Mass Timber Conference News from Portland, Oregon, United States – March 22 - 24, 2016

AHJ DOB NYC WTF

AHJ are the bad cops of the mass timber revolution: nasty AUTHORITES HAVING JURSIDICTION. Daddy, daddy! I want a lollipop and I want it big and tall and I want it before dinner and I want it all made out of sugar and I will be good and safe the world if you let me have it.

Daddy understands but says: WAIT A MOMENT!! Daddy is a bad daddy and daddy shows you what you are welcome to do in mass wood:

tall wood building solutions by Keith Wen - the code guru for Bushwick hipster's 

A log cabin? This is boring oatmeal without even Maple syrup. I don't want it, you are a mean daddy!

I love you but I will need to study your lollipop, inside out, see if it is safe for you, at this age and time of the day. I don't even know what it's made out of and I wont let you suck it before I understand it.

But Suzy Wilkinson in Sydney has an even bigger one and has been eating them for years, and Tilly Madison from Vancouver brought five with her when she came to visit for the New Year. And her parents have tested it and say it is very good for her teeth, it cleans them I instead of hurting them, just the opposite from what you would think.

My dear Baby, your safety and health and that of the other kids in your class is more important for me than all this other stuff. But I will look at it and study it and discuss with the dentist who is the first responder and has to deal with your teeth when they hurt. You will need to wait and your tantrums will not speed anything up. I love you but patience.

I B, or not to be

And daddy proves his love and shows that he has already looked at it extensively and talked with the dentist. He knows the candy in and out as if he was a sales broker for luxury condies. And he describes it and your mouth gets all wet: 10 stories and 120' tall, right on the High Line in Chelsea in Manhattan, the firey district. You can look inside through the big glass windows and see exposed CLT ceilings resting on glulam beams and columns, the column grid reflected outside with beautiful charred wood that will burn less because it burned already, and the entrails are so bigotty Charlie And The CLT Factory. All the pathways where people run around and play, egress stairs and elevator shafts and other shafts: they are all made out of Chocolate and you can lick it from the walls. And it burns predictably and chars slow and there are root beer sprinklers but what happens the first 15 minutes when it is all crazy and everybody is licking and the dentist does not know where to look and where to go with all that excitement. How are we going to handle that party.

Keith Wen Slides - code look prescriptiver in powerpoint projection

And if the Queen of England let's her subjects eat lollipops all day long it does not mean anything to me before I know it's safe, I am your daddy. I love you also if you don't understand.

Dig some slides of what I am working on and what I am doing diligently, and .... WAIT!!!!!!

 

This was an exciting, enthusiastic and informative conference: Mass Timber is coming to the U.S. and it is coming fast, very fast, unstoppable and it is rolling in via Portland Oregon and you better have an office there if you want to join the party, but Big Apple’s Daddy

Keith Wen, Advisor to First Deputy Commissioner, New York City Department of Buildings - DOB

should not have been the only AHJ speaker and he should have not at the end to a tired audience on 

Track A but before Michael Green, the first day, in front of the full audience, because he has to do a lot of work and this should be facilitated from anybody in the mass timber movement, because it is easier to ask them to give and harder to test than to guest.

Biggest New Thing in Mass Timber?

 Height? Tallness? Stories? Treet at 14 done, UBC’s Brook Commons at 18 groundgebroken. HoHo Vienna will be happening soon at 24. Ha Ha a TA WO BU.

It wasn’t Height but wood is growing sunwards.

Cheap? Kinda.

When builder

Nick Milestone of B&K Structure in London

rushes through hundreds of applications he has erected from pure CLT to all king of steel hybrids, from supermarket to multifamily you start believing it: It is cheaper! It is easier and he juggles it 4 hooks in the air.

When substantially shortened construction time mean a Higher IRR (I Really Roll) due to the lesser time the beautiful capital has to yawn in a project, and oh Wei the construction loans are paid back fast and furious and this does not come from a CLT dreamerworldbetterer but from Lendlease, then 

Lendlease non-bullshit comparison by Mr. Daryl Patterson who is nothing less than the Head of Operational Excellence, Property Australia, of the lendleasing giant. These guys are committed all the way and they are thinking.

you ask yourself not if it is true but how can I get in fast and catch up and if it is better to seismically deal with Oregon State than with ardent Keith Wen NYCDOB and his giant friends from FDNY like ladder 12  and very boys dream Engine 3.

How will I catch up to something that already has a market? A class A office building for a King by a Kaiser, land acquisition, deal, design, development, construction, leasing, operating occupying all in the one hand of a wood renaissance prince on the other side of the river joined by new Canti LEVER romantic post and beams not from doctor Dre but Dr Johnson.

MANUFACTURED ELEMENTS – SIMILAR COMPONENTS WEARING DIFFERENT CLOTHES EVERY TIME

a Lendlease building site of the future, Daryl Patterson, Australia

That’s PHASE II of the CLT revolution. Pre-manufacturing will change everything, the way we think of building and build buildings, the way we design them in 6 D modeling (happens when you have sex with two 3Ds together,) the way we manufacture them in manufactories, and the way we assemble them outdoors – correct rain is good for trees but not for slaughtered ones waiting for a hook –and the zeitgeist aesthetic with which we will enjoy them.

Last centuries Wunderkinder  (with all these Teutonic alpiners German and cubes become a benchmark,) I was saying that the centuries hope carry-ons have delivered only in height but not satisfied every decent architect’s dream: PREFABRICATION – MODULAR BUILDINGS.

And it sneaks on differently, not as trailer home modular home all finished finished but as prefab panels and that is good because the silly googly ping pong table finally fits in the living room. Rhomberg/Cree/LCT have put out a hybrid prefab wall and floor panel system and build it with LCT 1 in 012 and now the mass production has began propelled by a gentlemen that calls the core of it, the manufacturing plant, the factory a Fabrik, Yes Warhol, in a Fabrik the elements are built, and en plein air they are assembled. I am a plumber and I work in navy yard in a factory. Does this make my life better, where the girls at that I usually see in the field? 

on no Holzweg - Binderholz CLT called BBS grows to a finished wall in the hall

Helmut Spiehs with binderholz

is knocking them out, office building panels for France and many money Moxy Hotel panels for Germany; pick the house you want, as if it were a kitchen. The costs go down further and people can stay cheap and be environmental.

prepanelfab hotel mushrooms. Binderholz. Investing in Testing, supplying ample, practical reference reference material, and allying with builder B&K Structure in London to form X-lam alliance have proven winning strategies. 

I would say they look like shite, also passive houses tend to do that often, but they are the future and a mass production is not supposed to be a custom yacht. And the design will improve when bright overflying architects will set their pencil and sketch it on the wall, the exposed CLT wall. 

The progress came with the stiff , light and large panels. Already you need to pre-coordinate, pre-engineer it to CNC route windows and doors and edges. Container it and screw it together. And now you build the whole wall with the window and the waterproofed shell and set it onto the fully built up floor panel. High tech knocking on wood.

without crane mass timber is no fane. x-lam by binderholz is called BBS and is a CLT derived from KLH. They all press except for Merk who sucks: more than 14' wide panel that could wave if you paid for that. hard to tie to the roof of my mini cooper.

So CLT is winning on many fronts but the one to three story residential stick frame buildings are just too cheap to build to be engulfed by CLT slabs and the Americans love them while to Europeans laugh them. But the equilibrated Propaganda Minister for the Mass Timber State, Robert Malczyk has a proactive idea: ask more of a building, better acoustics and better fire protection and better insulation and better better so that CLT becomes the only options and the sticks two by on all fours out the window. And if you have to convince your father in law to build you a CLT MacMansion invite engineer Malczyk and by entrée daddy will have signed a check. 

And there is excitement on the composite front with multinational engineers sealing it together: Brenton Johnson of SOM now gives his celebrated hybrid beams a piece of wood underneath to make the high grater more appealing and Hans-Eric Blomgren of thumbs up arup comes up with a steel wood hermaphrodite to brace the whole world in his grip, a term hard to say, harder remember and for an earthquake even harder to untangle.

And many more spoke and spoke well and in the cellar below the chat cellar a mini booth trade show was going on and lastly the Marriott diligently demonstrated that also tasteless interior décor cant do without wood, just cunt do.

Sou Fujimoto and Tribeca Tomorrow

Solid Sexy Beast: Sou Fujimoto - Canopia – Proposed 2016 – Bordeaux like the wine – with Laisné Roussel

It is an uproar, a dodecaphonic revival of bitching and moaning but the sun shines feistily on this very Monday, 20 March 2023; we got used to spring not starting when it should but the rezoning of Tribeca of Manhattan is just ridiculous and a pain in the ass and nobody will ever build at these conditions:

Zoning overlays residential and non, maximum heights, lot coverages and setter backers rear and front and up and down and sky penetration planes, ass and pussy, and required street walls and 

Drunken Sexy Beast: Sou Fujimoto - Canopia - Proposed 2016 - Bordeaux like the wine -  

with Laisné Roussel

sophisticated air right transfers and abatements and bonuses: same old equally upsetting to the cheap developer and the revolutionary architect.  Business as usual.

But 2 new Building Classes are just not acceptable:

1.     Buildings need to be Performance Type III or better

2.     Buildings need to be Carbon Type II or better

What do this restrictions mean? What do we need to calculate here? Why does the Major and city planning try to screw us like this?

Pages and pages of formulas and modelings and the certifying consultants thieves. But these are the new environmental benchmarks and money is there to be made in a strong market and the environmental classes are there to be met or else…

Let’s cut to the CLT chase, glulamed and all:

Performance Type: adopts passive house criteria for level of insulation (Size Thicker Matters,) air tightness and energy and resources consumption of building systems. You can stick the glass façade up your ass because even quadruple glazed windows are not insulative enough to meet the major’s smiley face: How am I going to sell my Tribeca luxury apartments with small windows? Don’t build if you cant. Go fishing, who gives a fuck.

Carbon type: just what I feared, you calculate the total volume of each utilized building material and with formulas with zero wiggle room you get to a number: the Embodied Carbon.  The new pain in the ass, the nightmare of this fucking millennium. From when you dig the copper, to the piss in the sewer of mine workers to the first class air trip of management, to extracting, melding, mixing, making and shipping and packing and unpacking and swearing and sweating and usual plumber cutting the pipe to short and discard and on and on until it is installed and the building dead again and it recycled. Impossible to calculate but there are formulas for each material and cheating is fucking harder than it should be. So what does Carbon Type II or I mean. It means that you are lucky if you

Green Sexy Beast: Sou Fujimoto - Canopia - Proposed 2016 - Bordeaux like 

the wine -with Laisné Roussel

are able to use concrete and steel for foundation and if the ground water were lower they would force Carbon Type I on you,  driven blackened chestnut piles supporting an impregnated CLT mat as foundation. So if you want to build up 200 foot in Tribeca you need to do it in mass timber, and more than that, you will need to check where this wood-would comes from and if the cheaper and subtler European engineered wood elements were shipped over in containers on a sail boat or if these containers came on a train from the Carolinas or Canadas. And you won’t meet Carbon Type II building with the cheap aluminum façade because that material is so fucking heavy in Carbon that a plane out of it couldn’t take off.

And once the tears dried and the bitching and moaning quitters and landlorders must command less for their build able square feet because at these conditions and under these harder ships less money is to be made, it will appear that there is still money to be made, maybe lesser but maybe notter but there is profit somewhere and they will all do as they are told, the geces and ceems and pees and archs and developers and aiaitchjeys and fireman and buyers and workers and unions and the police alike.

Floor dissolution in Timberland: Sou Fujimoto – Final Wooden House – 2006 - Kumamoto 

And every new building down there is going to be mass wood, all over the place, and it will smell like in Don Quichoteian wind mills and the USDA and the White House will reciprocratingly pat their shoulders about the unexpected upgrade: a first world country becoming a world-major extractor of a carbonified commodity: How Much Wood Will  a Woochuck laminate? You don’t even need to water the fucking forests they just grow by themselves. And the usually stigamticied agricultural monoculture here is just called Forest without that minus: plant some new ones and don’t let them deer eat them and you are good with or without lime and salt.

And where does tweeting Sou Fujimoto fit in all of this except for Tribecas enduring love of vinegared handrolled bytes?

He will be 52, young for such a successful architect with people wondering about the not-yet-pritzker-pricy and he will be proud and angry, because his 200 foot tall wood skyscraper will be one

The Genius: Shigeru Ban – a stick frame building – Tamedia – 2013 - Zurich

of the first new buildings in the rezoned Tribeca preselling well at $7,000/SF (I will talk more about inflation in other posts) with some nice inventions for mass timber, some kick ass connections and structures, just like the Japanese crafters have always done it and he will be pissed off because he couldn’t use the skinny steel rods to lighten his structure, to erase floor separations and the 

The Prophet: Michael Green – a case for preaching and nailing it – T3 – 2016 – Minneapolis

seamlessly inside-outing, the stupid (I know words too made that celebrity famouser) glass restrictions and thick insulated walls are a drag but overall it will look just fine and we all will whine from our hearts because we won’t be able to afford to live there.

The Inventor: Andrew Waugh – panelize panelize panelize CLT up and high - Stadthaus Murray Grove – 2009 - London