Wood is the most abundant naturally renewable building material on the planet. With its capacity for sequestering carbon and the minimal extraction and processing energy required (wood has the lowest embodied energy of any primary building material), designing with wood, where suitable, makes a significant contribution to the sustainability of a design. But it’s more complex than that. For good reason, sustainable design often focuses on durability, for the purpose of conserving resources. This means ensuring that a structure will last, as a result of careful material selections, performance connection detailing, and on-going care and maintenance. Also, designing with the specific intent that the structure can be renovated or rehabilitated without complete dismantling is an integral part to sustainable design. Recovering materials at the end of a building’s life rather than sending them to landfill is another way to extend material longevity—and wood is well suited to deconstruction and re-use, perhaps more so than steel.
Check out this article about the sustainability of Mass Timber featuring Google MT1 architect Michael Green
