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