Seattle Skyscrapers Made Out of Wood?

In our bi-monthly Seattlemag.com column And Another Thing…, Knute Berger–who writes regularly for Seattle Magazine and Crosscut.com and is a frequent pundit on KUOW–takes an in-depth look at some of the highly topical and sometimes polarizing issues in our city.

Seattle was built of and on wood. A sawmill was our first industry and created our first fortune, and sawdust from that sawmill helped to fill in the tide flats on which the modern city was built. The most impressive forest these days, however, is the forest of skyscrapers downtown and rising in the Denny Triangle and South Lake Union. Building tall is the urbanist’s dream for sustainability: Go up, young man!

But could we build a skyscraper forest more in keeping with our roots? That is actually more feasible than it sounds. The latest building material in the search for eco-friendly urban high-rises: wood. Yes, skyscrapers made not of steel and concrete but out of wood are the new hot thing.

That goes against the grain of modern techniques that have been with us for a century (our first real skyscraper, the Smith Tower, turned 100 this year). But it turns out, new composite materials made of wood can be used to build stable, tall structures–some call them “plyscrapers.” An architect, the appropriately named Michael Green, who is thinking about building 30-story wooden high-rises in Vancouver, BC. Canada, land of trees, is at the forefront of engineered-timber technology. Such buildings are already popping up around the world. 

Think of it as the wood equivalent of Boeing’s composites for the 787. Advances in glue-lamination, especially an innovation called “cross laminated timber,” can be used to create structures that are tall, strong, earthquake-safe, and, yes, fire resistant. The U.S. government has put some money into research. The biggest thing the plyscrapers have going for them is that they are made from a renewable, local resource, and are much more carbon-friendly than traditional high-rise materials, the manufacture of which leaves a huge carbon footprint. Indeed, wooden skyscrapers sequester carbon rather than filling the atmosphere with it as does the production of steel and concrete.

Original Seattle old growth juxtaposed against our early high-rises

Seattle is at the forefront of green buildings. The Bullitt Center on Capitol Hill (not wood) is considered the greenest office building on the planet, which Grist noted in a story recently is changing the world. Also, Weyerhaeuser–which once billed itself as “the tree growing company” is constructing a new headquarters in Pioneer Square, moving from its concrete bunker in Federal Way. Wouldn’t it be perfect if their new HQ utilized this new technology?

Seattle’s seems like the perfect place to build (grow?) these truly green buildings. And wouldn’t it be cool to have your penthouse be a treehouse?