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Abstract

Exogenous forces are reshaping building markets among the 19 real estate product sectors comprising most of America’s built environment. The real estate development value chain is being recast in sectors like fuel retail, fast food, grocery, and warehousing, while new venture-capital interventions are hybridizing housing, hospitality, healthcare, and the senior services markets in value-adding ways. Meanwhile, pockets of low-density metropolitan fabrics—the non-downtown environments encompassing suburbs, small towns, villages, edge cities, exurban areas, and rural areas, which house 85 percent of America’s population —are densifying in response to consumer demand for walkable, mixed-use environments. Disruptions are driving innovation in each of these 19 real estate product sectors, but they are primarily technological and social. Building outcomes conspicuously lack best sustainability practices necessary to build a next-generation green economy. Mass timber technology can play a key role in ensuring that the massive levels of resources the U.S. will allocate to building the next generation of human settlements—close to $1.5 trillion just in 2020—are not squandered by poor practices in energy conservation, carbon reduction, ecosystem stewardship, nonrenewable resource conservation, and climate change mitigation. More than ever, the resiliency of critical human support systems is based upon the competent modeling of climate unknowns in future development.

Description

Given climate change projections and the urgency for developing low-carbon futures, what if cities were built from the only building construction system that sequesters carbon and can be engineered to be “energy positive”—wood? While building construction and operations are responsible for half of the carbon emissions among the greenhouse gases that generate climate change, mass timber engineering can act as a form of climate protection. Accordingly, the research project rethinks common building typologies through construction in factory-based timber-engineered technology—cross-laminated timber (CLT) and glulam building platforms as an alternative to concrete, steel, and light-framed wood construction. The goal is to produce a wood-based taxonomy of the standard real estate products used to construct cities, building types mostly ignored by high design.

According to developer Christopher Leinberger in The Option of Urbanism: Investing in a New Urban Dream, nineteen standard real estate products—mostly suburban—underwritten by the financing and insurance sectors essentially shape American cities (e.g., offices, fast food restaurants, manufacturing buildings, big boxes, banks, garden apartments, single-family houses, hotels/motels, storage facilities, assisted living facilities, schools, churches, and neighborhood shopping centers). Their underwriting is based on market liquidity or resale velocity, otherwise known as exchange value. Exchange values in building markets are premised on short-term investment logics that reward use of construction systems with high embodied energy costs and other negative externalities, particularly in low-density metropolitan areas, constituting 80 percent of America’s built environment.

The objective is not simply to retrofit commercial typologies with a sustainable construction system, but rather to explore the typological and architectural patterns that drive the reproduction of negative externalities (e.g., pollution, high fossil fuel use, sprawling land use, planned obsolescence, ugliness, etc.) in the development of cities. Innovations in timber-engineered buildings to date have been associated with a few signature projects involving premium tall buildings, institutions, and commercial structures. However, the ordinary low-rise building typologies comprising most of our auto-oriented landscapes hold the key to revolutionizing our carbon footprint through better building, urbanism, and land use. The challenge, then, is to diffuse this innovation to common building types within their existing cost structures. How might design fulfill functional and economic obligations for which a type is financed and built, while offering collateral benefits: expressions of publicness, renewed senses of beauty, enhanced responsiveness to livability, function, and context, and an architecture that anticipates its own adaptive reuses over time—the true smart building?

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Publication Date

5-2021

Document Type

Report

City

All Cities

Keywords

mass timber; cross-laminated timber; building categories; value chain; urbanism

Disciplines

Architecture | Environmental Design | Geological Engineering | Landscape Architecture | Urban Studies and Planning

Awards

2023 London International Creative Competition Official Selection—Architecture
2021 Fast Company Innovation by Design Awards Cities Category Honorable Mention
2021 The Plan Awards: Special Projects Winner
2021 Green GOOD DESIGN Award

Comments

Project Team:

University of Arkansas Community Design Center:
Stephen Luoni, Director and Steven L. Anderson Chair in Architecture and Urban Studies
Claude M. Terral III, AIA, Project Architect
Tarun Kumar Potluri, Project Designer
Kacper Lastowiecki, Project Designer
Joshua Levy, Project Designer
Linda Komlos, Administrative Analyst

University of Arkansas Resiliency Center:
Dr. Marty Matlock, PE, BCEE, Professor and Executive Director

Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design:
Peter MacKeith, Dean and Professor
John Folan, AIA, Department of Architecture Head and Professor

UACDC Students:
Jacob Caylon Alford
Keturah Bethel
Mary Grace Corrao
Matthew A. Scott
Wenjie Zhu

Client:
Weyerhaeuser Giving Fund: Seattle, Washington

Wood City: Timberizing the City’s Building Blocks

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