Reflections on Wood and Sustainability
It’s been more than a month since the Maine Wood + Sustainability Conference, and it’s still a topic of conversation around the GO Logic studio. Measured in plain numbers, the event was a big success, exceeding its target attendance by 50 percent, and the presentations were enlightening and informative across the … um … board.
Among the highlights:
- Keynote speaker Tom Chung, of Leers Weinzapfel Associates, presented a case study of his acclaimed design for the John W. Olver Design Building at UMass Amherst, which made groundbreaking use of cross-laminated timber and wood-concrete composites in a large institutional building.
- Structural Engineer Nat Oppenheimer, a senior principal at Silman (and current GOL collaborator on a project for College of the Atlantic), shared his firm’s experience in pioneering code approval for mass timber projects.
- GO Lab president Joshua Henry reported on GO Lab’s progress in establishing North American manufacture of wood fiber-based insulation products, a potential boon for both high performance construction and Maine’s highly sustainable forest products industry.
- Tim Lock, GO Logic management director and Maine AIA board member, helped to organize, hosted, and moderated a panel of engineering, construction, and sustainability professionals on the opportunities—and imperative—to increase the use of sustainably grown wood in place of non-renewable building materials.
Our biggest take-away, though, was a sense of allied professions and industries coalescing around a shared vision. The short form is this: Wood is by far our most important renewable resource (less than a day’s worth of tree growth could satisfy a year’s worth of the country’s total construction material demand), and sustainable forests are central to Maine’s identity, economy, and way of life. Working in concert, we can both steward and cultivate that resource—preserving and managing forest ecosystems for long-term sustainability, increasing building energy performance, and creating a new model of economic growth that is regenerative rather than destructive.
Jaime Broadbent, Architect, Kaplan Thomson Architects and Timothy Lock, Management Director, GO Logic
Timothy Lock, GO Logic, moderates a panel including (from left to right) Deane Rykerson, Architect and State Legislator; Matt Tonello, Director of Operations/ME, Consigli; Darron Collins, President, College of the Atlantic; Paul Becker, PE, Becker Structural; Rob Ohtani, Thornton Thomasetti
Left to right: Jeannette Schram, Executive Director, AIA Maine; Lee Burnett, Local Woodworks; Naomi Beal, Executive Director, Passive House Maine
