Yasmeen Almuhanna: Looking Out, Week 3

            Arguably the most renewable building material out there, wood has been used in building since the days of yore. However, they have almost always been limited to low rise buildings. Although it’s known that heavy timber is more fire resistant in a building than steel, this requires the chopping down of really big trees that generally take a pretty long time to reach the state that we need for a heavy timber frame work.

           Recently people have managed to cross laminate wood and somehow result with a building material that retains all the virtues of heavy timber without chopping down big trees. The result = cross laminated timber (CLT). This process has already been applied in buildings such as Waugh Thistleton's CLT building in London, 9 storeys of wood.