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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
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Whoever on Thursday June 08 2017, @04:53AM
There was a study published a year or so ago that said that it costs $80k/year/homeless person, because of the ER costs. It's cheaper to give people some housing and basic medical care.
What really gets me is the heartless people who think that people would rather live a shitty life in shitty subsidized housing than do a job if they had a chance. Yes, there are certainly some people who would do that, and people who are incapable of holding down a job (because of mental illness), but the rest: for the most part, I expect they would prefer to have a nicer life, even if it means working.