The architect who earlier this year made a case for the use of wood in tall buildings goes on the record with TreeHugger.com to say that wood is one of the most technologically advanced building materials. And it’s been that way for the past 500 years, he says. “The architecture industry is stuck in a mindset that Modernism is about glass, steel, and concrete and my argument is that those are man-made materials that have incredible impacts on the earth, incredible impacts on energy, and incredible impacts on carbon,” he says. When it comes to wood, “we have a material that has an incredible molecular structure, it’s incredibly lightweight … and we realize that the binders in the wood molecular structure are quite complex and have in themselves all kinds of opportunity,” he says. “So as we start to break down wood, we can see how we can reconstitute it in new ways.”
Meet Michael Green:
