High ambitions

So much has happened in the world of engineered wood over the past decade that you'd be forgiven for not keeping up with the technological developments and advances in timber engineering that are taking wood construction to challenging new heights. If you think you're up to speed because you're aware of the Stadthaus - a nine-storey, cross laminated timber apartment building in London's Murray Grove that was completed in January 2009 - then I'm afraid you've not been paying sufficient attention.

Certainly, that building opened engineers' eyes to the vertical possibilities of wood construction, but the speed at which things have moved since then has been eyewatering and a harbinger of big changes in the way we think about building high in urban environments. Around the globe, new and ever taller timber buildings are being proposed - and erected - with projects as far apart as Melbourne (11-storeys, completed) Bergen (14-storeys, under construction), Vienna (24-storeys, recently proposed) and Stockholm (34-storeys, in development).

And in the USA, the home of the steel-framed skyscraper, a $2m tall timber building prize has been announced by Barack Obama to drive commercial development towards sustainable construction using engineered wood. Already a feasibility study by world-renowned architects/engineers SOM for a hybrid timber structure to replace an existing 46-storey steel-framed tower in Chicago is showing the way.

These developments are neither fashion-driven nor whimsical but founded upon new and radical thinking about a carbon-based economy and the potential to sequester huge amounts of atmospheric carbon dioxide in solid timber construction. Yes, we now have a range of structural engineered timber products such as cross laminated timber (CLT), laminated veneered lumber (LVL), laminated strand lumber (LSL) and good old glulam, but parallel innovations in computing technology from CNC machining to parametric modeling have combined with these advances in fabrication to facilitate a whole range of new approaches to wood construction.

In combination and in hybrid forms these products are providing positive answers to the challenge of a global population that is not only increasing exponentially in size but also gravitating towards life and work in cities.

While not in itself a universal panacea, new approaches to solid wood construction allow us to conceive ways of building in more sustainable, healthy ways, and simultaneously providing city dwellers with vastly better environmental quality.

From a technical perspective, offsite manufacture of engineered wood solutions answers many of the questions posed by Modern Methods of Construction (MMC) and Building Information Modeling (BIM).

Yes, there's a long way to go before we see complete towns and cities built in wood, but further innovation in this sector by industry and academia working together will almost certainly deliver innovative, renewable, scaleable and transformational ways of building to meet the urban challenges of the 21st century