This is my grandfather. And this is my son. My grandfather taught me to work with wood when I was a little boy, and he also taught me the idea that if you cut down a tree to turn it into something, honor that tree's life and make it as beautiful as you possibly can. My little boy reminded me that for all the technology and all the toys in the world, sometimes just a small block of wood, if you stack it up tall, actually is an incredibly inspiring thing. These are my buildings. I build all around the world out of our office in Vancouver and New York. And we build buildings of different sizes and styles and different materials, depending on where we are. But wood is the material that I love the most, and I'm going to tell you the story about wood. And part of the reason I love it is that every time people go into my buildings that are wood, I notice they react completely differently. I've never seen anybody walk into one of my buildings and hug a steel or a concrete column, but I've actually seen that happen in a wood building. I've actually seen how people touch the wood, and I think there's a reason for it. Just like snowflakes, no two pieces of wood can ever be the same anywhere on Earth. That's a wonderful thing. I like to think that wood gives Mother Nature fingerprints in our buildings. It's Mother Nature's fingerprints that make our buildings connect us to nature in the built environment. Now, I live in Vancouver, near a forest that grows to 33 stories tall. Down the coast here in California, the redwood forest grows to 40 stories tall. But the buildings that we think about in wood are only four stories tall in most places on Earth. Even building codes actually limit the ability for us to build much taller than four stories in many places, and that's true here in the United States. Now there are exceptions, but there needs to be some exceptions, and things are going to change, I'm hoping. And the reason I think that way is that today half of us live in cities, and that number is going to grow to 75 percent. Cities and density mean that our buildings are going to continue to be big, and I think there's a role for wood to play in cities. And I feel that way because three billion people in the world today, over the next 20 years, will need a new home. That's 40 percent of the world that are going to need a new building built for them in the next 20 years. Now, one in three people living in cities today actually live in a slum. That's one billion people in the world live in slums. A hundred million people in the world are homeless. The scale of the challenge for architects and for society to deal with in building is to find a solution to house these people. But the challenge is, as we move to cities, cities are built in these two materials, steel and concrete, and they're great materials. They're the materials of the last century. But they're also materials with very high energy and very high greenhouse gas emissions in their process. Steel represents about three percent of man's greenhouse gas emissions, and concrete is over five percent. So if you think about that, eight percent of our contribution to greenhouse gases today comes from those two materials alone. We don't think about it a lot, and unfortunately, we actually don't even think about buildings, I think, as much as we should. This is a U.S. statistic about the impact of greenhouse gases. Almost half of our greenhouse gases are related to the building industry, and if we look at energy, it's the same story. You'll notice that transportation's sort of second down that list, but that's the conversation we mostly hear about. And although a lot of that is about energy, it's also so much about carbon. The problem I see is that, ultimately, the clash of how we solve that problem of serving those three billion people that need a home, and climate change, are a head-on collision about to happen, or already happening. That challenge means that we have to start thinking in new ways, and I think wood is going to be part of that solution, and I'm going to tell you the story of why. As an architect, wood is the only material, big material, that I can build with that's already grown by the power of the sun. When a tree grows in the forest and gives off oxygen and soaks up carbon dioxide, and it dies and it falls to the forest floor, it gives that carbon dioxide back to the atmosphere or into the ground. If it burns in a forest fire, it's going to give that carbon back to the atmosphere as well. But if you take that wood and you put it into a building or into a piece of furniture or into that wooden toy, it actually has an amazing capacity to store the carbon and provide us with a sequestration. One cubic meter of wood will store one tonne of carbon dioxide. Now our two solutions to climate are obviously to reduce our emissions and find storage. Wood is the only major material building material I can build with that actually does both those two things. So I believe that we have an ethic that the Earth grows our food, and we need to move to an ethic in this century that the Earth should grow our homes. Now, how are we going to do that when we're urbanizing at this rate and we think about wood buildings only at four stories? We need to reduce the concrete and steel and we need to grow bigger, and what we've been working on is 30-story tall buildings made of wood. We've been engineering them with an engineer named Eric Karsh who works with me on it, and we've been doing this new work because there are new wood products out there for us to use, and we call them mass timber panels. These are panels made with young trees, small growth trees, small pieces of wood glued together to make panels that are enormous: eight feet wide, 64 feet long, and of various thicknesses. The way I describe this best, I've found, is to say that we're all used to two-by-four construction when we think about wood. That's what people jump to as a conclusion. Two-by-four construction is sort of like the little eight-dot bricks of Lego that we all played with as kids, and you can make all kinds of cool things out of Lego at that size, and out of two-by-fours. But do remember when you were a kid, and you kind of sifted through the pile in your basement, and you found that big 24-dot brick of Lego, and you were kind of like, "Cool, this is awesome. I can build something really big, and this is going to be great." That's the change. Mass timber panels are those 24-dot bricks. They're changing the scale of what we can do, and what we've developed is something we call FFTT, which is a Creative Commons solution to building a very flexible system of building with these large panels where we tilt up six stories at a time if we want to. This animation shows you how the building goes together in a very simple way, but these buildings are available for architects and engineers now to build on for different cultures in the world, different architectural styles and characters. In order for us to build safely, we've engineered these buildings, actually, to work in a Vancouver context, where we're a high seismic zone, even at 30 stories tall. Now obviously, every time I bring this up, people even, you know, here at the conference, say, "Are you serious? Thirty stories? How's that going to happen?" And there's a lot of really good questions that are asked and important questions that we spent quite a long time working on the answers to as we put together our report and the peer reviewed report. I'm just going to focus on a few of them, and let's start with fire, because I think fire is probably the first one that you're all thinking about right now. Fair enough. And the way I describe it is this. If I asked you to take a match and light it and hold up a log and try to get that log to go on fire, it doesn't happen, right? We all know that. But to build a fire, you kind of start with small pieces of wood and you work your way up, and eventually you can add the log to the fire, and when you do add the log to the fire, of course, it burns, but it burns slowly. Well, mass timber panels, these new products that we're using, are much like the log. It's hard to start them on fire, and when they do, they actually burn extraordinarily predictably, and we can use fire science in order to predict and make these buildings as safe as concrete and as safe as steel. The next big issue, deforestation. Eighteen percent of our contribution to greenhouse gas emissions worldwide is the result of deforestation. The last thing we want to do is cut down trees. Or, the last thing we want to do is cut down the wrong trees. There are models for sustainable forestry that allow us to cut trees properly, and those are the only trees appropriate to use for these kinds of systems. Now I actually think that these ideas will change the economics of deforestation. In countries with deforestation issues, we need to find a way to provide better value for the forest and actually encourage people to make money through very fast growth cycles -- 10-, 12-, 15-year-old trees that make these products and allow us to build at this scale. We've calculated a 20-story building: We'll grow enough wood in North America every 13 minutes. That's how much it takes. The carbon story here is a really good one. If we built a 20-story building out of cement and concrete, the process would result in the manufacturing of that cement and 1,200 tonnes of carbon dioxide. If we did it in wood, in this solution, we'd sequester about 3,100 tonnes, for a net difference of 4,300 tonnes. That's the equivalent of about 900 cars removed from the road in one year. Think back to that three billion people that need a new home, and maybe this is a contributor to reducing. We're at the beginning of a revolution, I hope, in the way we build, because this is the first new way to build a skyscraper in probably 100 years or more. But the challenge is changing society's perception of possibility, and it's a huge challenge. The engineering is, truthfully, the easy part of this. And the way I describe it is this. The first skyscraper, technically -- and the definition of a skyscraper is 10 stories tall, believe it or not — but the first skyscraper was this one in Chicago, and people were terrified to walk underneath this building. But only four years after it was built, Gustave Eiffel was building the Eiffel Tower, and as he built the Eiffel Tower, he changed the skylines of the cities of the world, changed and created a competition between places like New York City and Chicago, where developers started building bigger and bigger buildings and pushing the envelope up higher and higher with better and better engineering. We built this model in New York, actually, as a theoretical model on the campus of a technical university soon to come, and the reason we picked this site to just show you what these buildings may look like, because the exterior can change. It's really just the structure that we're talking about. The reason we picked it is because this is a technical university, and I believe that wood is the most technologically advanced material I can build with. It just happens to be that Mother Nature holds the patent, and we don't really feel comfortable with it. But that's the way it should be, nature's fingerprints in the built environment. I'm looking for this opportunity to create an Eiffel Tower moment, we call it. Buildings are starting to go up around the world. There's a building in London that's nine stories, a new building that just finished in Australia that I believe is 10 or 11. We're starting to push the height up of these wood buildings, and we're hoping, and I'm hoping, that my hometown of Vancouver actually potentially announces the world's tallest at around 20 stories in the not-so-distant future. That Eiffel Tower moment will break the ceiling, these arbitrary ceilings of height, and allow wood buildings to join the competition. And I believe the race is ultimately on. Thank you. (Applause)
Ovo je moj deda. A ovo je moj sin. Deda me je naučio da radim sa drvetom kad sam bio mali dečak i takođe me je naučio ideji da ako isečeš drvo da bi ga pretvorio u nešto, poštuj život tog drveta i napravi to najlepše što možeš. Moj dečak me podseća da za svu tehnologiju i sve igračke na svetu, ponekad samo mali komad drveta, ako ga naslažeš u visinu u stvari je neverovatno inspirativna stvar. Ovo su moje zgrade. Gradim širom sveta iz naše kancelarije u Vankuveru i Njujorku. Gradimo zgrade raznih veličina i stilova i od različitih materijala, u zavisnosti od toga gde smo. Ali drvo je materijal koji najviše volim i ispričaću vam priču o drvetu. Deo razloga zašto ga volim je taj što svaki put kad ljudi uđu u moje zgrade koje su od drveta, primetim da reaguju potpuno drugačije. Nikad nisam video da neko uđe u neku od mojih zgrada i zagrli čelični ili betonski stub, ali sam video to u zgradama od drveta. Video sam ljude kako dodiruju drvo i mislim da postoji razlog za to. Isto kao i snežne pahuljice, ni dva komada drveta nikada i nigde na Zemlji ne mogu biti isti. To je divna stvar. Sviđa mi se da mislim da drvo ostavlja otiske prstiju Majke prirode na našim zgradama. Otisci prstiju Majke prirode su ti koji čine da nas naše zgrade povežu s prirodom u okruženju napravljenom ljudskom rukom. Živim u Vankuveru, pored šume koja raste do visine zgrade od 33 sprata. Uz obalu ovde u Kaliforniji šuma sekvoje raste do visine od 40 spratova. Ali zgrade od drveta na koje mislimo su visoke samo četiri sprata na većini mesta na Zemlji. I pravila gradnje u stvari ograničavaju našu mogućnost da gradimo zgrade mnogo više od četiri sprata na mnogim mestima i to je tako i ovde u Sjedinjenim Državama. Postoje izuzeci, ali i potrebno je da postoje izuzeci i stvari će se promeniti, nadam se. Razlog zbog čega tako mislim je taj što danas polovina nas živi u gradovima i taj broj će porasti do 75 procenata. Gradovi i gustina znače da će naše zgrade i dalje biti velike i mislim da postoji uloga koju drvo može da odigra u gradu. Mislim tako jer će za tri milijarde ljudi u svetu danas, za 20 godina, biti potreban novi dom. To je 40 posto sveta kojem će biti potrebna nova zgrada izgrađena za njih u sledećih 20 godina. Jedan od tri čoveka koji živi u gradovima danas, u stvari živi u sirotinjskom kraju. To je milijardu ljudi u svetu koji žive u sirotinjskim krajevima. Sto miliona ljudi u svetu su beskućnici. Veličina izazova sa kojim se suočavaju arhitekte i društvo u graditeljstvu je u tome da nađu rešenje da udome ove ljude. Ali izazov je, kako se selimo u gradove, oni su sagrađeni od dva materijala: čelika i betona i to su sjajni materijali. To su materijali poslednjeg stoleća. Ali to su takođe materijali sa veoma velikom energijom i veoma velikom emisijom gasova staklene bašte u svom procesu. Čelik predstavlja oko 3 procenta čovekovih emisija gasa staklene bašte, a beton preko 5 procenata. Ako razmislite o tome, osam procenata našeg doprinosa gasovima staklene bašte danas dolazi samo od ova dva materijala. Mi ne mislimo mnogo o tome i nažalost, ne mislimo čak ni o zgradama, ja mislim, onoliko koliko bi trebalo. Ovo je statistika SAD o uticaju gasova staklene bašte. Skoro polovina naših gasova staklene bašte je u vezi sa građevinarstvom i ako pogledamo energiju, ista je priča. Videćete da je prevoz na drugom mestu te liste, ali to je nešto što uglavnom čujemo. Iako puno toga zavisi od energije, takođe puno zavisi i od ugljenika Problem kako ga ja vidim je u tome da, konačno, sudaranje načina na koje rešavamo taj problem opsluživanja tri milijarde ljudi kojima treba dom i klimatskih promena, je čeoni sudar koji treba da se dogodi ili se već događa. Taj izazov znači da treba da počnemo da razmišljamo na nove načine i mislim da će drvo biti deo tog rešenja i ispričaću vam zašto. Kao arhitekti, drvo je jedini materijal, veliki materijal, sa kojim mogu da gradim, koji je izrastao uz pomoć sunčeve energije. Kada drvo raste u šumi i ispušta kiseonik i apsorbuje ugljen-dioksid i umre i padne na šumsko tlo, ono vraća ugljen-dioksid u atmosferu ili u zemlju. Ako izgori u šumskom požaru, takođe će vratiti taj ugljenik nazad u atmosferu. Ali ako uzmete to drvo i napravite od njega zgradu ili komad nameštaja ili drvenu igračku, ono u stvari ima neverovatnu sposobnost da skladišti ugljenik i omogućava nam njegovo oduzimanje. Jedan kubni metar drveta će uskladištiti jednu tonu ugljen-dioksida. Naša dva rešenja za klimu su, očigledno, da smanjimo emisije i nađemo skladište. Drvo je jedini od glavnih materijala za gradnju sa kojim mogu da gradim i koji radi obe ove stvari. Verujem da imamo moralni princip da nam Zemlja daje hranu i u ovom veku moramo da pređemo na moralni princip da nam Zemlja daje domove. A kako ćemo to da uradimo kada sprovodimo urbanizaciju ovim tempom i razmišljamo samo o drvenim zrgadama od četiri sprata? Treba da smanjimo beton i čelik i da gradimo više zgrade i ono na čemu radimo su zgrade od drveta od 30 spratova Projektujemo ih sa inženjerom po imenu Erik Karš koji radi sa mnom na tome i radimo ovaj novi posao jer postoje novi proizvodi od drveta koje možemo da koristimo i zovemo ih masovne drvene ploče. Ove ploče su napravljene od mladog drveća, niskog drveća, malih komada drveta zalepljenih jedan za drugi da bi formirali ploče koje su ogromne: 2.5 metra široke, 19.5 metara dugačke i raznih debljina. Način na koji najbolje mogu da opišem ovo, je taj da smo svi navikli na gradnju 2 puta 4 kada mislimo o drvetu. To je ono što ljudi preuranjeno zaključuju. Gradnja 2 puta 4 je nešto kao male Lego kocke sa 8 tačaka sa kojima smo se svi igrali kao deca i možete napraviti razne super stvari od Lego kocki te veličine i od kocki 2 puta 4. Ali setite se kad ste bili deca i pretraživali gomilu u vašem podrumu i nalazili veliku Lego kocku od 24 tačke i rekli biste nešto kao: "Super, ovo je sjajno. Mogu da sagradim nešto baš veliko i biće super." To je ta promena. Masovne drvene ploče su te kocke od 24 tačke. One menjaju razmeru onoga što možemo da uradimo i ono što smo razvili, je nešto što zovemo FFTT, što je rešenje "Creative Commons"-a za izgradnju veoma fleksibilnog sistema gradnje sa ovim velikim pločama gde možemo da gradimo šest spratova odjednom, ako hoćemo. Ova animacija vam pokazuje kako se zgrada sklapa na vrlo jednostavan način, ali ove zgrade su sada dostupne arhitektama i inženjerima da grade za različite kulture u svetu, različite arhitektonske stilove i karaktere. Da bismo gradili bezbedno projektovali smo ove zgrade da funkcionišu u okolnostima Vankuvera, gde smo u visoko trusnoj oblasti, čak 30 spratova u visinu. Očigledno, svaki put kad pomenem ovo, čak i ovde na konferenciji, ljudi kažu: "Jesi li ozbiljan? Trideset spratova? Kako ćeš to da uradiš?" A ima puno stvarno dobrih i važnih pitanja koja postavljaju i za koja provedemo puno vremena smišljajući odgovore, dok sastavljamo naš izveštaj i reviziju izveštaja kolega. Fokusiraću se na nekoliko njih i da počnemo sa vatrom, jer mislim da je vatra verovatno prvo o čemu svi razmišljate sada. To je u redu. Način na koji to opisujem je ovaj. Ako vas zamolim da uzmete šibicu i zapalite je i držite cepanicu i pokušate da je zapalite, to se ne dešava, zar ne? Svi to znamo. Da biste zapalili vatru, počinjete od malih komada drveta i raspaljujete je i posle nekog vremena možete da stavite cepanicu na vatru i kad ste je stavili, naravno, ona gori, ali gori polako. Masovne drvene ploče, ovi novi proizvodi koje koristimo, su prilično iste kao cepanice. Teško je zapaliti ih, a kada se zapale u stvari gore neobično predvidivo i možemo upotrebiti nauku o vatri da bismo predvideli i učinili ove zgrade sigurnim kao betonske i čelične. Sledeći veliki problem, seča šuma. 18 procenata naše zasluge za emisije gasova staklene bašte širom sveta je rezultat seče šuma. Poslednje što želimo je da sečemo drveće. Ili poslednje što želimo je da sečemo pogrešno drveće. Postoje modeli održivog šumarstva koji nam omogućavaju da sečemo drveće kako treba i to je jedino drveće pogodno za upotrebu u ovakvim sistemima. Mislim da će ove ideje promeniti ekonomiju seče šuma. U zemljama sa problemima sa sečom šuma moramo da nađemo način da obezbedimo veću vrednost šumama i podstaknemo ljude da zarađuju novac kroz vrlo brze cikluse rasta - 10, 12, 15 godina staro drveće koje čini ove proizvode i omogućava nam da gradimo u ovoj meri. Napravili smo proračun za zgradu od 20 spratova. Uzgajaćemo dovoljno drveta u Severnoj Americi svakih 13 minuta. Toliko je potrebno. Priča sa ugljenikom ovde je stvarno dobra. Da smo izgradili zgradu od cementa i betona, taj proces bi rezultirao proizvodnjom tog cementa i 1.200 tona ugljen-dioksida. Da smo je izgradili od drveta, u ovom rešenju, oduzeli bismo oko 3.100 tona za neto razliku od 4.300 tona. Ekvivalent tome je 900 automobila sklonjenih sa puteva za godinu dana. Pomislite na onih 3 milijarde ljudi kojima treba novi dom i možda će ovo doprineti smanjenju. Na početku smo revolucije, nadam se, u načinu na koji gradimo, jer ovo je prvi novi način za gradnju oblakodera u verovatno 100 godina ili više. Ali promeniti percepciju društva o mogućnostima je izazov i to veliki. Gradnja je, iskreno, lakši deo ovoga. Ja to ovako opisujem. Prvi oblakoder, tehički - a po definiciji oblakoder je zgrada od 10 spratova, verovali ili ne - prvi oblakoder je bio ovaj u Čikagu i ljudi su se plašili da prođu ispod ove zgrade. Ali samo četiri godine kasnije Gustav Ajfel je gradio Ajfelov toranj i kako ga je sagradio, tako je promenio horizonte gradova sveta, promenio i stvorio konkurenciju između mesta kao što su Njujork i Čikago gde su graditelji počeli da prave sve veće zgrade i da pomeraju granicu visine sa sve boljim graditeljstvom. Napravili smo ovaj model u Njujorku kao teoretski model studentskog grada tehničkog univerziteta koji se osniva i razlog što smo izabrali ovu lokaciju je da vam pokažemo kako ove zgrade mogu da izgledaju jer spoljašnjost može da se menja. U stvari samo govorimo o strukturi. Razlog što smo ga izabrali je taj što je ovo tehnički univerzitet i verujem da je drvo tehnološki najnapredniji materijal sa kojim mogu da gradim. Slučajno Majka priroda drži patent i ne osećamo se prijatno zbog toga. Ali tako treba da bude, otisci prstiju prirode u okruženju stvorenom ljudskom rukom. Tražim mogućnost da ostvarim "momenat Ajfelovog tornja", koko to zovemo. Zgrade počinju da niču širom sveta. Postoji zgrada u Londonu od devet spratova, nova zgrada, tek završena, u Australiji koja ima, ja mislim, 10 ili 11. Počinjemo da podižemo visinu ovih drvenih zgrada i nadamo se i ja se nadam da će moj grad Vankuver možda objaviti najvišu zgradu na svetu od oko 20 spratova u ne tako dalekoj budućnosti. Taj "momenat Ajfelovog tornja" će probiti plafon, taj proizvoljni plafon visine i omogućiti drvenim zgradama da uđu u trku. I mislim da je trka konačno počela. Hvala vam. (Aplauz)