Are Skyscrapers Made From Wood The Future Of Design?

Imagine a new miracle building material that could change the way skyscrapers are designed. Now imagine that material is wood.

- Justin Davidson

UNTIL RECENTLY, there were two basic ways of using wood in construction: chop down whole tree trunks for heavy beams or saw them into two-by-fours. The first, which produced log cabins and medieval church roofs, is costly and inefficient today, relying on scarce old-growth. The second gives us stick-built houses but nothing much taller than a few floors. Now a third technique, sandwiching layers of wood and adhesive, yields cross-laminated timber (CLT), a kind of super-plywood that comes in immense slabs as long as a bowling lane and as thick as 12 inches. A similar process yields steel-hard beams called glulam. The principle is almost touchingly simple: “Gluing a stack of cards together produces something stronger than building a house of cards,” says architect Do Janne Vermeulen, a principal at the Dutch firm Team V Architecture.