November 2012

Architects and engineers are reviving the use of wood as an eco-friendly replacement for concrete, as borne out by the completion of an eight-storey office building in Austria and residential block in London.

The LCT One building in Dornbirn, Austria, is a ‘hybrid’ building made from both wood and concrete and designed by Austrian architectural firm Cree. Assembled from solid panels made from layers of wood and other materials, the high-tech building has a central concrete core housing its lifts and utilities. From a concrete foundation, vertical posts of glue-laminated wood (known as glulam) support hybrid floor panels made from more glulam beams embedded in reinforced concrete. Made by sticking together smaller pieces of wood to create structural elements, glulam can resist compression better than concrete — but weighs much less and is more sustainable, the Daily Mailreports. Cree claims that prefabricating the glulam elements of the building cuts construction time by half, guarantees quality and slashes the buildings’ carbon footprint. Concrete emits nearly its own weight in carbon dioxide as its produce; the raw material for wooden skyscrapers, by contrast, literally grows on trees and absorbs carbon from the air as it does so.

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