The unstoppable spread of Ikea has meant that flat-pack wooden furniture is already the staple of every home across the globe. This approach to furnishings may soon be extended to the substance of the house itself.
"This is the beginning of the timber age," says Andrew Waugh, director of Waugh Thistleton architects, which built the UK's first cross-laminated timber building in 2003, and is soon to complete the world's biggest wooden apartment block in Dalston, east London. "It beats steel and concrete on so many levels, from embodied energy and environmental performance to cost, speed, accuracy, weight, acoustic separation, waterproofing, ventilation - and, ultimately, it's nicer to live in."
From apartment blocks to flat-pack mass housing and plans for wooden skyscrapers from Stockholm to Vancouver, wood is finally becoming a viable option in the mainstream construction industry - and 2017 is when it will experience huge growth.
One major sign is that insurance giant Legal & General has announced it is moving into the house-building industry, establishing a factory in Yorkshire for the prefabrication of flat-pack wooden homes. Its approach removes many of the problems associated with "wet trades", such as mixing concrete.
For Waugh, who is also working on Legal & General's project, the benefits of timber are to be found at every stage of the process.
"These building sites are completely different places," he says. "It's not the usual toxic environment, with jackhammers, grinders and compressors. Wooden buildings are put together with cordless screwdrivers."
The tallest timber building is currently a 14-storey apartment block in Bergen, Norway, but material researchers at the University of Cambridge have been dreaming on an entirely different scale. They recently unveiled a speculative plan for a 300-metre "toothpick" skyscraper in London, made from a series of glue-laminated "mega-trusses", using sections of up to 2.5-metres diameter at their base.
"It's a scale that simply doesn't exist yet," says Michael Ramage, who leads the Centre for Natural Material Innovation at Cambridge, "but we're confident that it will soon."
Stockholm is leading the way, with plans for a cluster of four 20-storey towers, by Tham & Videgård Arkitekter, to be made entirely from Swedish pine, while CF Møller has unveiled a scheme for a 34-storey timber tower nearby, planned for completion in 2023.
Vienna plans a pair of 24-storey wooden towers, claimed to save 2,800 tonnes of CO2 compared to using concrete - the equivalent of driving a car 40km every day for 1,300 years. But the scheme came as a surprise to the local fire department. "A few of us were upset because it was crazy to present an idea that has not been discussed with everyone," said fire service spokesman Christian Wegner - although he added he was optimistic it would pass tests once a fail-safe sprinkler system had been developed.
Finnish architect Anssi Lassila, who has built the country's tallest wooden buildings to date, says that a timber apartment block is 50 times more safe than one made of concrete.
With the sustainably harvested forests of Canada alone providing enough timber to house a billion people over the next 70 years, logs may well be the future of our cities.
Oliver Wainwright is The Guardian's architecture and design critic.
The WIRED World in 2017 is WIRED's fifth annual trends briefing, predicting what's coming next in the worlds of technology, science and design
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
