9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
This is my grandfather.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
And this is my son.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
My grandfather taught me to work with wood

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
when I was a little boy,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
and he also taught me the idea that

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
if you cut down a tree to turn it into something,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
honor that tree's life and make it as beautiful

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
as you possibly can.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
My little boy reminded me

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
that for all the technology and all the toys in the world,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
sometimes just the small block of wood,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
and if you stack it up tall,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
actually is an incredibly inspiring thing.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
These are my buildings.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
I build all around the world

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
out of our office in Vancouver and New York.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
And we build buildings of different sizes and styles

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
and different materials, depending on where we are.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
But wood is the material that I love the most,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
and I'm going to tell you the story about wood.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
And part of the reason I love it is that every time

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
people go into my buildings that are wood,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
I notice they react completely differently.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
I've never seen anybody walk into one of my buildings

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
and hug a steel or a concrete column,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
but I've actually seen that happen in a wood building.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
I've actually seen how people touch the wood,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
and I think there's a reason for it.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
Just like snowflakes, no two pieces of wood

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
can ever be the same anywhere on earth.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
That's a wonderful thing.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
I like to think that wood

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
gives Mother Nature fingerprints in our buildings.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
It's Mother Nature's fingerprints that make

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
our buildings connect us to nature in the built environment.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
Now, I live in Vancouver, near a forest

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
that grows to 33 storeys tall.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
Down the coast here in California, the Redwood forest

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
grows to 40 storeys tall.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
But the buildings that we think about in wood

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
are only four storeys tall in most places on earth.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
Even building codes actually limit the ability for us to build

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
much taller than four storeys in many places,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
and that's true here in the United States.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
Now there are exceptions,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
but there needs to be some exceptions,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
and things are going to change, I'm hoping,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
and the reason I think that way is that

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
today half of us live in cities,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
and that number is going to grow to 75 percent.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
Cities in density mean that our buildings

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
are going to continue to be big,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
and I think there's a role for wood to play in cities.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
And I feel that way because three billion people

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
in the world today, over the next 20 years,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
will need a home.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
That's 40 percent of the world that are going to need

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
a new building built for them in the next 20 years.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
Now, one in three people living in cities today

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
actually live in a slum.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
That's one billion people in the world live in slums.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
A hundred million people in the world are homeless.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
The scale of the challenge for architects

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
and for society to deal with in building

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
is to find a solution to house these people.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
But the challenge is, as we move to cities,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
cities are built in these two materials,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
steel and concrete, and they're great materials.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
They're the materials of the last century.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
But they're also materials with very high energy

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
and very high greenhouse gas emissions in their process.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
Steel represents about three percent

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
of man's greenhouse gas emissions,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
and concrete is over five percent.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
So if you think about that, eight percent

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
of our contribution to greenhouse gases today

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
comes from those two materials alone.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
We don't think about it a lot, and unfortunately,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
we actually don't even think about buildings, I think,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
as much as we should.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
This is a U.S. statistic about the impact of greenhouse gases.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
Almost half of our greenhouse gases are related to the building industry,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
and if we look at energy, it's the same story.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
You'll notice that transportation sort of second

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
down that list, but that's the conversation we mostly hear about.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
And although a lot of that is about energy,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
it's also so much about carbon.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
The problem I see is that, ultimately,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
the clash of how we solve that problem

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
of serving those three billion people that need a home

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
and climate change are a head on collision

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
about to happen, or already happening.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
That challenge means that we have to start thinking in new ways,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
and I think wood is going to be part of that solution,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
and I'm going to tell you the story of why.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
As an architect, wood is the only material,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
big material that I can build with

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
that's already grown by the power of the sun.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
When a tree grows in the forest and gives off oxygen

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
and soaks up carbon dioxide,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
and it dies and it falls to the forest floor,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
it gives that carbon dioxide back to the atmosphere or into the ground.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
If it burns in a forest fire, it's going to give that carbon

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
back to the atmosphere as well.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
But if you take that wood and you put it into a building

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
or into a piece of furniture or into that wooden toy,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
it actually has an amazing capacity

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
to store the carbon and provide us with the sequestration.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
One cubic meter of wood will store

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
one tonne of carbon dioxide.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
Now our two solutions to climate are obviously

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
to reduce our emissions and find storage.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
Wood is the only major material building material

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
I can build with that actually does both those two things.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
So I believe that we have

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
an ethic that the earth grows our food,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
and we need to move to an ethic in this century

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
that the earth should grow our homes.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
Now, how are we going to do that

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
when we're urbanizing at this rate

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
and we think about wood buildings only at four stories?

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
We need to reduce the concrete and steel and we need

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
to grow bigger and what we've been working on

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
is 30-storey tall buildings made of wood.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
We've been engineering them with an engineer

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
named Eric Karsh who works with me on it,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
and we've been doing this new work because

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
there are new wood products out there for us to use,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
and we call them mass timber panels.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
These are panels made with young trees,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
small growth trees, small pieces of wood

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
glued together to make panels that are enormous:

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
eight feet wide, 64 feet long, and of various thicknesses.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
The way I describe this best, I've found, is to say

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
that we're all used to two-by-four construction

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
when we think about wood.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
That's what people jump to as a conclusion.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
Two-by-four construction is sort of like the little

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
eight-dot bricks of LEGO that we all played with as kids,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
and you can make all kinds of cool things out of LEGO

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
at that size, and out of two-by-fours.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
But do remember when you were a kid,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
and you kind of sifted through the pile in your basement,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
and you found that big 24-dot brick of LEGO,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
and you were kind of like,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
"Cool, this is awesome, I can build something really big,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
and this is going to be great."

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
That's the change.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
Mass timber panels are those 24-dot bricks.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
They're changing the scale of what we can do,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
and what we've developed is something we call FFTT,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
which is a creative commons solution

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
to building a very flexible system

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
of building with these large panels where we tilt up

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
six stories at a time if we want to.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
This animation shows you how the building goes together

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
in a very simple way, but these buildings are available

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
for architects and engineers now to build on

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
for different cultures in the world,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
different architectural styles and characters,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
in order for us to build safely,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
and we've engineered these buildings, actually,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
to work in a Vancouver context,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
where we're a high seismic zone,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
even at 30 stories tall.

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
Now obviously, every time I bring this up,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
people even, you know, here at the conference, say,

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
"Are you serious? Thirty storeys? How's that going to happen?"

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
And there's a lot of really good questions that are asked

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
and important questions that we spent quite a long time

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
working on the answers to as we put together

9:59:59.000,9:59:59.000
our report and the peer review report.