Our biggest design decision
was no doubt the decision to build the whole office out of Massive Wood.
Very few multi-story offices in Europe have been built out of Massive Wood so
far and none yet in the Netherlands.
Massive Wood in this case
means something entirely different from using wood for some of the structures
and façades, as is commonplace in many buildings. No, here the entire structure
is made of massive wood, with no use of steel or concrete (except for the
basement floor and walls). The walls and floors will be built up of 26-36cm
massive wood panels, consisting of multiple cross-layers of glue-free solid FSC
fir wood, sustainably harvested in South Western Germany.
The decision to go for
massive wood was triggered by our quest to find a material for construction
that would not only answer all of our technical requirements to achieve high
energy goals (such as thermal mass, insulation, airtightness) but also score
very high in sustainability and health.
From a sustainability
perspective, there is no better building material than wood and it is very
unlikely that anything better can ever be developed. Which other material
absorbs so much CO2 during its growth and then provides such good thermal mass
and insulation values during its lifetime ?
Using wood may sound
unsustainable to some. We need as many trees as possible to absorb CO2 right ?
Correct! But a sustainably managed (FSC or PEFC) forest absorbs more CO2 than a
wild one, as the removal of grown-up trees creates space in the forest for
fast-growing young ones. So in fact wood from sustainable forests easily
outperforms any
After visiting multiple
suppliers and references in Austria and Germany we eventually selected
"NurHolz" from Rombach in Germany's Schwarzwald to supply pre-fab floor-
and wall- panels which can be quickly assembled on site in May. Trucking all of
these panels to Haelen of course takes a toll on our project's CO2 balance, but
that is easily compensated by the big CO2 savings that the material itself
provides when compared to concrete.
Is massive wood more
expensive ? Yes, in the short run it is. But we are very optimistic about
recovering the extra investment because there is no healthier environment to
work in. No glue, no paint, no cold radiation from walls or floors, perfect
comfort. If there is one building in which all risks of "sick building
syndrome" have been tackled, this is it.
We will all have to switch
our "take-make-waste" linear economy into a circular economy in which
all materials are either re-used or given back to nature. If we don't, there
simply won't be enough materials around for all of us. By building our office
out of one of nature's best products we make another small step in preparing
our company for the circular economy of tomorrow.
