WEBVTT 00:00:01.000 --> 00:00:04.000 This is my grandfather. 00:00:04.000 --> 00:00:06.000 And this is my son. 00:00:06.000 --> 00:00:08.000 My grandfather taught me to work with wood 00:00:08.000 --> 00:00:10.000 when I was a little boy, 00:00:10.000 --> 00:00:12.000 and he also taught me the idea that 00:00:12.000 --> 00:00:15.000 if you cut down a tree to turn it into something, 00:00:15.000 --> 00:00:17.000 honor that tree's life and make it as beautiful 00:00:17.000 --> 00:00:19.000 as you possibly can. 00:00:19.000 --> 00:00:23.000 My little boy reminded me 00:00:23.000 --> 00:00:26.000 that for all the technology and all the toys in the world, 00:00:26.000 --> 00:00:28.000 sometimes just a small block of wood, 00:00:28.000 --> 00:00:30.000 if you stack it up tall, 00:00:30.000 --> 00:00:34.000 actually is an incredibly inspiring thing. NOTE Paragraph 00:00:34.000 --> 00:00:36.000 These are my buildings. 00:00:36.000 --> 00:00:37.000 I build all around the world 00:00:37.000 --> 00:00:40.000 out of our office in Vancouver and New York. 00:00:40.000 --> 00:00:43.000 And we build buildings of different sizes and styles 00:00:43.000 --> 00:00:45.000 and different materials, depending on where we are. 00:00:45.000 --> 00:00:47.000 But wood is the material that I love the most, 00:00:47.000 --> 00:00:49.000 and I'm going to tell you the story about wood. 00:00:49.000 --> 00:00:51.000 And part of the reason I love it is that every time 00:00:51.000 --> 00:00:54.000 people go into my buildings that are wood, 00:00:54.000 --> 00:00:56.000 I notice they react completely differently. 00:00:56.000 --> 00:00:59.000 I've never seen anybody walk into one of my buildings 00:00:59.000 --> 00:01:01.000 and hug a steel or a concrete column, 00:01:01.000 --> 00:01:04.000 but I've actually seen that happen in a wood building. 00:01:04.000 --> 00:01:07.000 I've actually seen how people touch the wood, 00:01:07.000 --> 00:01:09.000 and I think there's a reason for it. 00:01:09.000 --> 00:01:11.000 Just like snowflakes, no two pieces of wood 00:01:11.000 --> 00:01:14.000 can ever be the same anywhere on Earth. 00:01:14.000 --> 00:01:16.000 That's a wonderful thing. 00:01:16.000 --> 00:01:18.000 I like to think that wood 00:01:18.000 --> 00:01:22.000 gives Mother Nature fingerprints in our buildings. 00:01:22.000 --> 00:01:24.000 It's Mother Nature's fingerprints that make 00:01:24.000 --> 00:01:29.000 our buildings connect us to nature in the built environment. NOTE Paragraph 00:01:29.000 --> 00:01:31.000 Now, I live in Vancouver, near a forest 00:01:31.000 --> 00:01:34.000 that grows to 33 stories tall. 00:01:34.000 --> 00:01:36.000 Down the coast here in California, the redwood forest 00:01:36.000 --> 00:01:39.000 grows to 40 stories tall. 00:01:39.000 --> 00:01:42.000 But the buildings that we think about in wood 00:01:42.000 --> 00:01:45.000 are only four stories tall in most places on Earth. 00:01:45.000 --> 00:01:49.000 Even building codes actually limit the ability for us to build 00:01:49.000 --> 00:01:51.000 much taller than four stories in many places, 00:01:51.000 --> 00:01:53.000 and that's true here in the United States. NOTE Paragraph 00:01:53.000 --> 00:01:55.000 Now there are exceptions, 00:01:55.000 --> 00:01:57.000 but there needs to be some exceptions, 00:01:57.000 --> 00:01:59.000 and things are going to change, I'm hoping. 00:01:59.000 --> 00:02:01.000 And the reason I think that way is that 00:02:01.000 --> 00:02:04.000 today half of us live in cities, 00:02:04.000 --> 00:02:07.000 and that number is going to grow to 75 percent. 00:02:07.000 --> 00:02:09.000 Cities and density mean that our buildings 00:02:09.000 --> 00:02:12.000 are going to continue to be big, 00:02:12.000 --> 00:02:16.000 and I think there's a role for wood to play in cities. 00:02:16.000 --> 00:02:19.000 And I feel that way because three billion people 00:02:19.000 --> 00:02:22.000 in the world today, over the next 20 years, 00:02:22.000 --> 00:02:23.000 will need a new home. 00:02:23.000 --> 00:02:25.000 That's 40 percent of the world that are going to need 00:02:25.000 --> 00:02:29.000 a new building built for them in the next 20 years. 00:02:29.000 --> 00:02:31.000 Now, one in three people living in cities today 00:02:31.000 --> 00:02:33.000 actually live in a slum. 00:02:33.000 --> 00:02:36.000 That's one billion people in the world live in slums. 00:02:36.000 --> 00:02:41.000 A hundred million people in the world are homeless. 00:02:41.000 --> 00:02:43.000 The scale of the challenge for architects 00:02:43.000 --> 00:02:46.000 and for society to deal with in building 00:02:46.000 --> 00:02:50.000 is to find a solution to house these people. NOTE Paragraph 00:02:50.000 --> 00:02:54.000 But the challenge is, as we move to cities, 00:02:54.000 --> 00:02:57.000 cities are built in these two materials, 00:02:57.000 --> 00:03:00.000 steel and concrete, and they're great materials. 00:03:00.000 --> 00:03:02.000 They're the materials of the last century. 00:03:02.000 --> 00:03:05.000 But they're also materials with very high energy 00:03:05.000 --> 00:03:09.000 and very high greenhouse gas emissions in their process. 00:03:09.000 --> 00:03:11.000 Steel represents about three percent 00:03:11.000 --> 00:03:13.000 of man's greenhouse gas emissions, 00:03:13.000 --> 00:03:16.000 and concrete is over five percent. 00:03:16.000 --> 00:03:19.000 So if you think about that, eight percent 00:03:19.000 --> 00:03:22.000 of our contribution to greenhouse gases today 00:03:22.000 --> 00:03:25.000 comes from those two materials alone. 00:03:25.000 --> 00:03:28.000 We don't think about it a lot, and unfortunately, 00:03:28.000 --> 00:03:30.000 we actually don't even think about buildings, I think, 00:03:30.000 --> 00:03:31.000 as much as we should. 00:03:31.000 --> 00:03:35.000 This is a U.S. statistic about the impact of greenhouse gases. 00:03:35.000 --> 00:03:38.000 Almost half of our greenhouse gases are related to the building industry, 00:03:38.000 --> 00:03:41.000 and if we look at energy, it's the same story. 00:03:41.000 --> 00:03:44.000 You'll notice that transportation's sort of second down that list, 00:03:44.000 --> 00:03:46.000 but that's the conversation we mostly hear about. 00:03:46.000 --> 00:03:50.000 And although a lot of that is about energy, 00:03:50.000 --> 00:03:53.000 it's also so much about carbon. 00:03:53.000 --> 00:03:56.000 The problem I see is that, ultimately, 00:03:56.000 --> 00:03:58.000 the clash of how we solve that problem 00:03:58.000 --> 00:04:01.000 of serving those three billion people that need a home, 00:04:01.000 --> 00:04:05.000 and climate change, are a head-on collision 00:04:05.000 --> 00:04:08.000 about to happen, or already happening. NOTE Paragraph 00:04:08.000 --> 00:04:11.000 That challenge means that we have to start thinking in new ways, 00:04:11.000 --> 00:04:13.000 and I think wood is going to be part of that solution, 00:04:13.000 --> 00:04:15.000 and I'm going to tell you the story of why. 00:04:15.000 --> 00:04:17.000 As an architect, wood is the only material, 00:04:17.000 --> 00:04:20.000 big material, that I can build with 00:04:20.000 --> 00:04:23.000 that's already grown by the power of the sun. 00:04:23.000 --> 00:04:26.000 When a tree grows in the forest and gives off oxygen 00:04:26.000 --> 00:04:28.000 and soaks up carbon dioxide, 00:04:28.000 --> 00:04:31.000 and it dies and it falls to the forest floor, 00:04:31.000 --> 00:04:36.000 it gives that carbon dioxide back to the atmosphere or into the ground. 00:04:36.000 --> 00:04:39.000 If it burns in a forest fire, it's going to give that carbon 00:04:39.000 --> 00:04:41.000 back to the atmosphere as well. 00:04:41.000 --> 00:04:44.000 But if you take that wood and you put it into a building 00:04:44.000 --> 00:04:48.000 or into a piece of furniture or into that wooden toy, 00:04:48.000 --> 00:04:49.000 it actually has an amazing capacity 00:04:49.000 --> 00:04:53.000 to store the carbon and provide us with a sequestration. 00:04:53.000 --> 00:04:57.000 One cubic meter of wood will store 00:04:57.000 --> 00:04:59.000 one tonne of carbon dioxide. 00:04:59.000 --> 00:05:02.000 Now our two solutions to climate are obviously 00:05:02.000 --> 00:05:04.000 to reduce our emissions and find storage. 00:05:04.000 --> 00:05:06.000 Wood is the only major material building material 00:05:06.000 --> 00:05:10.000 I can build with that actually does both those two things. 00:05:10.000 --> 00:05:13.000 So I believe that we have 00:05:13.000 --> 00:05:16.000 an ethic that the Earth grows our food, 00:05:16.000 --> 00:05:18.000 and we need to move to an ethic in this century 00:05:18.000 --> 00:05:21.000 that the Earth should grow our homes. NOTE Paragraph 00:05:21.000 --> 00:05:22.000 Now, how are we going to do that 00:05:22.000 --> 00:05:24.000 when we're urbanizing at this rate 00:05:24.000 --> 00:05:26.000 and we think about wood buildings only at four stories? 00:05:26.000 --> 00:05:29.000 We need to reduce the concrete and steel and we need 00:05:29.000 --> 00:05:30.000 to grow bigger, and what we've been working on 00:05:30.000 --> 00:05:35.000 is 30-story tall buildings made of wood. 00:05:35.000 --> 00:05:39.000 We've been engineering them with an engineer 00:05:39.000 --> 00:05:41.000 named Eric Karsh who works with me on it, 00:05:41.000 --> 00:05:44.000 and we've been doing this new work because 00:05:44.000 --> 00:05:46.000 there are new wood products out there for us to use, 00:05:46.000 --> 00:05:48.000 and we call them mass timber panels. 00:05:48.000 --> 00:05:51.000 These are panels made with young trees, 00:05:51.000 --> 00:05:54.000 small growth trees, small pieces of wood 00:05:54.000 --> 00:05:57.000 glued together to make panels that are enormous: 00:05:57.000 --> 00:06:01.000 eight feet wide, 64 feet long, and of various thicknesses. NOTE Paragraph 00:06:01.000 --> 00:06:04.000 The way I describe this best, I've found, is to say 00:06:04.000 --> 00:06:06.000 that we're all used to two-by-four construction 00:06:06.000 --> 00:06:07.000 when we think about wood. 00:06:07.000 --> 00:06:10.000 That's what people jump to as a conclusion. 00:06:10.000 --> 00:06:12.000 Two-by-four construction is sort of like the little 00:06:12.000 --> 00:06:14.000 eight-dot bricks of Lego that we all played with as kids, 00:06:14.000 --> 00:06:17.000 and you can make all kinds of cool things out of Lego 00:06:17.000 --> 00:06:20.000 at that size, and out of two-by-fours. 00:06:20.000 --> 00:06:21.000 But do remember when you were a kid, 00:06:21.000 --> 00:06:23.000 and you kind of sifted through the pile in your basement, 00:06:23.000 --> 00:06:26.000 and you found that big 24-dot brick of Lego, 00:06:26.000 --> 00:06:27.000 and you were kind of like, 00:06:27.000 --> 00:06:29.000 "Cool, this is awesome. I can build something really big, 00:06:29.000 --> 00:06:31.000 and this is going to be great." 00:06:31.000 --> 00:06:32.000 That's the change. 00:06:32.000 --> 00:06:35.000 Mass timber panels are those 24-dot bricks. 00:06:35.000 --> 00:06:37.000 They're changing the scale of what we can do, 00:06:37.000 --> 00:06:39.000 and what we've developed is something we call FFTT, 00:06:39.000 --> 00:06:42.000 which is a Creative Commons solution 00:06:42.000 --> 00:06:47.000 to building a very flexible system 00:06:47.000 --> 00:06:49.000 of building with these large panels where we tilt up 00:06:49.000 --> 00:06:53.000 six stories at a time if we want to. 00:06:53.000 --> 00:06:57.000 This animation shows you how the building goes together 00:06:57.000 --> 00:07:00.000 in a very simple way, but these buildings are available 00:07:00.000 --> 00:07:03.000 for architects and engineers now to build on 00:07:03.000 --> 00:07:04.000 for different cultures in the world, 00:07:04.000 --> 00:07:07.000 different architectural styles and characters. 00:07:07.000 --> 00:07:10.000 In order for us to build safely, 00:07:10.000 --> 00:07:12.000 we've engineered these buildings, actually, 00:07:12.000 --> 00:07:14.000 to work in a Vancouver context, 00:07:14.000 --> 00:07:15.000 where we're a high seismic zone, 00:07:15.000 --> 00:07:19.000 even at 30 stories tall. NOTE Paragraph 00:07:19.000 --> 00:07:20.000 Now obviously, every time I bring this up, 00:07:20.000 --> 00:07:22.000 people even, you know, here at the conference, say, 00:07:22.000 --> 00:07:25.000 "Are you serious? Thirty stories? How's that going to happen?" 00:07:25.000 --> 00:07:29.000 And there's a lot of really good questions that are asked 00:07:29.000 --> 00:07:31.000 and important questions that we spent quite a long time 00:07:31.000 --> 00:07:33.000 working on the answers to as we put together 00:07:33.000 --> 00:07:36.000 our report and the peer reviewed report. NOTE Paragraph 00:07:36.000 --> 00:07:37.000 I'm just going to focus on a few of them, 00:07:37.000 --> 00:07:39.000 and let's start with fire, because I think fire 00:07:39.000 --> 00:07:41.000 is probably the first one that you're all thinking about right now. 00:07:41.000 --> 00:07:42.000 Fair enough. 00:07:42.000 --> 00:07:44.000 And the way I describe it is this. 00:07:44.000 --> 00:07:46.000 If I asked you to take a match and light it 00:07:46.000 --> 00:07:50.000 and hold up a log and try to get that log to go on fire, 00:07:50.000 --> 00:07:52.000 it doesn't happen, right? We all know that. 00:07:52.000 --> 00:07:55.000 But to build a fire, you kind of start with small pieces 00:07:55.000 --> 00:07:56.000 of wood and you work your way up, 00:07:56.000 --> 00:07:59.000 and eventually you can add the log to the fire, 00:07:59.000 --> 00:08:01.000 and when you do add the log to the fire, of course, 00:08:01.000 --> 00:08:04.000 it burns, but it burns slowly. 00:08:04.000 --> 00:08:06.000 Well, mass timber panels, these new products 00:08:06.000 --> 00:08:08.000 that we're using, are much like the log. 00:08:08.000 --> 00:08:11.000 It's hard to start them on fire, and when they do, 00:08:11.000 --> 00:08:14.000 they actually burn extraordinarily predictably, 00:08:14.000 --> 00:08:16.000 and we can use fire science in order to predict 00:08:16.000 --> 00:08:18.000 and make these buildings as safe as concrete 00:08:18.000 --> 00:08:21.000 and as safe as steel. NOTE Paragraph 00:08:21.000 --> 00:08:24.000 The next big issue, deforestation. 00:08:24.000 --> 00:08:26.000 Eighteen percent of our contribution 00:08:26.000 --> 00:08:28.000 to greenhouse gas emissions worldwide 00:08:28.000 --> 00:08:30.000 is the result of deforestation. 00:08:30.000 --> 00:08:33.000 The last thing we want to do is cut down trees. 00:08:33.000 --> 00:08:37.000 Or, the last thing we want to do is cut down the wrong trees. 00:08:37.000 --> 00:08:40.000 There are models for sustainable forestry 00:08:40.000 --> 00:08:42.000 that allow us to cut trees properly, 00:08:42.000 --> 00:08:44.000 and those are the only trees appropriate 00:08:44.000 --> 00:08:46.000 to use for these kinds of systems. 00:08:46.000 --> 00:08:48.000 Now I actually think that these ideas 00:08:48.000 --> 00:08:52.000 will change the economics of deforestation. 00:08:52.000 --> 00:08:54.000 In countries with deforestation issues, 00:08:54.000 --> 00:08:56.000 we need to find a way to provide 00:08:56.000 --> 00:08:59.000 better value for the forest 00:08:59.000 --> 00:09:01.000 and actually encourage people to make money 00:09:01.000 --> 00:09:03.000 through very fast growth cycles -- 00:09:03.000 --> 00:09:06.000 10-, 12-, 15-year-old trees that make these products 00:09:06.000 --> 00:09:08.000 and allow us to build at this scale. 00:09:08.000 --> 00:09:11.000 We've calculated a 20-story building: 00:09:11.000 --> 00:09:14.000 We'll grow enough wood in North America every 13 minutes. 00:09:14.000 --> 00:09:16.000 That's how much it takes. NOTE Paragraph 00:09:16.000 --> 00:09:19.000 The carbon story here is a really good one. 00:09:19.000 --> 00:09:23.000 If we built a 20-story building out of cement and concrete, 00:09:23.000 --> 00:09:25.000 the process would result in the manufacturing 00:09:25.000 --> 00:09:29.000 of that cement and 1,200 tonnes of carbon dioxide. 00:09:29.000 --> 00:09:32.000 If we did it in wood, in this solution, 00:09:32.000 --> 00:09:33.000 we'd sequester about 3,100 tonnes, 00:09:33.000 --> 00:09:36.000 for a net difference of 4,300 tonnes. 00:09:36.000 --> 00:09:39.000 That's the equivalent of about 900 cars 00:09:39.000 --> 00:09:42.000 removed from the road in one year. 00:09:42.000 --> 00:09:43.000 Think back to that three billion people 00:09:43.000 --> 00:09:45.000 that need a new home, 00:09:45.000 --> 00:09:48.000 and maybe this is a contributor to reducing. NOTE Paragraph 00:09:48.000 --> 00:09:50.000 We're at the beginning of a revolution, I hope, 00:09:50.000 --> 00:09:52.000 in the way we build, because this is the first new way 00:09:52.000 --> 00:09:57.000 to build a skyscraper in probably 100 years or more. 00:09:57.000 --> 00:10:00.000 But the challenge is changing society's perception 00:10:00.000 --> 00:10:02.000 of possibility, and it's a huge challenge. 00:10:02.000 --> 00:10:05.000 The engineering is, truthfully, the easy part of this. 00:10:05.000 --> 00:10:08.000 And the way I describe it is this. 00:10:08.000 --> 00:10:10.000 The first skyscraper, technically -- 00:10:10.000 --> 00:10:12.000 and the definition of a skyscraper is 10 stories tall, believe it or not — 00:10:12.000 --> 00:10:14.000 but the first skyscraper was this one in Chicago, 00:10:14.000 --> 00:10:18.000 and people were terrified to walk underneath this building. 00:10:18.000 --> 00:10:19.000 But only four years after it was built, 00:10:19.000 --> 00:10:22.000 Gustave Eiffel was building the Eiffel Tower, 00:10:22.000 --> 00:10:24.000 and as he built the Eiffel Tower, 00:10:24.000 --> 00:10:28.000 he changed the skylines of the cities of the world, 00:10:28.000 --> 00:10:31.000 changed and created a competition 00:10:31.000 --> 00:10:34.000 between places like New York City and Chicago, 00:10:34.000 --> 00:10:36.000 where developers started building bigger and bigger buildings 00:10:36.000 --> 00:10:40.000 and pushing the envelope up higher and higher 00:10:40.000 --> 00:10:42.000 with better and better engineering. NOTE Paragraph 00:10:42.000 --> 00:10:44.000 We built this model in New York, actually, 00:10:44.000 --> 00:10:47.000 as a theoretical model on the campus 00:10:47.000 --> 00:10:49.000 of a technical university soon to come, 00:10:49.000 --> 00:10:51.000 and the reason we picked this site 00:10:51.000 --> 00:10:54.000 to just show you what these buildings may look like, 00:10:54.000 --> 00:10:55.000 because the exterior can change. 00:10:55.000 --> 00:10:58.000 It's really just the structure that we're talking about. 00:10:58.000 --> 00:11:01.000 The reason we picked it is because this is a technical university, 00:11:01.000 --> 00:11:03.000 and I believe that wood is the most 00:11:03.000 --> 00:11:07.000 technologically advanced material I can build with. 00:11:07.000 --> 00:11:10.000 It just happens to be that Mother Nature holds the patent, 00:11:10.000 --> 00:11:12.000 and we don't really feel comfortable with it. 00:11:12.000 --> 00:11:14.000 But that's the way it should be, 00:11:14.000 --> 00:11:18.000 nature's fingerprints in the built environment. NOTE Paragraph 00:11:18.000 --> 00:11:20.000 I'm looking for this opportunity 00:11:20.000 --> 00:11:23.000 to create an Eiffel Tower moment, we call it. 00:11:23.000 --> 00:11:25.000 Buildings are starting to go up around the world. 00:11:25.000 --> 00:11:27.000 There's a building in London that's nine stories, 00:11:27.000 --> 00:11:29.000 a new building that just finished in Australia 00:11:29.000 --> 00:11:31.000 that I believe is 10 or 11. 00:11:31.000 --> 00:11:35.000 We're starting to push the height up of these wood buildings, 00:11:35.000 --> 00:11:37.000 and we're hoping, and I'm hoping, 00:11:37.000 --> 00:11:40.000 that my hometown of Vancouver actually potentially 00:11:40.000 --> 00:11:42.000 announces the world's tallest at around 20 stories 00:11:42.000 --> 00:11:45.000 in the not-so-distant future. 00:11:45.000 --> 00:11:48.000 That Eiffel Tower moment will break the ceiling, 00:11:48.000 --> 00:11:49.000 these arbitrary ceilings of height, 00:11:49.000 --> 00:11:52.000 and allow wood buildings to join the competition. 00:11:52.000 --> 00:11:54.000 And I believe the race is ultimately on. NOTE Paragraph 00:11:54.000 --> 00:11:56.000 Thank you. NOTE Paragraph 00:11:56.000 --> 00:12:01.000 (Applause)