‘Tall Wood’ — World’s Tallest Wood Skyscraper Proposed by MGA

Michael Green Architects (MGA) is a 14 person architecture and interior design firm based in Vancouver BC. The office is the latest design company to promote the use of wood in the construction of tall buildings.

Michael Green’s design calls for a 30-story tower, based on laminated composite wood. Mass timber products using layers of wood fused together at right angles are strong enough to handle load-bearing infrastructure, walls and floors, he told CNN .

“We think we can go higher than 30 stories,” Mr. Green told the network. “We stopped exploring wood around 100 years ago (with the advent of steel and concrete); now we’re looking at a whole new system using mass timber products.”

Cutting down trees doesn’t sound like the most environmentally sensitive approach, the reporter notes. But Mr. Green argued that using wood from sustainable forests and the carbon dioxide savings make wood an eco-choice.

Last week the Canadian Wood Council released a detailed study suggesting a wood-based structural system “represents the first significant challenge to concrete and steel structures since their inception in tall building design more than a century ago.”

Green has documented his research and design specifications and generously published the results in an open source paper – a kind of instruction manual for building really tall wood buildings.