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posted by cmn32480 on Wednesday June 07 2017, @10:41PM   Printer-friendly
from the sounds-like-heavy-duty-plywood dept.

Officials in Oregon have approved construction permits for the first all-wood high-rise building in the nation.

Construction on the 12-story building, called Framework, will break ground this fall in Portland's trendy and rapidly growing Pearl District and is expected to be completed by the following winter.

The decision by state and local authorities to allow construction comes after months of painstaking testing of the emerging technologies that will be used to build it, including a product called cross-laminated timber, or CLT.

To make CLT, lumber manufacturers align 2-by-4 boards in perpendicular layers and then glue them together like a giant sandwich before sliding the resulting panels into a massive press for drying. The resulting panels are stronger than traditional wood because of the cross-hatched layers; CLT can withstand horizontal and vertical pressures similar to those from a significant earthquake with minimal damage.

They are also lighter and easier to work with than regular timber, resulting in lower cost and less waste.

For this project, scientists at Portland State University and Oregon State University subjected large panels of CLT to hundreds of thousands of pounds of pressure and experimented with different methods for joining them together.

Could cross-laminated timber revive the timber industry?

Previously: Can You Build A Safe, Sustainable Skyscraper Out Of Wood?
The Case for Wooden Skyscrapers


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  • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 08 2017, @03:44AM (5 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 08 2017, @03:44AM (#522424)

    Stop talking science. The grumpy old men here know better than the people who made painstaking tests of the materials.

    For their next trick, after having established that this structure will burn quickly and be a safety hazard because it's made of witches, they'll demonstrate to us that the Earth is banana-shaped.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 08 2017, @04:02AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 08 2017, @04:02AM (#522432)

    Witches? We burnt the last of them last Sunday over prayers. Also, the earth is not shaped like a banana, it's more Buddha's Hand [wikipedia.org]-ey from where I'm standing.

  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 08 2017, @05:55AM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 08 2017, @05:55AM (#522463)

    Stop talking science. The grumpy old men here know better than the people who made painstaking tests of the materials...

    OTOMH

    Great Fire of London
    Great Chicago Fire
    San Francisco Fire of 1851

    or just go have a look through this [wikipedia.org] for reasons why buildings of more than a couple of storeys in cities are made of bricks/stone/concrete.

    The thing about a 'fire retardent' material is that, unlike bricks and mortar or concrete, it still bloody well burns, especially when surrounded by other fuel sources and fanned by strong winds..the bottom line here is that this decision to build looks as if it is being driven by an unholy combination, the 'interests' of a declining local timber industry and the bottom line of someone needing to get something done as cheaply as possible.

    If you want to talk about the 'strength' of the material, CLT, well, I work with wood every day and yes, have used CLT (in Europe here). There's no problem with the material, it's strong enough and the only caveat I do have is the glue used to laminate the timber, I have experienced delamination due to failure there, not a common problem, admittedly (two incidents over 4 years), but still one to watch out for.

    Now, I'm not in the US, but we're going down the same route and I see more and more rather flimsy timber framed housing being put up in areas where the traditional build has been bricks & mortar and stone. We've never had any historical fire locally which has devastated a large area (plenty of smaller ones, usual causes;Luftwaffe back in the day,accidents,arson,insurance jobs,local business 'clan' wars...), however, what we do have from the historical record is the occasional storm with winds in the 130 mph+ range, sort of the reason that we tend to build in bricks & stone locally and favour low buildings.

    I'll be getting the popcorn out as they're about to start another of these developments quite close to me, having seen the proposals, I really wonder if the architects have taken into account in their wind loading calculations that these houses be sitting at the target end of a natural 'wind funnel' formed by a combination of a valley pointing to a 'bowl' created by an old quarry working...probably not, as they're a 'standard' design more suited to 'gentler, southern climes' and the scheme has been rushed through the planning system by the usual 'vested interests' (core samples taken on the day they get planning permission approved? talk about paying lip service to legalities...)

    Please don't get me wrong, I've nothing against timber construction, I just question the wisdom of using it for buildings taller than a single storey in inappropriate locations.

    For their next trick, after having established that this structure will burn quickly and be a safety hazard because it's made of witches...

    Err, no, some of us (father was in the construction game for decades) sort of know why most town/cities stopped building wooden structures above two/three storeys, especially in 'crowded' areas like their centres, belief in allegedly omnipotent entities, beit witches, scientists, planners, etc. don't enter into it..

    ..they'll demonstrate to us that the Earth is banana-shaped.

    Well, Isn't it? (Looks at current political scene in the US, here [about to vote for an idiot I hate, as the alternatives are a lot worse], rest of the world...Looks at the general state of the planet..) it sure as hell ain't Peachy....

    • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Thursday June 08 2017, @10:39AM (2 children)

      by kaszz (4211) on Thursday June 08 2017, @10:39AM (#522523) Journal

      Is your point that besides the obvious dangers of fire. These all wood houses can't deal with winds properly?

      Oh and.. fire + wind = *duck*

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 08 2017, @06:47PM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 08 2017, @06:47PM (#522732)

        Is your point that besides the obvious dangers of fire. These all wood houses can't deal with winds properly?

        No, just that building inappropriate wooden house designs in the wrong areas is not a good idea.

        From my window, I can see wooden houses of a Scandinavian design built in the late '60s, intended as a stop-gap solution to a housing shortage then. They're still standing, and are now well beyond their designer's intended lifespan (27 years, ISTR my father saying), sure, they have problems (mainly due to asinine decisions made regarding the type of heating initially installed), but they are, on the whole, still structurally sound. These houses work as they were designed to cope with a harsher climate than the one we have locally, over-engineered if you will.

        Now, the new development being put up less than 300ft from these houses, what they're intending to build there is a generic design intended for a milder climate, more or less a 'flat-pack' timber structured with brick cladding. Rather than individual houses they building terraced housing, each terrace presenting a large surface area to the wind, factor in that, as I said above, they're at the target end of a wind funnel and that we have a rather interesting historical record of storms every so often with winds of over 130mph...like I said, popcorn time.

        And I've not even mentioned the issues regarding the local water table at the site of the development...there's another one nearby where the houses are already (after 4 years) slowly sliding down the hillside they're built on..but that, as they say, is another story.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 08 2017, @08:09PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 08 2017, @08:09PM (#522768)

          apologies for typos above...wtf? I'm sure I read it over a couple of times before posting.