WEBVTT 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 This is my grandfather. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And this is my son. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 My grandfather taught me to work with wood 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 when I was a little boy, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and he also taught me the idea that 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 if you cut down a tree to turn it into something, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 honor that tree's life and make it as beautiful 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 as you possibly can. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 My little boy reminded me 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 that for all the technology and all the toys in the world, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 sometimes just the small block of wood, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and if you stack it up tall, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 actually is an incredibly inspiring thing. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 These are my buildings. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 I build all around the world 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 out of our office in Vancouver and New York. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And we build buildings of different sizes and styles 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and different materials, depending on where we are. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 But wood is the material that I love the most, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and I'm going to tell you the story about wood. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And part of the reason I love it is that every time 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 people go into my buildings that are wood, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 I notice they react completely differently. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 I've never seen anybody walk into one of my buildings 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and hug a steel or a concrete column, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 but I've actually seen that happen in a wood building. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 I've actually seen how people touch the wood, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and I think there's a reason for it. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Just like snowflakes, no two pieces of wood 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 can ever be the same anywhere on earth. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 That's a wonderful thing. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 I like to think that wood 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 gives Mother Nature fingerprints in our buildings. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 It's Mother Nature's fingerprints that make 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 our buildings connect us to nature in the built environment. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Now, I live in Vancouver, near a forest 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 that grows to 33 storeys tall. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Down the coast here in California, the Redwood forest 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 grows to 40 storeys tall. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 But the buildings that we think about in wood 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 are only four storeys tall in most places on earth. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Even building codes actually limit the ability for us to build 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 much taller than four storeys in many places, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and that's true here in the United States. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Now there are exceptions, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 but there needs to be some exceptions, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and things are going to change, I'm hoping, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and the reason I think that way is that 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 today half of us live in cities, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and that number is going to grow to 75 percent. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Cities in density mean that our buildings 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 are going to continue to be big, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and I think there's a role for wood to play in cities. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And I feel that way because three billion people 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 in the world today, over the next 20 years, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 will need a home. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 That's 40 percent of the world that are going to need 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 a new building built for them in the next 20 years. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Now, one in three people living in cities today 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 actually live in a slum. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 That's one billion people in the world live in slums. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 A hundred million people in the world are homeless. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 The scale of the challenge for architects 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and for society to deal with in building 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 is to find a solution to house these people. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 But the challenge is, as we move to cities, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 cities are built in these two materials, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 steel and concrete, and they're great materials. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 They're the materials of the last century. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 But they're also materials with very high energy 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and very high greenhouse gas emissions in their process. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Steel represents about three percent 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 of man's greenhouse gas emissions, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and concrete is over five percent. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 So if you think about that, eight percent 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 of our contribution to greenhouse gases today 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 comes from those two materials alone. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 We don't think about it a lot, and unfortunately, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 we actually don't even think about buildings, I think, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 as much as we should. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 This is a U.S. statistic about the impact of greenhouse gases. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Almost half of our greenhouse gases are related to the building industry, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and if we look at energy, it's the same story. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 You'll notice that transportation sort of second 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 down that list, but that's the conversation we mostly hear about. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And although a lot of that is about energy, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 it's also so much about carbon. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 The problem I see is that, ultimately, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 the clash of how we solve that problem 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 of serving those three billion people that need a home 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and climate change are a head on collision 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 about to happen, or already happening. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 That challenge means that we have to start thinking in new ways, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and I think wood is going to be part of that solution, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and I'm going to tell you the story of why. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 As an architect, wood is the only material, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 big material that I can build with 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 that's already grown by the power of the sun. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 When a tree grows in the forest and gives off oxygen 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and soaks up carbon dioxide, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and it dies and it falls to the forest floor, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 it gives that carbon dioxide back to the atmosphere or into the ground. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 If it burns in a forest fire, it's going to give that carbon 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 back to the atmosphere as well. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 But if you take that wood and you put it into a building 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 or into a piece of furniture or into that wooden toy, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 it actually has an amazing capacity 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 to store the carbon and provide us with the sequestration. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 One cubic meter of wood will store 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 one tonne of carbon dioxide. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Now our two solutions to climate are obviously 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 to reduce our emissions and find storage. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Wood is the only major material building material 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 I can build with that actually does both those two things. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 So I believe that we have 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 an ethic that the earth grows our food, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and we need to move to an ethic in this century 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 that the earth should grow our homes. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Now, how are we going to do that 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 when we're urbanizing at this rate 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and we think about wood buildings only at four stories? 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 We need to reduce the concrete and steel and we need 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 to grow bigger and what we've been working on 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 is 30-storey tall buildings made of wood. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 We've been engineering them with an engineer 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 named Eric Karsh who works with me on it, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and we've been doing this new work because 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 there are new wood products out there for us to use, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and we call them mass timber panels. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 These are panels made with young trees, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 small growth trees, small pieces of wood 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 glued together to make panels that are enormous: 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 eight feet wide, 64 feet long, and of various thicknesses. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 The way I describe this best, I've found, is to say 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 that we're all used to two-by-four construction 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 when we think about wood. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 That's what people jump to as a conclusion. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Two-by-four construction is sort of like the little 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 eight-dot bricks of LEGO that we all played with as kids, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and you can make all kinds of cool things out of LEGO 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 at that size, and out of two-by-fours. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 But do remember when you were a kid, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and you kind of sifted through the pile in your basement, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and you found that big 24-dot brick of LEGO, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and you were kind of like, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 "Cool, this is awesome, I can build something really big, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and this is going to be great." 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 That's the change. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Mass timber panels are those 24-dot bricks. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 They're changing the scale of what we can do, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and what we've developed is something we call FFTT, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 which is a creative commons solution 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 to building a very flexible system 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 of building with these large panels where we tilt up 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 six stories at a time if we want to. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 This animation shows you how the building goes together 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 in a very simple way, but these buildings are available 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 for architects and engineers now to build on 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 for different cultures in the world, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 different architectural styles and characters, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 in order for us to build safely, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and we've engineered these buildings, actually, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 to work in a Vancouver context, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 where we're a high seismic zone, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 even at 30 stories tall. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Now obviously, every time I bring this up, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 people even, you know, here at the conference, say, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 "Are you serious? Thirty storeys? How's that going to happen?" 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And there's a lot of really good questions that are asked 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and important questions that we spent quite a long time 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 working on the answers to as we put together 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 our report and the peer review report.