Low-carbon construction: the rise, fall and rise again of engineered timber systems

For thousands of years, solid wood has been used as a building material appreciated for being a lightweight, easy reusable and fast regrown resource. Today, building with wood, using engineered timber construction systems is innovative and on the rise: timber is again seen as an ideal green building material, well suited for a broad range of structural and aesthetic applications, and as contemporary construction material due to its low embodied energy, rapid natural regrowth and unique high-performance attributes. The potential of prefabricated engineered solid wood panel systems, such as cross-laminated timber (CLT), as a sustainable building system, is being realized by the construction sector. Since timber is one of the few materials that has the capacity to store carbon in large quantities over a long period of time, solid wood panel construction offers the opportunity of carbon engineering, e.g. to turn buildings and entire districts into ‘carbon sinks’. Thus, some of the historically negative environmental impact of urban development and construction could be avoided. This is a state-of-the-art building system for urban sustainable architecture that can cut construction times in half; featuring an exposed wood load-bearing structure, system approach and off-site prefabrication of system elements. The wood structure provides a comfortable, healthy living and working environment and saves resources. The presenter introduces a series of case studies of recently constructed inner-city residential timber buildings using CLT systems, exploring their levels of acceptance. These precedents are in London, Vienna and Trondheim; while Australia’s first timber high-rise has recently been completed in Melbourne. Given the many benefits of lightweight CLT construction, its introduction to the Asian construction sector is timely and relevant. The purpose of the presentation is to identify its benefits and explore the barriers preventing a fast uptake, and strategies for removing these barriers.