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Is Helsinki city centre's new neighbourhood, Wood City, the future of building? Developers are increasingly swapping out concrete and steel in favour of wood
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- Title
- Is Finland's Wood City the future of building?
- Published
- Sep 26 2022
- Word count
- 1369 words
Without even glancing, my pre-article hot take based on existing knowledge is:
There are advantages, but also risks. Wood-eating insects like termites and ants can destroy wood structures in short order.
Concrete and steel can build stronger, more dense housing with great thermal capacity, reducing heating and cooling energy use. Wood works great for low-medium density provided risks are watched for and mitigated quickly. It's a great natural insulator. It is however very flammable, and moisture can destroy it if it isn't permitted to breath, like a lot of modern housing aims for. Thats why sealing and insulating an older home needs extra care and must be done properly to avoid rotting the frame.
A combination of the two, using concrete/steel for the important structural work and shrouding the most flammable areas like kitchens would probably work well.
Post-read:
This is the most true thing. I hadn't considered treated engineered wood, nor how wood structures do retain structural integrity longer in a fire (on average).
With that in mind, I think I stand by the majority of what I said, but using wood as a supplementary structural, and a heavy replacement for interior framing and decoration over drywall/concrete walls would be quite awesome.
I like the idea of building a concrete box with roughly every-other level as concrete/steel, but then fleshed out in-between with wood framing and walls. It allows a greater flexibility and ease of repair and interior modification to suit new purposes as the years go on.
A great example is a school building. If the majority of the structure is concrete, especially doors and interior walls...if the school's needs change, its astronomically expensive to modify room size and shape. If it's wood you can tear it apart and reuse components far easier.
Building techniques have a lot of regional differences and there are lots of different components. (For example, interior walls in the US for residential construction are mostly gypsum board with wood framing - no concrete there.)
So I think this article is too generic, covering too many different building types and components briefly, to really understand how they’re using wood more in Finland, except at the level of “I guess they’re using more wood now?”
I would guess they’re still using concrete for foundations, but it doesn’t say.
I was thinking largely in the realm of public, retail, and medium-high density apartment buildings. A fair number, if not majority, are primarily brick or concrete/steel, especially if built in the magic window that was ugly 1970s concrete.
To go full tangent, look at the depressingly utilitarian stuff from the last 2 decades of the USSR and realize that was the general modern asthetic of that era, not purely some dystopian dictatorship prison housing. It's like the dark ages for architecture.
That said, I love 70's interior design. Especially wood panelling... can't wait for it to be mainstream again. It's a fantastic mold spore barrier.
Even the company that is creating this project doesn't mention how the buildings are made. It's very obviously a long overdue marketing stunt that started in 2015.
They mention it several times. The article talks in several places about engineered wood, aka glulam or CLT. That's the thing which has changed in wood construction in the last few decades and it's why projects like this can happen at all. It's an amazing material. Think plywood on steroids.
In a lot of aspects it's comparable to steel - doesn't handle compression quite so well, but you can still build medium-size wooden skyscrapers - while also being lighter, easier to work with and considerably more environmentally friendly. It's fire and insect resistant and has good thermal properties.
I'm not sure going into the exact technical details of how they're framing a structure is all that interesting to most BBC news readers. But you can basically treat CLT the same as steel on medium scale projects. Ultimately there's only so many ways you can build a building out of sticks, be they wooden or steel or reinforced concrete or whatever.
Maybe not so fast. From Norway - "Wooden road bridge designed to last 100 years . . .collapses"
https://www.euronews.com/2022/08/15/completely-destroyed-wooden-road-bridge-collapses-in-norway
https://www.newcivilengineer.com/latest/timber-bridge-in-norway-built-to-last-100-years-collapses-after-a-decade-15-08-2022/
This video is a nice explanation of what went wrong. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSPI0xkTifI