Patrick Schleisman
While the high cost of steel is motivating some design and building professionals to consider wood for their non-residential projects, many are also choosing wood because of its environmental attributes. Whether the driving force is green building certification, the need to adhere to new energy or climate change legislation, or simply a desire to set their building apart as environmentally responsible, wood is increasingly being used to achieve sustainability objectives.
Gene Dunwody, Jr., of Dunwody/Beeland Architects in Macon, Georgia, prefers to use wood because it’s sustainable as well as economical, and because it’s easier to find subcontractors who can fabricate and install it. Dunwody has recently encountered a lot of interest in the use of wood framing in commercial projects. Currently, Dunwody/Beeland is primarily using wood for all of their apartment and hotel projects.
In 2008, Dunwody/Beeland designed Providence Village North Macon, a mixed-use project in Macon developed by Rob Ballard, who has always preferred the use of wood. The development originally featured four buildings with 70,000 square feet of retail using a concrete system on the second floor and 240 apartments on two wood-framed floors above. To decrease cost and increase efficiency, the design has been modified to three four-story buildings constructed completely out of wood.
Dunwody suggests that builders are shifting to wood, in part, because they can recycle and re-use wood products, allowing them to realize even greater cost savings over steel and concrete construction.
Another example of wood’s benefits can be found in the design and construction of the Blue Ridge Parkway Destination Center near Asheville, North Carolina. This project, designed by Lord, Aeck & Sargent’s John Starr, AIA, and Joshua Gassman, received the 2007 Wood Design Award for green building as part of the new WoodWorks program for non-residential construction.
The center sits along the Blue Ridge Parkway, a 469-mile road that winds through Virginia, North Carolina and Tennessee. The National Park Service wanted the center to be a demonstration of their commitment to sustainability. To accomplish this, Starr’s team looked at all the systems throughout the building for sustainability and found that wood was a logical choice.
While the natural surroundings of the Blue Ridge Parkway Destination Center played a large role in the choice of building materials, Starr and his team enjoyed working with wood for its environmental benefits.
Wood is the only building material that has third-party certification programs in place to verify that products being sold have come from a sustainably managed resource. North America has more certified forests than any other jurisdiction — and, according to the 2007 State of America’s Forests report, has as much forested land now as it did 100 years ago. Over the past 50 years, less than 2 percent of the standing tree inventory in the United States was harvested each year, while net tree growth was 3 percent.
Wood also fares well when compared to other materials using life cycle assessment (LCA) methodology — an internationally recognized scientific approach to evaluating materials, assemblies and whole structures, based on measurable indicators of environmental impact.
LCA studies have repeatedly found that wood is better for the environment than steel or concrete in terms of embodied energy, global warming potential, resource use, air pollution and water pollution.
It’s also important from a climate change perspective. Forests help clean the air by absorbing carbon dioxide and releasing oxygen, while trees incorporate the absorbed carbon into their wood — and products made from that wood continue to store the carbon indefinitely. A typical 2,500-square-foot wood-frame home, for example, has 30 metric tons of carbon stored in its structure, the equivalent of driving an average passenger car for 5 years or using about 3,200 gallons of gasoline.
A collaborative effort of the major North American wood associations, WoodWorks was established last year to provide resources that allow architects, engineers, building owners, developers and others to design and build non-residential structures out of wood more easily and at less cost. Visit woodworks.org for technical publications and presentations, information on educational events and awards programs, or to find a technical director in your region.
— Patrick Schleisman is the regional director of WoodWorks Southeast