleton Architects constructed the 4,480-square-metre Black & White Building from prefabricated components that were precision-engineered to be slotted together. This means the building, which Waugh describes as “visibly sustainable”, is dismantlable and can be disassembled rather than demolished at the end of its life with its materials reused.

Designboom sat down with Kengo Kuma to talk about his ongoing work for the biophilic, wood-enveloped mixed-use complex ‘Welcome Project’ in Milan. …Layers of wood topping panels of glass windows brush against undivided spaces with tall ceilings. …Serenity surprisingly permeates the cosmopolitan surroundings, and the use of wood throughout the architecture helps with that. …Kengo Kuma puts his faith in the organic properties of wood in architecture. In a city where the use of timber might not be visibly displayed among the steel and glass skyscrapers, along the marble and stone historical sites, that dot the cityscape, Kuma is re-introducing wood to the urban design of Milan.

Timber construction is making headlines across the world with new high-rise projects choosing this popular building material over cement and steel to reduce their carbon footprint and offer a pathway to sustainability. But how can timber construction be sustainable when you have to cut down trees to source the material? …Substitution of carbon-intensive materials such as steel and cement with low embodied carbon materials is one of the strategies being adopted to reduce the industry’s carbon footprint. …By replacing steel and concrete with timber products for instance, embodied carbon can be reduced by up to 75 per cent. However, given the global campaign against deforestation, how will we get the timber for our buildings? …Sustainable timber is timber sourced from sustainably managed and certified forests. …Currently, 26.7 million hectares of native forests and plantations are certified under the Responsible Wood Certification Scheme, and 1.2 million hectares under the FSC.

ENGLAND — The temperature is almost -6C and despite the snow, workers are frantically putting the finishing touches to a pair of detached houses. …But the new builds are nestled inside Energy House 2.0, a £16m temperature-controlled chamber at the University of Salford. It is hoped the research facility will play an important role in testing the technologies that will make our homes greener and cheaper to run. …The main difference between the two houses is that, while the Bellway house is built from “real” bricks, the Barratt one is a timber frame made of 36cm-thick insulation-filled panels covered in a thin cladding that mimics a brick finish. The timber-frame house would secure a coveted A rating on an energy performance certificate. …It comes as the industry gears up for government standards that require a significant reduction in carbon emissions.

What do you visualise when you think of manufactured wooden structures? Are you transported to a warm sauna in the freezing depths of Finland and Iceland? …How about contemporary villas in the Netherlands? Bridges in Canada? Thanks to the surge in popularity of cross-laminated timber – or CLT – as a structural material, there is a new reality of what can be built with wood. First developed in the 1990s in Austria … the use of CLT is now burgeoning. The global CLT market size was estimated at $944.9m in 2021, $1bn this year and is forecast to reach $3bn by 2030. Already popular in Europe and Canada, the US … has proven a tougher nut to crack. …With the global megatrend of decarbonisation only gathering pace, underpinned by social and political drivers, CLT offers solutions that few alternatives can. Still in its infancy in terms of widespread adoption, more ambitious CLT projects have started to take shape.

Setra has been commissioned to supply locally produced cross-laminated timber and glulam for the Lumi district in Uppsala. There, Vasakronan is transforming a 1970s concrete building into state-of-the-art and more sustainable office space. Setra’s deliveries started in December and amount to a total of 1,200 cubic metres. The project involves six beams made of cross-laminated timber for new floors in three blocks, a new atrium linking the buildings with footbridges made of cross-laminated timber, and glulam for the roof structure of the atrium. …Vasakronan is Sweden’s largest real estate company and is owned by the First, Second, Third and Fourth AP Funds. The company owns, manages and develops centrally located office and retail properties in Stockholm, Gothenburg, Malmö and Uppsala.

As demand for electric vehicles soars, scientists are searching for materials to make sustainable batteries. Lignin, the stuff that makes trees woody, is shaping up to be a strong contender.  …Stora Enso, in Finland, describes itself as “one of the largest private forest owners in the world”. As such, it has a lot of trees, which it uses to make wood products, paper and packaging, for example. Now it wants to make batteries as well – electric vehicle batteries that charge up in as little as eight minutes.  The company hired engineers to look into the possibility of using lignin, a polymer found in trees. Around 30% of a tree is lignin, depending on the species – the rest is largely cellulose. …Lignin, a polymer, contains carbon. And carbon makes a great material for a vital component in batteries called the anode.

The steady rise in global energy consumption is causing a rapid depletion of fossil fuel resources. …there is an urgent need to determine alternate renewable energy sources. …Biomass is readily available and its organic composition makes it a top choice for an environment-friendly energy resource. …However, plant biomass contains more than 50% moisture… researchers from Japan led by Dr. Toshiaki Ohara, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Pathology and Experimental Medicine, Okayama University have identified an effective mechanical compression system for drying plant biomass for power generation without the need for thermal drying. Their novel method can be applied on both woody and herbaceous plants and generates a compression liquid with water-soluble lignin that has basic antiviral properties against influenza and pig epidemic diarrhea viruses. …both cedar board and ginger herb species compression liquids significantly inhibited influenza and porcine epidemic diarrhea virus infection.