Gee, what could possibly go wrong? I hope Al-Qaeda doesn't hear about this...
Posted on 02/01/2015 8:24:31 AM PST by dennisw
Towers of Steel? Look Again
Benton Johnson, an engineer who worked on the report, said that wooden high-rises could help solve the growing worldwide problem of providing adequate housing to the billions of people who are, or will be, living in cities — while also addressing climate change.
“We know that we need to build a lot more buildings,” Mr. Johnson said. “And we know that we need to lower CO2.”
Until now, tall wooden buildings had been championed by a handful of architects and engineers, mostly from smaller firms overseas and in Canada. They welcomed the Skidmore, Owings & Merrill report.
The movement to construct tall buildings largely with wood as an environmentally friendlier alternative to steel and concrete has received a boost from an unusual source — a leading architectural firm known for its towers of steel and concrete.
Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, the Chicago-based firm that has designed a long list of skyscrapers, including the new One World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan, has developed a structural system that uses so-called mass timber — columns and thick slabs that are laminated from smaller pieces of wood. In a report this year, the firm showed how the system could be used to build a 42-story residential tower that would have a lower carbon footprint than a conventional structure.
“We’re tall building engineers,” said William F. Baker, a partner in the firm. “We wanted to see what we can do to help on the sustainability side.” With their system, about 70 percent of the structural material is wood; most of the rest, including the foundation, is concrete.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
The flash steel hardening process developed by a self taught metallurgist in Detroit a few years ago (Flash Bainite) Should be showing up in construction soon if it hasn’t already.
Lighter stronger steel hardened faster and cheaper
Gee, what could possibly go wrong? I hope Al-Qaeda doesn't hear about this...
Rearden metals? ;-)
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Let’s take all the idiots that are concerned about a “carbon footprint” and just ‘assist’ their suicide.
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It is unusual for a steel frame to survive a fire.
They usually are annealed by the heat of the fire, and curl up like a fresh boiled noodle.
That was the reason for the thick asbestos gunite that used to be applied to steel frames.
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Wood is an excellent building material. It can even be rendered fire and bug resistant. But it looses strength dramatically when it gets wet.
Of course, the watermelons (green on the outside, red on the inside) will whine that making bricks generates CO2...and we’re back to the cycle of stupidity.
So he wants to address rising C02 by destroying millions of trees that convert the C02 to oxygen while at the same time creating huge fire traps? Sounds perfectly logical to me.
LOL! Exactly!
What if no one cares about their carbon footprint.
It is a phony construct to trap the middle class.
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