The future of design and construction is in light steel framing and avoids building with cement and mortar and other wet systems as much as possible for speed and precision.
Actually, the future of design and construction is in wood! You can actually grow trees, cut them down a rip them into pieces that you can build with speed and precision!
I was thinking about ham-n-cheese, as ya gotta feed the crew to keep them happy. no food = no construction, so lunch is the future!
some LCA people think that using recyclable materials like steel or alumninum is the best long-term choice, even with the destruction cuased by their extraction/refining. I prefer the renewables to the recyclables myself...
don't know any building product/material that doesn't use water for processing or to make...
so what uses the least water to fabricate/grow?
dimensional stone dry laid? but this isnt' weather tight...
steel uses gazillions of gallons from mining to refining.
concrete is pretty bad, terracotta/brick/tile- hmmm
plastics use tons of aqua in the oil refinery
If you ignore the water a tree needs to grow, there is still lots of h20 used in production from debarking to veneering.
Maybe an Igloo has the lowest % of any material since it's 100% nothing else and nothing lost in production.
Yes but once you process steel you can keep recycling it an unlimited number of times. Plus don't need much steel by weight than any other common material for a given structure. Concrete, bricks and wood take a lot more effort and skill to make and use and can't be recycled over and over again.
lets see- for steel you produce a huge carbon footprint of the coal/coke for the initial refining, then for recycling you get to play with a mini-mill that still uses limestone (lots of co2) and either more coke or shitloads of electricy generated by burning coal (not many steel mills run on hydro - that's aluminum's game). plus there's all the transport (diesel trucks) sorting and grinding before sending back into the smelter...
Oh, the basic oxygen furnace produces shitloads of CO2 which the scrubber can't get.
Steel doesn't look that good from a carbon p.o.v. and then there is the hole left after it's mined (plus all that overburden, slag, and tailings)
recycled conc/brick/cmu makes great base material for roads and foundations. wood can be turned into a biofuel or chipped into particle board
Magnesia- please take some time to research the entire subject before making claims about how green your product is...
But its the amount of steel needed compared to the cement and other materials. Same could be said about producing all other construction materials. The main issue is once its produced it can be reused an unlimited amount of times without having to dig more out of the ground. Everything else you have to keep making from raw materials. Plus I like trees with leaves on them so they can take back the CO2 that's produced by all the other activities you mentioned.
recycling steel still produces a deficit of CO2 emissions. cutting down a tree and replanting a new one is a net-zero-sum game. While it takes most tree species 20-40 years to grow large enough to be harvested these days, a managed forest is a much more productive/happy place then any reclaimed coal or iron pit mine...
And as you said, a tree can absorb/sequester co2 better then any high-tech method we have.
'I just think this is the material for the future and needs more attention from architectural designers.'
magnesiacore, the potential for steel has been fully explored and taken advantage of in the manner you suggest. neutra posited the same thing you are in 1929 when he built his lovell health house, and it was exhausted as an alternative during the case study program during the fifties. they learned, a long, long time ago, that it is actually not the future of construction as they hoped and as you suggest.
magnesiacore - What about the embodied energy in steel and steel recycling? Any #'s or ideas on that?
Please read "Cradle to Cradle" McDonough writes in one chapter on how the whole process of recy. steel is a designed flaw. When steel is recycled it is a random mix of all types and grades of steel that get smelted down into a new 'hybrid form of steel. He gives a great example on the aluminum coke can: the side is one type of metal and top and bottom are a completly differnet type so once recycled the can now becomes some hybrid alloy that dosent ever become a can a again. It goes on to make a watch. All this is i believe a form of down cycling and is the out come of design faliure. Why cant a coke cane be made out of ONE metal not THREE? Anyhow I would highly suggest that you pick up a copy of the book and read it - its a great book and dosent push and theory or ideas onto the reader, its more like a documentary of whats going on in the recycling centers and chemical labs and what nots.
Realisticly speaking, lumber industry can eat steel construction industry like an appetizer.
most common training programs for trades, building materials and tools are wood friendly and there are billions if not trillions already invested for this direction.
steel on the other hand has a lead role on commercial buildings. which brings the question to a building type.
also location is very important. as i'd like to point out, forestry is an industrialized country endeveor., where is world most population is in poorer geography and no way in hell they can build western style lumber construction.
it goes on and on.
i don't like this comperesant. it makes only a campy sense.i like all the choices, concrete, metal, wood, brick, yutong etc.
as long as we get a grip on "future is now issue" steven addressed.
this picture of massive lumber use for a family of three, can never be sold to me as renewable source. it is only renowable to 1% of the world population.
keep the greedy steel manufacturers out of our job sites. plus i hate the fuckin' sound of metal screw going into metal stud. my carpenter said he'd be a slap bitch before he screws tin.
fossil fuel requirements (or slackly embodied energy)
MJ/kg Megajoules per kilogram
rough sawn timber 1.5 MJ/kg or 750 MJ/m3
steel 35 MJ/kg or 26600 MJ/m3
concrete 2 MJ/kg or 4800 MJ/m3
aluminium 435MJ/kg or 1100000 MJ/m3
greenhouse gases etc.
per tonne
rough sawn timber carbon released 30kg/t carbon stored 250 kg/m3
steel carbon released 700kg/t carbon stored 0 kg/m3
concrete carbon released 50kg/t carbon stored 0 kg/m3
aluminium carbon released 8700kg/t carbon stored 0 kg/m3
disclaimer:opinion
the issues with forestry is that selective harvesting or planatation harvesting assists the development of a sustainable resourece. some species of timber can not be grown in planatations due to natural occuring fungus and diesease and growth patterns. making the excercise null and void.
way to address this for designers, architects engineers everyone really is to choose/specify timbers from planations were possible. everyone from clients upwards need to realise the "environmental" consquence of having a "rare species" timber floor, when an alternative is just as beautiful and easier to source this way. for example a huon pine table top or huon pine veneer on a table top is beautiful and "smart" use of the product. Huon pine flooring is ridiculous. (and you would not get or afford the quantities anyway :))
disclaimer no 2.
YES I am working in somewhat in the timber industry - researching production,sustainabilty issues, design, education etc etc, within an architecture school.
YES I am trained as an architect.
NO I am not registered.
YES I want to know more.....
Do I want to hear debate - SHIT YEAH. Talking to all sorts of people can produce a variety of soultions and ideas ....
do I support clearfelling. NO, not with the current techniques.
do i support burnoffs. No, but i understand that some trees release seeds this way, we need to investigate alternatives to this method of collection. yes, when it is used to remove fuel loads in a forest, a grey area of emotion...yes occurs naturally etc etc.
do I support selective harvesting. Yes to a point. but that is a story for another day. this post is getting very long....
do I support plantations. YES and NO. Monoculture plantations no, coverting farmland to planatations, I would rather not, but if consumers continue to grow at this rate and want to build houses then I rather plant a tree to be harvested in 80 years for my grandkids to build a house with...unless some one finds a alternative renewable sustainable material
do I support recycling. yes i do, especially in the current climate of demolish to build. recycle if you can.
do I support woodchipping. Yes and NO. chipping parts of a log that is waste and unusable to be used in any other process - yes. chipping whole trees - UGHHH NO!.
No material is without its benefits and advantages. Not every climate is suitable for wood construction. The point I was trying to make is that say you use light weight steel studs to build a house, it takes less of it that any other material by weight. You can't build lighter in weight than metal studs. Plus most metal studs are made from recycled metal. Granted building in structural steel with HSS, posts and beams may not be advantageous, if metal studs are used made from metal that use to be cars or whatever other prior used goods, it functions and recycling and provides a light weight structural material without mining or cutting down anything.
your are correct that not every climate is suitable for timber construction. "Lightness" in a building structure is important in a variety of typologies and site context. This is the great thing about sustainable design, is that it makes us as designers question, the location, need and buidling construction type and technique. as you mentioned in your first post, there are advantages to building with speed and certain materials, say in remote locations with transport, and not ideal build conditions, or resources...
Idealistically recycling car parts for reuse is a great idea. It stops us sourcing a material from a non renewable resource. Though the other thought to ponder is how it is recycled? I am limited on the knowledge, but to create a new stud from recycled car parts, would require massive amounts of fossil fuel to refine. Does this not add to the amount of carbons released into the atmosphere, and requires us to use a non-renewable resource such as fossil fuel to do so? :)
I think it takes less energy to melt exiting metal than to smelt ore into metal in the first place. To build a whole house with metal studs you can probably load all the studs you need in a pick-up truck and does not weigh all that much. The same house needs a transport truck load of timber and I don't know how many trees worth of material.
Someone would need to do an energy use study with one house as an example to see what different material consume energy wise to build it.
yes you are most likely right- less energy is needed to melt existing metal, than ore metal. but where does that energy come from? fossil fuel or renewable energy sources.
yes i agreed with you in the above post about transport, though maybe not in a very clear way.(sorry) A lightweight material is easier to transport..... this is the part of the deiight about the embodied energy debate.
thus the further delicousness in the following hypothetical equations:
recycled metal studs + transport (pick up/ute) = 2x
dressed timber + transport (big truck) = 3x
however in reality in LCA, (not the end user use of energy or energy efficency of a building)and the following equation is just the tip of the iceburg.... it just goes on and on.......like an all day sucker lollipop!
mine ore + transport + metal make +transport + car assembly + drive car + dead car + transport to refine + refine + recycled metal studs + transport (pick up/ute) = 11x
wood + log truck + sawmill+ transport (bigtruck) = 5x
ahh the delights of LCA. and as you suggested there are a number of projects as you mentioned already happening. If interested I can get the info for you; a number of the people I am working with are researching (and constructing) the energy effeciency of building and how this compares with different materials and building practices for their PHD and other programs, and as part of this looked into the LCA ( and have been shocked at the connectivity of process and productions ) of different materials as part of this...
as suggested by 24-7tecture have a look at "Cradle to Cradle"...
.......steel stud work is great.it is even greater when used smartly for a complex array of reasons and a rational understanding of materials/architecture/site....:)
You would have to factor out the value of the car and the fact that the car is going to get made run for 15 years and then die after serving its purpose... whether you build the house or not. So you realy can start the calculations from the dead car forward.
Then you have to factor in the life of the building with all steel and with all wood. I think one would get more millage out of the house made of all steel studs than wood.... less rebuilding.
The future of design and construction
The future of design and construction is in light steel framing and avoids building with cement and mortar and other wet systems as much as possible for speed and precision.
I found good resources at http://www.steelframingalliance.com/mc/page.do
is this spam?????
Didn't know we had any product reps on the website.
I support steel, cement and such but dude!
Actually, the future of design and construction is in wood! You can actually grow trees, cut them down a rip them into pieces that you can build with speed and precision!
Jesus was a carpenter...no wonder why so many support wood construction :) Ok, treekiller, chime in here...
I was thinking about ham-n-cheese, as ya gotta feed the crew to keep them happy. no food = no construction, so lunch is the future!
some LCA people think that using recyclable materials like steel or alumninum is the best long-term choice, even with the destruction cuased by their extraction/refining. I prefer the renewables to the recyclables myself...
how about bamboo? bamboo grows so fast and can be used in many different ways.
but can you build without any water???
don't know any building product/material that doesn't use water for processing or to make...
so what uses the least water to fabricate/grow?
dimensional stone dry laid? but this isnt' weather tight...
steel uses gazillions of gallons from mining to refining.
concrete is pretty bad, terracotta/brick/tile- hmmm
plastics use tons of aqua in the oil refinery
If you ignore the water a tree needs to grow, there is still lots of h20 used in production from debarking to veneering.
Maybe an Igloo has the lowest % of any material since it's 100% nothing else and nothing lost in production.
Yes but once you process steel you can keep recycling it an unlimited number of times. Plus don't need much steel by weight than any other common material for a given structure. Concrete, bricks and wood take a lot more effort and skill to make and use and can't be recycled over and over again.
lets see- for steel you produce a huge carbon footprint of the coal/coke for the initial refining, then for recycling you get to play with a mini-mill that still uses limestone (lots of co2) and either more coke or shitloads of electricy generated by burning coal (not many steel mills run on hydro - that's aluminum's game). plus there's all the transport (diesel trucks) sorting and grinding before sending back into the smelter...
Oh, the basic oxygen furnace produces shitloads of CO2 which the scrubber can't get.
Steel doesn't look that good from a carbon p.o.v. and then there is the hole left after it's mined (plus all that overburden, slag, and tailings)
recycled conc/brick/cmu makes great base material for roads and foundations. wood can be turned into a biofuel or chipped into particle board
Magnesia- please take some time to research the entire subject before making claims about how green your product is...
But its the amount of steel needed compared to the cement and other materials. Same could be said about producing all other construction materials. The main issue is once its produced it can be reused an unlimited amount of times without having to dig more out of the ground. Everything else you have to keep making from raw materials. Plus I like trees with leaves on them so they can take back the CO2 that's produced by all the other activities you mentioned.
...I am not in the steel business. I just think this is the material for the future and needs more attention from architectural designers.
recycling steel still produces a deficit of CO2 emissions. cutting down a tree and replanting a new one is a net-zero-sum game. While it takes most tree species 20-40 years to grow large enough to be harvested these days, a managed forest is a much more productive/happy place then any reclaimed coal or iron pit mine...
And as you said, a tree can absorb/sequester co2 better then any high-tech method we have.
'I just think this is the material for the future and needs more attention from architectural designers.'
magnesiacore, the potential for steel has been fully explored and taken advantage of in the manner you suggest. neutra posited the same thing you are in 1929 when he built his lovell health house, and it was exhausted as an alternative during the case study program during the fifties. they learned, a long, long time ago, that it is actually not the future of construction as they hoped and as you suggest.
magnesiacore - What about the embodied energy in steel and steel recycling? Any #'s or ideas on that?
Please read "Cradle to Cradle" McDonough writes in one chapter on how the whole process of recy. steel is a designed flaw. When steel is recycled it is a random mix of all types and grades of steel that get smelted down into a new 'hybrid form of steel. He gives a great example on the aluminum coke can: the side is one type of metal and top and bottom are a completly differnet type so once recycled the can now becomes some hybrid alloy that dosent ever become a can a again. It goes on to make a watch. All this is i believe a form of down cycling and is the out come of design faliure. Why cant a coke cane be made out of ONE metal not THREE? Anyhow I would highly suggest that you pick up a copy of the book and read it - its a great book and dosent push and theory or ideas onto the reader, its more like a documentary of whats going on in the recycling centers and chemical labs and what nots.
the future is now.
Realisticly speaking, lumber industry can eat steel construction industry like an appetizer.
most common training programs for trades, building materials and tools are wood friendly and there are billions if not trillions already invested for this direction.
steel on the other hand has a lead role on commercial buildings. which brings the question to a building type.
also location is very important. as i'd like to point out, forestry is an industrialized country endeveor., where is world most population is in poorer geography and no way in hell they can build western style lumber construction.
it goes on and on.
i don't like this comperesant. it makes only a campy sense.i like all the choices, concrete, metal, wood, brick, yutong etc.
as long as we get a grip on "future is now issue" steven addressed.
this picture of massive lumber use for a family of three, can never be sold to me as renewable source. it is only renowable to 1% of the world population.
i'll add this too;
lumber industry is pretty much construction dependent whereas steel is a much more widely used in most industrial consumer objects.
keep the greedy steel manufacturers out of our job sites. plus i hate the fuckin' sound of metal screw going into metal stud. my carpenter said he'd be a slap bitch before he screws tin.
If we stop building with wood what the heck are all those carpenters going to do, become Architects?
okay my two bobs worth.
fossil fuel requirements (or slackly embodied energy)
MJ/kg Megajoules per kilogram
rough sawn timber 1.5 MJ/kg or 750 MJ/m3
steel 35 MJ/kg or 26600 MJ/m3
concrete 2 MJ/kg or 4800 MJ/m3
aluminium 435MJ/kg or 1100000 MJ/m3
greenhouse gases etc.
per tonne
rough sawn timber carbon released 30kg/t carbon stored 250 kg/m3
steel carbon released 700kg/t carbon stored 0 kg/m3
concrete carbon released 50kg/t carbon stored 0 kg/m3
aluminium carbon released 8700kg/t carbon stored 0 kg/m3
disclaimer:opinion
the issues with forestry is that selective harvesting or planatation harvesting assists the development of a sustainable resourece. some species of timber can not be grown in planatations due to natural occuring fungus and diesease and growth patterns. making the excercise null and void.
way to address this for designers, architects engineers everyone really is to choose/specify timbers from planations were possible. everyone from clients upwards need to realise the "environmental" consquence of having a "rare species" timber floor, when an alternative is just as beautiful and easier to source this way. for example a huon pine table top or huon pine veneer on a table top is beautiful and "smart" use of the product. Huon pine flooring is ridiculous. (and you would not get or afford the quantities anyway :))
disclaimer no 2.
YES I am working in somewhat in the timber industry - researching production,sustainabilty issues, design, education etc etc, within an architecture school.
YES I am trained as an architect.
NO I am not registered.
YES I want to know more.....
Do I want to hear debate - SHIT YEAH. Talking to all sorts of people can produce a variety of soultions and ideas ....
do I support clearfelling. NO, not with the current techniques.
do i support burnoffs. No, but i understand that some trees release seeds this way, we need to investigate alternatives to this method of collection. yes, when it is used to remove fuel loads in a forest, a grey area of emotion...yes occurs naturally etc etc.
do I support selective harvesting. Yes to a point. but that is a story for another day. this post is getting very long....
do I support plantations. YES and NO. Monoculture plantations no, coverting farmland to planatations, I would rather not, but if consumers continue to grow at this rate and want to build houses then I rather plant a tree to be harvested in 80 years for my grandkids to build a house with...unless some one finds a alternative renewable sustainable material
do I support recycling. yes i do, especially in the current climate of demolish to build. recycle if you can.
do I support woodchipping. Yes and NO. chipping parts of a log that is waste and unusable to be used in any other process - yes. chipping whole trees - UGHHH NO!.
apologies a bit more than two bobs worth.
No material is without its benefits and advantages. Not every climate is suitable for wood construction. The point I was trying to make is that say you use light weight steel studs to build a house, it takes less of it that any other material by weight. You can't build lighter in weight than metal studs. Plus most metal studs are made from recycled metal. Granted building in structural steel with HSS, posts and beams may not be advantageous, if metal studs are used made from metal that use to be cars or whatever other prior used goods, it functions and recycling and provides a light weight structural material without mining or cutting down anything.
magnesiacore.
hi.
sustainability is a great debate. :)
your are correct that not every climate is suitable for timber construction. "Lightness" in a building structure is important in a variety of typologies and site context. This is the great thing about sustainable design, is that it makes us as designers question, the location, need and buidling construction type and technique. as you mentioned in your first post, there are advantages to building with speed and certain materials, say in remote locations with transport, and not ideal build conditions, or resources...
Idealistically recycling car parts for reuse is a great idea. It stops us sourcing a material from a non renewable resource. Though the other thought to ponder is how it is recycled? I am limited on the knowledge, but to create a new stud from recycled car parts, would require massive amounts of fossil fuel to refine. Does this not add to the amount of carbons released into the atmosphere, and requires us to use a non-renewable resource such as fossil fuel to do so? :)
I think it takes less energy to melt exiting metal than to smelt ore into metal in the first place. To build a whole house with metal studs you can probably load all the studs you need in a pick-up truck and does not weigh all that much. The same house needs a transport truck load of timber and I don't know how many trees worth of material.
Someone would need to do an energy use study with one house as an example to see what different material consume energy wise to build it.
sustainability debate again :) YAY
yes you are most likely right- less energy is needed to melt existing metal, than ore metal. but where does that energy come from? fossil fuel or renewable energy sources.
yes i agreed with you in the above post about transport, though maybe not in a very clear way.(sorry) A lightweight material is easier to transport..... this is the part of the deiight about the embodied energy debate.
thus the further delicousness in the following hypothetical equations:
recycled metal studs + transport (pick up/ute) = 2x
dressed timber + transport (big truck) = 3x
however in reality in LCA, (not the end user use of energy or energy efficency of a building)and the following equation is just the tip of the iceburg.... it just goes on and on.......like an all day sucker lollipop!
mine ore + transport + metal make +transport + car assembly + drive car + dead car + transport to refine + refine + recycled metal studs + transport (pick up/ute) = 11x
wood + log truck + sawmill+ transport (bigtruck) = 5x
ahh the delights of LCA. and as you suggested there are a number of projects as you mentioned already happening. If interested I can get the info for you; a number of the people I am working with are researching (and constructing) the energy effeciency of building and how this compares with different materials and building practices for their PHD and other programs, and as part of this looked into the LCA ( and have been shocked at the connectivity of process and productions ) of different materials as part of this...
as suggested by 24-7tecture have a look at "Cradle to Cradle"...
.......steel stud work is great.it is even greater when used smartly for a complex array of reasons and a rational understanding of materials/architecture/site....:)
You would have to factor out the value of the car and the fact that the car is going to get made run for 15 years and then die after serving its purpose... whether you build the house or not. So you realy can start the calculations from the dead car forward.
Then you have to factor in the life of the building with all steel and with all wood. I think one would get more millage out of the house made of all steel studs than wood.... less rebuilding.
yes,as i said the tip of the iceburg in LCA calcuations :)
[/img]
light steel framing?
that ain't light steel...
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