“I’ve never seen anybody walk into one of my buildings and hug a steel or a concrete column. But I’ve actually seen that in a wood building…. I like to think that wood gives Mother Nature fingerprints in our buildings. It’s Mother Nature’s fingerprints that make our buildings connect us to nature in a built environment.”
– Architect Michael Green
Let’s face it: we’re not really reinventing the wheel here.
For centuries, our ancestors have used wood to put a
roof over their heads, walls under the roof and furniture
inside the walls. It’s Mother Nature’s strongest, most readily-available, renewable, warm and welcoming building material.
And in today’s world, where we all share in the need to reduce our footprint on the environment, wood’s natural properties make it the obvious building material of choice.
Wood is organic, sustainable, natural, and renewable. It’s cost competitive with any other building material. It’s strong, lightweight, adaptable and seismically safe. It actually contributes to reducing climate change, because it requires less energy to manufacture than any other building material, and stores carbon naturally.
But beyond all its structural, environmental and economic benefits, perhaps wood’s greatest appeal, as Michael Green says, is that it takes us on a path back through our history and connects us to the natural world from which we came.
Simply put, wood makes us feel good.
For more information on the power of wood, click on the links below:
Feel-good.ca – Feel good about Canadian pulp, paper, and wood