London, Oct 13 (ANI): Both architects and engineers are reviving the use of wood as a quick and eco-friendly solution to modern construction that produces large amount of carbon footprint.
The recent completion of an eight-storey wooden office block in Austria and a nine-storey residential block in London shows how the "plyscraper" are fast becoming a reality.
The LCT One building in Dornbirn, Austria, is a "hybrid" building that is made up of both wood and concrete and is designed by Austrian architectural firm Cree, the Daily Mail reported.
The building assembled from solid panels made off-site from layers of wood and other materials, has a central concrete core housing its lifts and utilities.
From a concrete foundation, vertical posts of glue-laminated wood (known as glulam) provide support to hybrid floor panels made from more glulam beams that are embedded in reinforced concrete.
Made from sticking together smaller pieces of wood to create structural elements with a higher tensile strength than steel, glulam can resist compression better than concrete, but weighs a lot less and is more sustainable.
The firm claims that prefabricating the glulam elements of the building off-site, cuts construction time by half and guarantees quality and slashes the carbon footprint of the buildings.
Nabih Tahan, an architect with Cree, told The Institute of Engineering and Technology, "We want to make buildings like car companies make cars, or computer companies make computers, using an industrial process and a systems approach."
"To get good performance out of buildings, you can't keep making them chaotically piece by piece on site, cutting things in the rain. You need to design them right and have a step-by-step organised process," he said.
British architects Waugh Thistleton calculated that they avoided producing nearly 125 tons of carbon dioxide in building in what is so far the world's tallest modern timber structure, a nine-storey Stadthaus building.
The building, in Hackney, East London, used even lesser amount of concrete than Cree's system, with load-bearing wall and floor slabs as well as stair and lift cores built entirely from cross-laminated timber (CLT) panels. (ANI)
