I live in big, beautiful British Columbia,
and my life is fueled by exploring nature
both at home and around the world.
In fact, this is from the Himalaya
just a few months ago
when I was climbing there.
Nature is a huge part of my life
and it inspires my creative
and professional world as well.
I work hard with my team
inspired by nature in Vancouver,
designing buildings.
As an architecture practice,
we have two main missions.
Our first mission is to focus
on making beautiful buildings
that serve our community
and respond to the needs
of the people within them.
The second mission we have
is focused on the fact
that the first mission has a huge impact
on the planet and on climate change,
and we have to work to reduce it.
As a result, our firm is often called
a highly sustainable practice,
and the truth is, it really isn't.
In fact, I don't believe
that word "sustainable building"
or "sustainable practice"
is really true in most cases.
And the reason is the built environment
uses an enormous amount
of the world's resources,
and far too few of those
come from renewable resources.
In fact, the vast majority of the material
that man makes on Earth
goes into the built environment.
The other challenge with buildings
is they represent about 39%
of our greenhouse gas emissions,
or, in North America,
almost half of our
greenhouse gas emissions.
For reference, because
it's not talked about enough,
all of cars, planes, automobiles,
the entire transportation sector combined
represent only about 23%.
So buildings are
a huge part of the problem
and not discussed enough.
The reason for that are both the heating
and cooling of buildings, of course,
but also the materials
that go into buildings.
And when it comes to materials,
the buildings' structures,
what holds the buildings up,
really are composed
of four major materials
in every city on the planet:
concrete, steel, masonry and wood.
And of those four materials,
three of them have
very, very high carbon footprints,
in particular concrete and steel.
Now, wood is the only
material on that list
that's also a renewable resource
and sequesters carbon.
So it's the only pathway as a material
that actually can get us
to carbon-neutral buildings.
And it's the pathway we choose
in our practice to build all buildings.
So our practice has been
a timber-only practice since our inception
and as part of our advocacy
for the use of wood in buildings,
about 15 years ago, I wrote a book
called "The Case for Tall Wood Buildings,"
and that book taught the lesson
of why we should do this
and how we should do this.
And in the beginning,
it was a very unlikely concept
that people had a hard time believing.
And yes, we figured out
that we could have built
the Empire State Building
entirely out of wood.
That early idea
now is a mainstream concept
around the world
in sustainable building practices,
and there are hundreds
of tall wood buildings
that have either been built
or are currently under design
and construction,
and thousands more to come.
But wood as a sustainable idea
is not sustainable
unless it actually comes
from sustainable forest practices.
And much of the planet has forests
that we actually need to keep standing
as part of our climate solution.
And in fact, lots of the world
have forests that are under deep threat.
If we think about where population
in the world mostly resides
and where it's growing the quickest,
in fact, most of those areas
either don't have forests
or also are aware
these forests are threatened.
And so wood, as good a solution as it is
and a solution that
I still very much believe in,
is not a global solution.
Most of our cities are still built
in those first three materials:
steel, concrete and masonry,
and they have a high carbon footprint.
We're working hard
and people are working hard
to make concrete and steel better.
But unfortunately,
tweaking those existing materials
is making them only modestly better.
In the case of concrete,
it's estimated they can reduce
the carbon footprint of concrete
at best between 10% and 35%.
And that's a long way to go
from where we need to be,
either at carbon neutrality in our cities,
or better yet, in carbon-sequestering,
carbon-negative buildings.
So how do we get there?
After building about 1.5 million
square feet of mass timber
I still believe in that material,
but I keep asking myself this question:
what is the alternative to “the big four”?
And the answer, in my mind
without question,
is studying and understanding
what's happening in nature
and nature's structures,
combining that with modern biotechnology
and combining that
with all of the computer modeling
that allows us to make incredibly
efficient structures going forward.
All those things together
are creating what we call “Five.”
Five is a fifth way,
a new structural material
that will replace, in my mind over time,
“the big four.”
It's an all-organic material
made from forests and crops
that can be grown all over the world.
It's strong and safe,
and it eventually will be cost-effective
and competitive against
any other material available.
Now, this isn't a new idea.
Products made from natural materials,
thankfully, are growing up everywhere.
There's a huge industry
of biomaterials in academia,
as well as in private business.
And we're seeing new products
come online every day.
This community is strong
and hopefully getting stronger
and our contribution to it
is really focused on this idea
of the biggest material use,
which again is the building structure.
So how does it work?
So the idea is based on the same concept
of how a tree works
or any other vascular plant.
As we zoom in, a tree is sort of
made of lignified tissues
that go from the bottom
of the tree to the top,
as are plants.
And those lignified tissues
have within them, in cell structure,
cellulose fibers and lignin
that together make the plant strong
in order to grow and thrive.
And those two materials,
the fiber in the plant,
as well as the lignin,
as well as other binders,
make up the ingredients
of what we call Five.
Studying the fibers
and how they work in plants
is another part of how
we're trying to make this structure.
And if we all imagine cutting through
a branch as the image just showed,
we know that nature finds
very efficient ways to create structures,
and they're often round like a branch.
But as humans, we tend to
make boxy structures.
And the reason we do that is concrete,
steel and these materials and wood,
are more efficient
when we form them as a box
or when we cut them as a box,
It's more affordable
and that's why we see it.
So a typical structure has columns
and beams and a slab that make it up,
and they're very boxy forms,
as you can see in the image.
Now different structures
behave very differently all the time.
This particular structure
is an example from a tall building,
but if we were talking about a house,
it would be a different structure.
Or if we're talking about a hockey rink,
it would be another structure.
So just in this example,
how do the forces work?
Well, you have the force
of the weight of people
and you have the force
of the weight of the building above.
You have wind blowing on the sides
or an earthquake impacting it.
The forces, as they press down
on this particular example,
in blue are forces of compression.
That’s the squeezing forces, pushing down.
And the forces here in yellow
are the tension forces,
the pulling apart on that structure.
When we put those together,
we see how the forces move
to the ground through this simple frame.
And it's sort of a flowing diagram.
In fact, when we use
what's called a structural stress plot,
you can see that the form
is very natural in its character.
But as I said,
we build things out of boxes,
and when we overlap in our example,
a boxy structure of wood, for example,
we see these areas in red
which really are unnecessary.
There wasted material
in the current way we build.
In this example,
working with our engineers,
we actually calculated
that this particular example
would result in about 27% material waste.
Now all buildings are different.
It's very hard to make
a sort of overall calculation,
some buildings are more efficient,
some less efficient.
But if we multiply this
by the amount of building
that needs to be built over
the next 40 years for humanity,
it's an incredible amount of human waste.
And poor use of our resources.
So our goal with Five is how do we use
as little resources as possible?
And when you use
little resources in a building,
you lighten the building up,
and a lighter building actually means
that it weighs less on the ground,
and our foundations below the ground
can be lighter as well.
So less resources equals lighter buildings
equals even less resources.
Taking this idea of how Five can use less,
we took four existing known solutions
and put them together.
The first is we take
those plant fibers I described
and that can come from trees,
that can come from plants, grass, bamboo.
It can come from waste wood products.
It can come from clearing
the understory of a forest
to make it less likely for forest fire
in places like California.
We take those fibers and combine them
with other organic binders and lignin
in order to sort of
create a solid product.
And then we take these computer models
that allow us to really design efficiency
into the way we build
so we can boil out all that waste.
And then finally,
we're going to use custom robotics.
That means that every part of a building,
rather than being cookie cutter
and the same and wasteful,
could be just as much material
as needed and no more
in order to make the building safe.
Together, that makes something
that looks like this.
And again, this is an example.
The flat top is flat
because we walk on floors,
but underneath the building
looks more organic in its shape,
and as you can see,
these beams and columns
feel a little bit more like branches
and more like what we see in nature.
As we zoom in even further,
we start to see
how it's actually composed.
And you may think in your mind:
is this fiberboard?
Is this particleboard, things
you’ve seen before?
Well, actually what we're talking about
is a very microscopic layering
of these plant fibers
that are just a millimeter long.
By laying them together
and cross-laminating them
across each other,
we can customize the way,
based again on a structural model,
exactly how the composition
of each piece of the material works
in order to make
it as efficient as possible.
We combine it with these
organic polymers and lignin
and ultimately make
this material as strong, dense,
and it behaves much like a tree would.
Now we do that in another unique way
in the way the forming works.
Because no pieces of a structure
have to be the same
and we want to reduce waste,
we use robotic forms and fabric forms.
The red is fabric that moves in and out
and allows each piece of the building
to be completely, uniquely customizable.
And again, we're using it
to reduce the waste of the structure.
Now when we put that all together,
it looks like something
completely different,
something that none of us
have seen before.
It's not like steel,
it's not like concrete
and it's not like wood.
Instead, in this example, what you see
is an entirely plant-based structure.
It's healthy and beautiful to be around.
Its shapes are not there as decoration.
They're there
as just structural essentials,
and yet they're beautiful.
It's safe to be within.
It sequesters carbon,
so it's part of our solution
for climate change.
I believe we cannot continue
to work with broken systems
and try to make them better.
We have to imagine something next.
We also can't wait
for the world's resources to run out
before we imagine a future
that's different.
We are no longer part
of an industrial revolution of materials.
We are at the beginning of Mother Nature's
revolution of materials.
And as a result, we can make much more
beautiful environments for everyone.
As I walk around the forest of my home
and I look up into the trees
and imagine what the buildings
of the future are,
I imagine that they'll use less resources,
they'll have less impact.
They will still make strong,
healthy communities for all of us.
But they'll do so more efficiently.
All of these ideas
are ideas that already exist.
There's nothing new here.
We have an opportunity to live
in a completely biological world.
We just have to decide to do so.
There is a community growing of companies
and products of biomaterials
that are available,
and every day there are new materials
introduced into the system.
We can and we will solve this combination
of human need and the planet's need
at the same time.
All we need to do is listen to nature
and let her teach us how.
Thank you.
(Applause)