I'm not sure if there had been a water leak or what but the whole floor of her apartments main living area notably drooped in the middle and was kind of bouncy.
She claimed she couldn't notice it but I found it really unnerving.
It's not only a matter of water-leaks but also of noise, low thermal mass with the need of more effective ventilation and precise heating hard to get in a large building etc.
In ecological terms it's a matter of scale: trees keep growing IF we do not cut them too much. So at a certain level of demand wood is renewable, above it's not.
In human terms pushing revolutions is not much good because anything have and EOL and if we build much in a short period of time we need to rebuild en mass when it will reach it's EOL and we do not know up front in what kind of situation we will be at that point in time. So better a slow evolution, sparse, to have backups and low "new generation" demand in the timeline...
The real points though are IMO:
- who need apartments? People or those who sell them/sell the land since selling many apartments means much more profit than single-family homes?
- how can dense city/big buildings evolve? We know that they have a limited lifecycle, however no one seems to care up-front about it. Single family homes with a bit of land around can be rebuilt for instance at a generational change, it's easy to reach the decision as a single owner with a single family impacted, it's nearly impossible with MANY families in a single building.
- can dense area evolve well? For instance few decades ago cars was not that spread, so cities was not built for them. Cars arrive. Dense cities have struggled enormously to add them and nowadays we mostly agree that in dense are the sole option is public transports for nearly all since there is no physical place for cars for all. Cities built for cars for all on contrary struggle to maintain their road networks, their economy need a continuous growth witch works ONLY until old infra reach their EOL. Again not evolutionary plans was made up front. We are talking about flying cars nowadays, where to land tomorrow? We have seen the shift from shopping centers to on-line retails where to adapt to receive large boxes when we are not at home in a tall building? Spread enough single-family homes with small scattered buildings for work/service purpose on contrary CAN evolve. No matter much if we foresee well or not.
Well... IMVHO cities have reached the point of "too much density", there is no more economy of scale in them respect of their many issues. We still need a bit of density, we still are social animals, but instead of evolving toward bigger and bigger dense area, hubs in the middle of nothing, we need to spread, in a partially interconnected and mixed network. Like who? The classic internet vs today's one? In the end actual research shows that "any kind of network" tend to behave similarly... And those seems to be lessons no one want to take...
Those who sell apartments are also people!
> The issue with wood based homes is that they are really good for SMALL individual homes. NOT for tall buildings despite theoretically xlam and co allow to build them...
> It's not only a matter of water-leaks but also of noise, low thermal mass with the need of more effective ventilation and precise heating hard to get in a large building etc.
Sure at the moment nobody builds sky scrapers from timber, but large apartment buildings are absolutely no issue e.g. https://www.arup.com/projects/haut Moreover while you are correct that they tend to have lower thermal mass, they can typically be build much better insulated and air tight. Many low energy houses both small and big are timber houses. Heating and ventilation is not a bigger issue compared to concrete houses and noise is much a function of insulation so typically modern timber houses are better because they get build to a higher insulation standard.
> In ecological terms it's a matter of scale: trees keep growing IF we do not cut them too much. So at a certain level of demand wood is renewable, above it's not.
What is your point? you can always grew more trees if the demand is higher. The issue is not just that timber is renewable, its also that building based on timber is extremely CO2 and energy intensive.
> In human terms pushing revolutions is not much good because anything have and EOL and if we build much in a short period of time we need to rebuild en mass when it will reach it's EOL and we do not know up front in what kind of situation we will be at that point in time. So better a slow evolution, sparse, to have backups and low "new generation" demand in the timeline...
I don't know why you're bringing this up in this context, nobody is proposing to tear down cities and rebuild with timber.
> The real points though are IMO:
> - who need apartments? People or those who sell them/sell the land since selling many apartments means much more profit than single-family homes?
? how about the people living in the apartment buildings. Building cities from single family homes is completely unsustainable. the land use, transport cost and building costs are extremely high.
> - how can dense city/big buildings evolve? We know that they have a limited lifecycle, however no one seems to care up-front about it. Single family homes with a bit of land around can be rebuilt for instance at a generational change, it's easy to reach the decision as a single owner with a single family impacted, it's nearly impossible with MANY families in a single building.
? You make it sounds like cities are a new phenomena. We have build cities for hundreds of years, this is a solved issue. Moreover an advantage of apartment buildings over individual homes is that they typically lasts longer. We do not want to rebuild our housing every 30 years or so.
> - can dense area evolve well? For instance few decades ago cars was not that spread, so cities was not built for them. Cars arrive. Dense cities have struggled enormously to add them and nowadays we mostly agree that in dense are the sole option is public transports for nearly all since there is no physical place for cars for all. Cities built for cars for all on contrary struggle to maintain their road networks, their economy need a continuous growth witch works ONLY until old infra reach their EOL.
Yes building cities for cars makes them very unlikeable, how about we stop? Also blaming this on cities is a bit rich, the issue is that we suddenly changed our transport method to cars, which got us into the mess we are in. But importantly, you completely omit the fact that we can't have modern rural living without cars, so the costs are much higher (both in terms of energy and money). Rural living is completely unprepared for cars to disappear.
>Again not evolutionary plans was made up front. We are talking about flying cars nowadays, where to land tomorrow? We have seen the shift from shopping centers to on-line retails where to adapt to receive large boxes when we are not at home in a tall building? Spread enough single-family homes with small scattered buildings for work/service purpose on contrary CAN evolve. No matter much if we foresee well or not.
Funny, what you describe is largely suburbia, which has lots of sustainability issues (you need a car to get around, typically not walkable... )
> Well... IMVHO cities have reached the point of "too much density", there is no more economy of scale in them respect of their many issues. We still need a bit of density, we still are social animals, but instead of evolving toward bigger and bigger dense area, hubs in the middle of nothing, we need to spread, in a partially interconnected and mixed network. Like who? The classic internet vs today's one? In the end actual research shows that "any kind of network" tend to behave similarly... And those seems to be lessons no one want to take...
So how would this work, how are you proposing to spread out cities like New York, Tokyo or London? I mean you can look at cities like LA or Melbourne to see what happens if you restrict density of housing to largely single family dwellings. The cities become huge in terms of land area. Gridlocked as everyone has to travel large distances and making extensive public transport networks is much more difficult.
Sorry for being rude, but you seems making just PR up without evidence... I have built a wood-frame home for myself few years ago, assessing all the techniques available at that time, witch happen to be the same for today. It's just a two levels home, and while WELL insulated for noise it's not in practice. Some others here who live in different wood buildings report similar issues and I think most of them are from USA so with far lighter and different structure than mine. The PRs claims to have solved all issues, but that's a claim I still have to see only one who actually really live in an wood based building agree with that.
Also you can't made "much better airtight" wood based buildings because they are not by nature, even massive XLam usage can't do better than concrete simply because it's NOT nor can't be a unique isotropic surfaces built locally. You can made airtight enough buildings, of course, but still less than equally new one in CA. That's not a big issue for small homes/homes in general where the "plastic" (steam-brakes coating) is small enough, but on a large building ensure airtightness not only the day you end the construction but after years is an issue. Nothing "exceptional", like the reduced thermal mass, but still a negative point.
The positive is that in LESS volume you can push more glass wool, so yes you can say that a 40cm wood-frame perimetral wall is better insulated than an equal 40cm CA wall. It's also easy to change them once built, pass conduits etc. These are their plus. Fire resistance is a marginal plus. But that's not a real win. The real win is IF they cost less than CA or if like me you want them for some reasons (miscalculations included).
> What is your point? you can always grew more trees if the demand is higher.
You can't forests do not grow up in a finger snap. The actual demand is a thing, if you switch from CA to wood it's a very different one. My point is that if we SLOWLY push single-family homes wood made we can effectively get ecological benefits because the overall wood demand do not skyrocket and the slow growth today means a slow rebuild rate in the future. Something actually sustainable since you do not remade a home after few years, so trees have time to grow up again. If we push it at a schizophrenic speed instead of an environmental benefit and a new way of life we only made a mess with very few who profit and all others, environment included who loose.
> I don't know why you're bringing this up in this context, nobody is proposing to tear down cities and rebuild with timber.
That's the actual trend. UN New Urban Agenda admit we need to rebuild our cities, and we should not rebuild them as today, one of the new characteristic is the massive use of wood. Of course is an UN agenda, not a thing all the world blindly follow at warp seep, but that's is.
> ? how about the people living in the apartment buildings. Building cities from single family homes is completely unsustainable. the land use, transport cost and building costs are extremely high.
Are you really sure or you just imaging that? I know veeeery little studies on that topic, like http://www.newgeography.com/content/006840-high-density-and-... or casual news like https://www.helsinkitimes.fi/finland/finland-news/domestic/2... but in general terms is see far much more expensive constructions sites in towns than outside. Not only. I came from a big south-EU town, now living in the French Alps and well... My transportation costs are now LOWER than before. No traffic, a distributed local economy, "local buffers" (like mass usage of freezers vs buy ready-made foods as habit etc) do the trick.
People living in apartments? Well... Just this very year they are a little bit upset due to the skyrocketed energy prices and they have no choice. While people living in individual homes have little but still some choices, like room for p.v., wood stove etc...
> We have build cities for hundreds of years, this is a solved issue.
The very contrary: very old cities (who happen to be far little than modern ones) was built mostly with rocks. When you destroy a home the old rocks are ready at your disposal to build a new one. Wood based cities was far little in the history and source woods in the surroundings. CA or modern wood/steel structure can't be recycled as they are.
> you completely omit the fact that we can't have modern rural living without cars, so the costs are much higher (both in terms of energy and money).
I do not omit, I APPLAUD car's need. Really. Public transport is a CAP-like theorem solution: or you get efficient public transport or you get economically sustainable one. Pick one only. If public transport is good to serve ALL Citizens ALL the time is terribly inefficient in energy and economic terms. If you try maximize "very used" transit than the service is terrible for Citizen and as a result citizens need cars. There is NO way to have effective public transit. Car's are not that efficient, but serve a purpose and in the New Deal setup are NEEDED because you can't live alone on renewables and you can't have an electricity grid on renewables the load vary so much no network can keep the frequency. To have a grid with big p.v./wind you need batteries, since they do not last longer and are not cheap... Well cars have casually a very similar lifecycle than cars using car's batteries makes the grid stable enough and casual blackouts a non-issues for homes who run on their batteries for a short period of time and the p.v. usage compensate another bit of the costs. If you think we can have a new deal without cars, you are just dreaming nuclear fusion or something else who is not there.
> Funny, what you describe is largely suburbia, which has lots of sustainability issues
Suburbs was a failure because was done in USA for cars. EU rivieras where single-families homes are mixed with workplaces on contrary prove in EU that they works better than cities in all terms.
> So how would this work, how are you proposing to spread out cities like New York, Tokyo or London?
I propose a SLOW de-urbanization following WFH and retirees who are the first two cohort who can leave a city. Behind them a small local service industry can spring to life and behind it more. So the economy can work. Only few productions still need density and for them we can build districts, they tend to be also polluting industries so having them apart is good anyway.
Public transport MUST NOT be done there, only private one.
Land use must be regulated with the sustainability principle: we allow as much homes as they can source water and subsistence food locally. This create also a resilient society in all terms, natural disasters, attacks etc. Transports are not an issue either because a local-centric economy lower the need for them and more important push the need of many smaller routes instead of big ones. You travel less because you need to travel less.
To visualize of course you need to really start thinking about a new society, otherwise you clearly fail but not differently than those from the past who say "fly? Ah, no, mans can't fly! They have no wings". Remember that at their times they have perfectly reasonable objections for their statements. not differently than those before against steel-made ships.