Engineered wood

In a nutshell, it's a new state-of-the-art dance theater to really replace the original Doris Duke Theater.

And the primary performance space is a 60 by 80 mass timber room with a flat floor, retractable seating so that the dance space is meant to operate as both performance and workshop space.

The support spaces are really circulated around the primary theater volume.

And many of those are meant to be sort of fluid spaces that can double as lobby, additional performance space, lecture space.

And there's also an elevated catwalk that is at the upper level of the theater space.

In a way, it's kind of a high-tech machine, performance machine, really wrapped in this warm and very human timber building.

A distinctive mass timber structure establishes the character of the new building.

Exposed cross-laminated timber panels and glulam beams create a warm, inviting interior that recalls the original theater's traditional A-frame timber construction.

They're blue roots.

Scantlings? Yeah, they have been sourcing West African hardwoods and then having them made into engineered timber products, scantlings specifically, in their factory in Malaysia.

But they're now announcing that they're actually setting up… a new Scantling's factory in, well, I find it interesting, in Morocco.

So essentially what that does is that reduces the travel time for the hardwood from West Africa, but it also cuts travel times and lead times to Europe.

Okay, one more thing, because it does change how permanent this looks.

In 2021, the code is rewritten to let mass timber, which is engineered wood glued to big panels, go much higher.

Depending on how much fire protection you add, you can now build 12 stories out of it or 18.

18 stories and 270 feet, which would actually have been unthinkable when the five-story limit was written.

The more impact a material has, the more you gain by improving it.

Now, start with wood and mass timber.

Its manufacturing simply isn't that energy intensive, especially next to concrete and steel.

It leans mostly on electricity, and it doesn't need the brutal temperatures that making cement or steel requires.

The conclusion the guides reach is striking.

Mass timber should be considered for any building of 12 stories or less.

And that's already happening, sort of, with the code changes opening the door to it.

It doesn't mean everything has to be wood.

This episode is about the machines that make mass timber and the plants they go into.

My guest is Jaka Bradač.

He sells CLT and glulam production lines in North America to Ledenek.

If you're thinking about building a plant, investing in one, or you just wanna know how this stuff gets made, this one's for you.

And if you're not on it yet, our newsletter covers new projects, the teams building them, and conversations like this one.

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And so the fact that we have our own division, just focusing on retrofits and, and he's, he's always been doing retrofits big and small throughout the career.

I mean, now they've got over a hundred projects in the portfolio, but our recent project that we just completed is a hundred year old heavy timber warehouse that in downtown Vancouver, and then we added three and a half storeys of mass timber on top of it.

And the next one we've got working right now is a 14 storey office building that we're converting to luxury hotels.

So those are two big kind of bold projects.

nine and part three?

Yeah, sorry.

so typically part nine is like single family homes i mean the the idea is from a code standpoint is you know you go ahead and build a house and you don't really need any engineers but of course now we've got glulam or you know mass timber type products where you've got engineered materials coming to site you need a structure engineer and nowadays you typically will need either like a building envelope consultants or a geotechnical engineer just because of you know ground issues so And realistically, like once you start hiring consultants, that's where you're moving away from, you know, single family homes to bigger buildings.

And that's where the part three gets into place where you're going to need many consultants to get you through a project.

And so if your home, if your single home in a community is protected by CitraTech, that may not be enough.

And so I think builders, commercial builders especially, and as we look at, uh, multi-family housing and things, how we build that started as code compliant, and that's where CitraTech making fire retardant treated OSB board and plywood and mass timber and things like that that we've talked about, how we build with fire retardant treated wood and not having to pressure impregnate it or incise it or weaken that wood.

Those are gonna become core things even in more urban environments in how we build different.

We have communities that aren't getting permitted to even build because they are approaching the wildland urban interface.

But thankful for CitraTech and innovators out there tackling this.

So let's talk about materials.

Mass timber and cross-laminated timber, also known as CLT, these materials have been popular in Europe for not only homes, but for buildings.

However, in the US, we've been a little more skeptical, or we haven't updated our codes yet to understand that these materials can be safe as well.

Mm

... mass timber wood scrapers, new constructions, and new construction models.

How do these new models and these new technologies answer some of the critiques that are leveled at the rather anonymous and homogenous reputation of tall buildings? And I think this is critical, what barriers stand in the way.

And I ask that because in the UK context, for example, timber construction over a certain number of stories is impermissible due to fire regulations.

So what models, and how can it be made more likely to occur?

Yeah.

So I'm a, I'm a massive advocate for, for mass timber.

I, I think it's, I think it's possibly the biggest game changer in the building industry in my lifetime.

Now, until recently, I've never really thought of wood as a technologically sophisticated material, but science is changing that quite dramatically.

New techniques involving lamination, densification and compression mean that engineered wood can now rival materials like aluminium, carbon, fibre and steel.

in terms of strength to weight and durability.

There's even a US company called Invent Wood, for example, which has developed something called Super Wood, treated and compressed wood with a claimed strength to weight ratio up to 10 times higher than steel.

And this isn't just about stuff going on in the laboratory.

Engineered wood is already being used in everything from skyscraper frames to turbine blades.

And Siemens has even used laminated wood fairings on high-speed trains, prototype ones in particular, to protect equipment from debris at speeds of up to 405 kilometres an hour.

I love it.