article_snippet: Despite the "plyscaper historical reputation for great city fires -- London in 1666, the Great Chicago fire of 1871 and San Francisco in 1906 -- wood is making a comeback as a construction material.
article_snippet: Next year in Vienna, construction will begin on a 275-foot building made almost entirely of wood, while Stockholm may build a 34-story wooden apartment by 2023.
article_snippet: With faster construction times and a softer environmental impact, could the building material of the past be the future of construction?
article_snippet: Mass timber panels, in particular, cross-laminated timber (known in the industry simply as CLT) are becoming established as a quicker, greener and eventually cheaper alternative to concrete and steel.
article_snippet: Wood has not been an urban material
article_snippet: Steel and concrete have huge carbon footprints.
article_snippet: Concrete accounts for about 6-8% of man's greenhouse gas emissions, whereas wood stores carbon dioxide and gives us a vehicle to create carbon-neutral buildings.
article_snippet: But the established nature of concrete and steel means that CLT will not replace urban building materials overnight.
article_snippet: They have to carry out special tests on the correct combination of concrete and wood.
article_snippet: Green counters that CLT is as fire resistant as other new-builds made by traditional means and likens CLT ability to burn to trying to set a redwood on fire with a lit match, with any charring creating an insulation layer that protects the wood underneath.
article_snippet: Even so, the industry remains largely skeptical of a process that -- while having obvious advantages in terms of speed -- is still on par with steel and concrete construction in terms of cost.
article_snippet: It will become cheaper but It's too new to be significantly less expensive," Green said, adding that the difficulty lies in competing with a well-honed and century-old system of designing, building and budgeting for concrete and steel.
article_snippet: Ultimately, buildings of the future are likely to be a mixture of wooden components and concrete and steel; combining the stability of concrete with the flexibility and speed of wood.
article_snippet: Leading timber specialist at the engineering group ARUP, Andrew Lawrence, said that shear walls -- the core of tall buildings which provide stability against the lateral force of the wind or seismic activity -- are likely to continue to be made from concrete and steel.
article_snippet: Clients are missing a trick with wood," he said, adding that dollar-for-dollar as a pure construction material wood can still struggle to be cheaper than concrete.
highlights_snippet: Wood is making a comeback as a construction material .
  