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Frontiers of Engineering Reports on Leading-Edge Engineering from the 2017 Symposium (2018) / Chapter Skim
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Supertall Timber: Functional Natural Materials for High-Rise Structures - Michael H. Ramage
Pages 99-104

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From page 99...
... . The scale of these contemporary buildings is significant, as the first metalframed skyscraper, William Le Baron Jenney's Home Insurance Building in C ­ hicago, was 55 meters tall when completed in 1891, and 1931 saw the completion of the Empire State Building in New York City, at 381 meters.
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From page 100...
... 100 FRONTIERS OF ENGINEERING FIGURE 1  Treet, a 14-story apartment building in Bergen, Norway, rises 52.8 meters and is made of cross-laminated and glued laminated timber.
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From page 101...
... CURRENT DEVELOPMENTS AND APPLICATIONS Novel properties in trees may give rise to a new class of natural materials, but engineered timber products on the market are already giving designers around the 1 Also see the 2013 technical report of the SOM Timber Tower Research Project, available at http:// www.som.com/ideas/research/timber_tower_research_project. 2  Supertall buildings are 300–600 meters.
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From page 102...
... Our supertall timber project, in which we have designed wooden skyscrapers (Figure 2) , shows the viability of commercial and residential buildings at a new scale in timber, using components and materials that are commercially available FIGURE 2  Maquette of River Beech Tower proposed for Chicago.
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From page 103...
... We roughly redesigned the Treet building in reinforced concrete for com parison and discovered that it would have five times as much steel in it as the timber building. • The savings multiplier on construction truck traffic can be as high as eight.3 These savings have implications for today's crowded metropo lises: smaller foundations, or indeed no new ones, as the existing foun dation for a demolished 10-story concrete building can hold a timber building three to four times as tall, with quieter construction and smaller cranes.
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From page 104...
... ACKNOWLEDGMENT This research is supported by EPSRC Grant EP/M01679X/1 and by a L ­ everhulme Trust Programme Grant. REFERENCES Foster RM, Reynolds TPS, Ramage MH.
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Key Terms

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  • supertall timber
  • engineered timber
  • building materials
  • tall timber

  • timber tower
  • plant cells
  • wood buildings
  • functional properties
  • super tall

  • current developments
  • times lighter
  • construction truck
  • residential skyscraper
  • using components

  • seagate structures
  • cell walls
  • using wood
  • timber products
  • specific functional

  • contemporary timber
  • woodworking equipment
  • veneer lumber
  • using current
  • methods exist

  • forest products
  • tower proposed
  • entire population
  • axial strength
  • tallest timber


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