0:00:01.000,0:00:04.000
This is my grandfather.

0:00:04.000,0:00:06.000
And this is my son.

0:00:06.000,0:00:08.000
My grandfather taught me to work with wood

0:00:08.000,0:00:10.000
when I was a little boy,

0:00:10.000,0:00:12.000
and he also taught me the idea that

0:00:12.000,0:00:15.000
if you cut down a tree to turn it into something,

0:00:15.000,0:00:17.000
honor that tree's life and make it as beautiful

0:00:17.000,0:00:19.000
as you possibly can.

0:00:19.000,0:00:23.000
My little boy reminded me

0:00:23.000,0:00:26.000
that for all the technology and all the toys in the world,

0:00:26.000,0:00:28.000
sometimes just a small block of wood,

0:00:28.000,0:00:30.000
if you stack it up tall,

0:00:30.000,0:00:34.000
actually is an incredibly inspiring thing.

0:00:34.000,0:00:36.000
These are my buildings.

0:00:36.000,0:00:37.000
I build all around the world

0:00:37.000,0:00:40.000
out of our office in Vancouver and New York.

0:00:40.000,0:00:43.000
And we build buildings of different sizes and styles

0:00:43.000,0:00:45.000
and different materials, depending on where we are.

0:00:45.000,0:00:47.000
But wood is the material that I love the most,

0:00:47.000,0:00:49.000
and I'm going to tell you the story about wood.

0:00:49.000,0:00:51.000
And part of the reason I love it is that every time

0:00:51.000,0:00:54.000
people go into my buildings that are wood,

0:00:54.000,0:00:56.000
I notice they react completely differently.

0:00:56.000,0:00:59.000
I've never seen anybody walk into one of my buildings

0:00:59.000,0:01:01.000
and hug a steel or a concrete column,

0:01:01.000,0:01:04.000
but I've actually seen that happen in a wood building.

0:01:04.000,0:01:07.000
I've actually seen how people touch the wood,

0:01:07.000,0:01:09.000
and I think there's a reason for it.

0:01:09.000,0:01:11.000
Just like snowflakes, no two pieces of wood

0:01:11.000,0:01:14.000
can ever be the same anywhere on Earth.

0:01:14.000,0:01:16.000
That's a wonderful thing.

0:01:16.000,0:01:18.000
I like to think that wood

0:01:18.000,0:01:22.000
gives Mother Nature fingerprints in our buildings.

0:01:22.000,0:01:24.000
It's Mother Nature's fingerprints that make

0:01:24.000,0:01:29.000
our buildings connect us to nature in the built environment.

0:01:29.000,0:01:31.000
Now, I live in Vancouver, near a forest

0:01:31.000,0:01:34.000
that grows to 33 stories tall.

0:01:34.000,0:01:36.000
Down the coast here in California, the redwood forest

0:01:36.000,0:01:39.000
grows to 40 stories tall.

0:01:39.000,0:01:42.000
But the buildings that we think about in wood

0:01:42.000,0:01:45.000
are only four stories tall in most places on Earth.

0:01:45.000,0:01:49.000
Even building codes actually limit the ability for us to build

0:01:49.000,0:01:51.000
much taller than four stories in many places,

0:01:51.000,0:01:53.000
and that's true here in the United States.

0:01:53.000,0:01:55.000
Now there are exceptions,

0:01:55.000,0:01:57.000
but there needs to be some exceptions,

0:01:57.000,0:01:59.000
and things are going to change, I'm hoping.

0:01:59.000,0:02:01.000
And the reason I think that way is that

0:02:01.000,0:02:04.000
today half of us live in cities,

0:02:04.000,0:02:07.000
and that number is going to grow to 75 percent.

0:02:07.000,0:02:09.000
Cities and density mean that our buildings

0:02:09.000,0:02:12.000
are going to continue to be big,

0:02:12.000,0:02:16.000
and I think there's a role for wood to play in cities.

0:02:16.000,0:02:19.000
And I feel that way because three billion people

0:02:19.000,0:02:22.000
in the world today, over the next 20 years,

0:02:22.000,0:02:23.000
will need a new home.

0:02:23.000,0:02:25.000
That's 40 percent of the world that are going to need

0:02:25.000,0:02:29.000
a new building built for them in the next 20 years.

0:02:29.000,0:02:31.000
Now, one in three people living in cities today

0:02:31.000,0:02:33.000
actually live in a slum.

0:02:33.000,0:02:36.000
That's one billion people in the world live in slums.

0:02:36.000,0:02:41.000
A hundred million people in the world are homeless.

0:02:41.000,0:02:43.000
The scale of the challenge for architects

0:02:43.000,0:02:46.000
and for society to deal with in building

0:02:46.000,0:02:50.000
is to find a solution to house these people.

0:02:50.000,0:02:54.000
But the challenge is, as we move to cities,

0:02:54.000,0:02:57.000
cities are built in these two materials,

0:02:57.000,0:03:00.000
steel and concrete, and they're great materials.

0:03:00.000,0:03:02.000
They're the materials of the last century.

0:03:02.000,0:03:05.000
But they're also materials with very high energy

0:03:05.000,0:03:09.000
and very high greenhouse gas emissions in their process.

0:03:09.000,0:03:11.000
Steel represents about three percent

0:03:11.000,0:03:13.000
of man's greenhouse gas emissions,

0:03:13.000,0:03:16.000
and concrete is over five percent.

0:03:16.000,0:03:19.000
So if you think about that, eight percent

0:03:19.000,0:03:22.000
of our contribution to greenhouse gases today

0:03:22.000,0:03:25.000
comes from those two materials alone.

0:03:25.000,0:03:28.000
We don't think about it a lot, and unfortunately,

0:03:28.000,0:03:30.000
we actually don't even think about buildings, I think,

0:03:30.000,0:03:31.000
as much as we should.

0:03:31.000,0:03:35.000
This is a U.S. statistic about the impact of greenhouse gases.

0:03:35.000,0:03:38.000
Almost half of our greenhouse gases are related to the building industry,

0:03:38.000,0:03:41.000
and if we look at energy, it's the same story.

0:03:41.000,0:03:44.000
You'll notice that transportation's sort of second down that list,

0:03:44.000,0:03:46.000
but that's the conversation we mostly hear about.

0:03:46.000,0:03:50.000
And although a lot of that is about energy,

0:03:50.000,0:03:53.000
it's also so much about carbon.

0:03:53.000,0:03:56.000
The problem I see is that, ultimately,

0:03:56.000,0:03:58.000
the clash of how we solve that problem

0:03:58.000,0:04:01.000
of serving those three billion people that need a home,

0:04:01.000,0:04:05.000
and climate change, are a head-on collision

0:04:05.000,0:04:08.000
about to happen, or already happening.

0:04:08.000,0:04:11.000
That challenge means that we have to start thinking in new ways,

0:04:11.000,0:04:13.000
and I think wood is going to be part of that solution,

0:04:13.000,0:04:15.000
and I'm going to tell you the story of why.

0:04:15.000,0:04:17.000
As an architect, wood is the only material,

0:04:17.000,0:04:20.000
big material, that I can build with

0:04:20.000,0:04:23.000
that's already grown by the power of the sun.

0:04:23.000,0:04:26.000
When a tree grows in the forest and gives off oxygen

0:04:26.000,0:04:28.000
and soaks up carbon dioxide,

0:04:28.000,0:04:31.000
and it dies and it falls to the forest floor,

0:04:31.000,0:04:36.000
it gives that carbon dioxide back to the atmosphere or into the ground.

0:04:36.000,0:04:39.000
If it burns in a forest fire, it's going to give that carbon

0:04:39.000,0:04:41.000
back to the atmosphere as well.

0:04:41.000,0:04:44.000
But if you take that wood and you put it into a building

0:04:44.000,0:04:48.000
or into a piece of furniture or into that wooden toy,

0:04:48.000,0:04:49.000
it actually has an amazing capacity

0:04:49.000,0:04:53.000
to store the carbon and provide us with a sequestration.

0:04:53.000,0:04:57.000
One cubic meter of wood will store

0:04:57.000,0:04:59.000
one tonne of carbon dioxide.

0:04:59.000,0:05:02.000
Now our two solutions to climate are obviously

0:05:02.000,0:05:04.000
to reduce our emissions and find storage.

0:05:04.000,0:05:06.000
Wood is the only major material building material

0:05:06.000,0:05:10.000
I can build with that actually does both those two things.

0:05:10.000,0:05:13.000
So I believe that we have

0:05:13.000,0:05:16.000
an ethic that the Earth grows our food,

0:05:16.000,0:05:18.000
and we need to move to an ethic in this century

0:05:18.000,0:05:21.000
that the Earth should grow our homes.

0:05:21.000,0:05:22.000
Now, how are we going to do that

0:05:22.000,0:05:24.000
when we're urbanizing at this rate

0:05:24.000,0:05:26.000
and we think about wood buildings only at four stories?

0:05:26.000,0:05:29.000
We need to reduce the concrete and steel and we need

0:05:29.000,0:05:30.000
to grow bigger, and what we've been working on

0:05:30.000,0:05:35.000
is 30-story tall buildings made of wood.

0:05:35.000,0:05:39.000
We've been engineering them with an engineer

0:05:39.000,0:05:41.000
named Eric Karsh who works with me on it,

0:05:41.000,0:05:44.000
and we've been doing this new work because

0:05:44.000,0:05:46.000
there are new wood products out there for us to use,

0:05:46.000,0:05:48.000
and we call them mass timber panels.

0:05:48.000,0:05:51.000
These are panels made with young trees,

0:05:51.000,0:05:54.000
small growth trees, small pieces of wood

0:05:54.000,0:05:57.000
glued together to make panels that are enormous:

0:05:57.000,0:06:01.000
eight feet wide, 64 feet long, and of various thicknesses.

0:06:01.000,0:06:04.000
The way I describe this best, I've found, is to say

0:06:04.000,0:06:06.000
that we're all used to two-by-four construction

0:06:06.000,0:06:07.000
when we think about wood.

0:06:07.000,0:06:10.000
That's what people jump to as a conclusion.

0:06:10.000,0:06:12.000
Two-by-four construction is sort of like the little

0:06:12.000,0:06:14.000
eight-dot bricks of Lego that we all played with as kids,

0:06:14.000,0:06:17.000
and you can make all kinds of cool things out of Lego

0:06:17.000,0:06:20.000
at that size, and out of two-by-fours.

0:06:20.000,0:06:21.000
But do remember when you were a kid,

0:06:21.000,0:06:23.000
and you kind of sifted through the pile in your basement,

0:06:23.000,0:06:26.000
and you found that big 24-dot brick of Lego,

0:06:26.000,0:06:27.000
and you were kind of like,

0:06:27.000,0:06:29.000
"Cool, this is awesome. I can build something really big,

0:06:29.000,0:06:31.000
and this is going to be great."

0:06:31.000,0:06:32.000
That's the change.

0:06:32.000,0:06:35.000
Mass timber panels are those 24-dot bricks.

0:06:35.000,0:06:37.000
They're changing the scale of what we can do,

0:06:37.000,0:06:39.000
and what we've developed is something we call FFTT,

0:06:39.000,0:06:42.000
which is a Creative Commons solution

0:06:42.000,0:06:47.000
to building a very flexible system

0:06:47.000,0:06:49.000
of building with these large panels where we tilt up

0:06:49.000,0:06:53.000
six stories at a time if we want to.

0:06:53.000,0:06:57.000
This animation shows you how the building goes together

0:06:57.000,0:07:00.000
in a very simple way, but these buildings are available

0:07:00.000,0:07:03.000
for architects and engineers now to build on

0:07:03.000,0:07:04.000
for different cultures in the world,

0:07:04.000,0:07:07.000
different architectural styles and characters.

0:07:07.000,0:07:10.000
In order for us to build safely,

0:07:10.000,0:07:12.000
we've engineered these buildings, actually,

0:07:12.000,0:07:14.000
to work in a Vancouver context,

0:07:14.000,0:07:15.000
where we're a high seismic zone,

0:07:15.000,0:07:19.000
even at 30 stories tall.

0:07:19.000,0:07:20.000
Now obviously, every time I bring this up,

0:07:20.000,0:07:22.000
people even, you know, here at the conference, say,

0:07:22.000,0:07:25.000
"Are you serious? Thirty stories? How's that going to happen?"

0:07:25.000,0:07:29.000
And there's a lot of really good questions that are asked

0:07:29.000,0:07:31.000
and important questions that we spent quite a long time

0:07:31.000,0:07:33.000
working on the answers to as we put together

0:07:33.000,0:07:36.000
our report and the peer reviewed report.

0:07:36.000,0:07:37.000
I'm just going to focus on a few of them,

0:07:37.000,0:07:39.000
and let's start with fire, because I think fire

0:07:39.000,0:07:41.000
is probably the first one that you're all thinking about right now.

0:07:41.000,0:07:42.000
Fair enough.

0:07:42.000,0:07:44.000
And the way I describe it is this.

0:07:44.000,0:07:46.000
If I asked you to take a match and light it

0:07:46.000,0:07:50.000
and hold up a log and try to get that log to go on fire,

0:07:50.000,0:07:52.000
it doesn't happen, right? We all know that.

0:07:52.000,0:07:55.000
But to build a fire, you kind of start with small pieces

0:07:55.000,0:07:56.000
of wood and you work your way up,

0:07:56.000,0:07:59.000
and eventually you can add the log to the fire,

0:07:59.000,0:08:01.000
and when you do add the log to the fire, of course,

0:08:01.000,0:08:04.000
it burns, but it burns slowly.

0:08:04.000,0:08:06.000
Well, mass timber panels, these new products

0:08:06.000,0:08:08.000
that we're using, are much like the log.

0:08:08.000,0:08:11.000
It's hard to start them on fire, and when they do,

0:08:11.000,0:08:14.000
they actually burn extraordinarily predictably,

0:08:14.000,0:08:16.000
and we can use fire science in order to predict

0:08:16.000,0:08:18.000
and make these buildings as safe as concrete

0:08:18.000,0:08:21.000
and as safe as steel.

0:08:21.000,0:08:24.000
The next big issue, deforestation.

0:08:24.000,0:08:26.000
Eighteen percent of our contribution

0:08:26.000,0:08:28.000
to greenhouse gas emissions worldwide

0:08:28.000,0:08:30.000
is the result of deforestation.

0:08:30.000,0:08:33.000
The last thing we want to do is cut down trees.

0:08:33.000,0:08:37.000
Or, the last thing we want to do is cut down the wrong trees.

0:08:37.000,0:08:40.000
There are models for sustainable forestry

0:08:40.000,0:08:42.000
that allow us to cut trees properly,

0:08:42.000,0:08:44.000
and those are the only trees appropriate

0:08:44.000,0:08:46.000
to use for these kinds of systems.

0:08:46.000,0:08:48.000
Now I actually think that these ideas

0:08:48.000,0:08:52.000
will change the economics of deforestation.

0:08:52.000,0:08:54.000
In countries with deforestation issues,

0:08:54.000,0:08:56.000
we need to find a way to provide

0:08:56.000,0:08:59.000
better value for the forest

0:08:59.000,0:09:01.000
and actually encourage people to make money

0:09:01.000,0:09:03.000
through very fast growth cycles --

0:09:03.000,0:09:06.000
10-, 12-, 15-year-old trees that make these products

0:09:06.000,0:09:08.000
and allow us to build at this scale.

0:09:08.000,0:09:11.000
We've calculated a 20-story building:

0:09:11.000,0:09:14.000
We'll grow enough wood in North America every 13 minutes.

0:09:14.000,0:09:16.000
That's how much it takes.

0:09:16.000,0:09:19.000
The carbon story here is a really good one.

0:09:19.000,0:09:23.000
If we built a 20-story building out of cement and concrete,

0:09:23.000,0:09:25.000
the process would result in the manufacturing

0:09:25.000,0:09:29.000
of that cement and 1,200 tonnes of carbon dioxide.

0:09:29.000,0:09:32.000
If we did it in wood, in this solution,

0:09:32.000,0:09:33.000
we'd sequester about 3,100 tonnes,

0:09:33.000,0:09:36.000
for a net difference of 4,300 tonnes.

0:09:36.000,0:09:39.000
That's the equivalent of about 900 cars

0:09:39.000,0:09:42.000
removed from the road in one year.

0:09:42.000,0:09:43.000
Think back to that three billion people

0:09:43.000,0:09:45.000
that need a new home,

0:09:45.000,0:09:48.000
and maybe this is a contributor to reducing.

0:09:48.000,0:09:50.000
We're at the beginning of a revolution, I hope,

0:09:50.000,0:09:52.000
in the way we build, because this is the first new way

0:09:52.000,0:09:57.000
to build a skyscraper in probably 100 years or more.

0:09:57.000,0:10:00.000
But the challenge is changing society's perception

0:10:00.000,0:10:02.000
of possibility, and it's a huge challenge.

0:10:02.000,0:10:05.000
The engineering is, truthfully, the easy part of this.

0:10:05.000,0:10:08.000
And the way I describe it is this.

0:10:08.000,0:10:10.000
The first skyscraper, technically --

0:10:10.000,0:10:12.000
and the definition of a skyscraper is 10 stories tall, believe it or not —

0:10:12.000,0:10:14.000
but the first skyscraper was this one in Chicago,

0:10:14.000,0:10:18.000
and people were terrified to walk underneath this building.

0:10:18.000,0:10:19.000
But only four years after it was built,

0:10:19.000,0:10:22.000
Gustave Eiffel was building the Eiffel Tower,

0:10:22.000,0:10:24.000
and as he built the Eiffel Tower,

0:10:24.000,0:10:28.000
he changed the skylines of the cities of the world,

0:10:28.000,0:10:31.000
changed and created a competition

0:10:31.000,0:10:34.000
between places like New York City and Chicago,

0:10:34.000,0:10:36.000
where developers started building bigger and bigger buildings

0:10:36.000,0:10:40.000
and pushing the envelope up higher and higher

0:10:40.000,0:10:42.000
with better and better engineering.

0:10:42.000,0:10:44.000
We built this model in New York, actually,

0:10:44.000,0:10:47.000
as a theoretical model on the campus

0:10:47.000,0:10:49.000
of a technical university soon to come,

0:10:49.000,0:10:51.000
and the reason we picked this site

0:10:51.000,0:10:54.000
to just show you what these buildings may look like,

0:10:54.000,0:10:55.000
because the exterior can change.

0:10:55.000,0:10:58.000
It's really just the structure that we're talking about.

0:10:58.000,0:11:01.000
The reason we picked it is because this is a technical university,

0:11:01.000,0:11:03.000
and I believe that wood is the most

0:11:03.000,0:11:07.000
technologically advanced material I can build with.

0:11:07.000,0:11:10.000
It just happens to be that Mother Nature holds the patent,

0:11:10.000,0:11:12.000
and we don't really feel comfortable with it.

0:11:12.000,0:11:14.000
But that's the way it should be,

0:11:14.000,0:11:18.000
nature's fingerprints in the built environment.

0:11:18.000,0:11:20.000
I'm looking for this opportunity

0:11:20.000,0:11:23.000
to create an Eiffel Tower moment, we call it.

0:11:23.000,0:11:25.000
Buildings are starting to go up around the world.

0:11:25.000,0:11:27.000
There's a building in London that's nine stories,

0:11:27.000,0:11:29.000
a new building that just finished in Australia

0:11:29.000,0:11:31.000
that I believe is 10 or 11.

0:11:31.000,0:11:35.000
We're starting to push the height up of these wood buildings,

0:11:35.000,0:11:37.000
and we're hoping, and I'm hoping,

0:11:37.000,0:11:40.000
that my hometown of Vancouver actually potentially

0:11:40.000,0:11:42.000
announces the world's tallest at around 20 stories

0:11:42.000,0:11:45.000
in the not-so-distant future.

0:11:45.000,0:11:48.000
That Eiffel Tower moment will break the ceiling,

0:11:48.000,0:11:49.000
these arbitrary ceilings of height,

0:11:49.000,0:11:52.000
and allow wood buildings to join the competition.

0:11:52.000,0:11:54.000
And I believe the race is ultimately on.

0:11:54.000,0:11:56.000
Thank you.

0:11:56.000,0:12:01.000
(Applause)