8/23/2023 0 Comments Skyscraper made out of wood(Remember the aforementioned Great Chicago Fire of 1871?) But wooden beams can be covered with fire-proof coatings, just as steel beams are. Of course, any talk of building skyscrapers out of wood is immediately going to raise concerns about fires. How far this practice could spread depends on the circumstances of each building - having Lake Michigan right next to Chicago was a big help for shipping plans - but it certainly has possibilities. And building the modules under factory settings provides for more quality control than building the whole skyscraper on site from the ground up. It's a strategy that can save you a lot of time. This modular approach is not unheard of in standard construction, but it's still relatively new, and the use of wood allowed the team to take full advantage of it. They came up with a plan where the building would be constructed out of standardized modules, all prefabricated at a nearby factory, then shipped to the construction site. That fact allowed the River Beech Tower team to get creative about the construction process as well as the design. "We wanted the design to evolve out of the iterative process of what the material wants to be," as Snapp put it. It also gave them a big open space going up the core of the building, which opened up all sorts of aesthetic and interior design possibilities. That allowed them to spread the base of the building wide enough to get the necessary structural stability. ![]() So they redesigned the building as essentially two skyscrapers conjoined by a central atrium. The engineers determined the entire bottom third of the building would have to be a solid wood block to give the structure enough stability. The initial design of the project that Perkins + Will modeled in its computers was your standard skyscraper tower. rigidity tradeoff lead to other interesting breakthroughs. Beyond that, the skyscraper would be basically all wood. Key connection points in the building would be reinforced with steel encased in concrete, and glass would be used in windows along with some other exterior materials. It also lent the project its interesting "honeycomb" aesthetic. A triangle is a much more structurally sturdy form than a rectangle, so taking a more flexible material like wood and building triangles out of it created a structure that holds up well under forces coming at it from all sides. For the River Beech Tower project, Snapp and his colleagues actually solved this problem by constructing the whole building out of triangle and diamond shapes. On the flip side, wood can sway too much, particularly in the wind - a major issue for taller buildings. Wood is an excellent insulator, which would save the building's owners and residents on heating and cooling costs. The lighter weight also opens up opportunities for cost saving throughout the construction process. A wooden skyscraper will have more give in an earthquake, for instance. Eighteen-story buildings made of timber already exist in Vancouver and Minneapolis, while other structures have popped up in Norway and New Zealand.īut why the effort in the first place? Well, several reasons.įor one thing, wood is lighter and more flexible than steel or concrete. Similar plans are underway in London, Stockholm, and other cities. But the point of the project was to prove the idea could work. ![]() Granted, River Beech Tower remains purely conceptual - a collection of designs and models, with no actual plans yet to build it. "We wanted the research to be tied to some sense of what's immediately achievable," Snapp explained. The idea was they would pick a real-world site and then develop the building from the ground up: As the architects fleshed out the project, that would give the Cambridge group specific structures, practices, and so forth to test out in the lab. Cambridge University's Natural Material Innovation project then came to them with the notion of doing a wooden skyscraper. The tower was designed in parallel with a master plan the firm was awarded to develop an area in Chicago's downtown, on the east shore of the river and just west of Grant Park. Snapp is the design principal guiding the firm's River Beech Tower project, an 800-foot residential skyscraper that would be built almost entirely out of wood.
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