Houston Chronicle by R.A. Schuetz 3/24/2019
LUFKIN, TEXAS — Tall pines blanket much of East Texas. Amid them, hunters stalk the deer, hogs and fowl that flit between the trees. The forests cover more than 75 percent of Hardin, Tyler, Polk, Jasper, Newton and Marion counties and take up more than half the land in two dozen more.
And if you look closely, at just the right angle, the apparent wilderness resolves into perfect rows, like a field of corn.
The region’s native trees have been harnessed into what’s known as the “wood basket†of the nation by foresters such as Rob Hughes, president of the Texas Forestry Association. More than 7 billion trees are being grown for harvest in East Texas, mostly on private land. On a recent Monday, Hughes drove through Lufkin, a city of 36,000, pointing out tree farms of various ages and the logging trucks hauling lumber down the other side of the road.
Mostly used until now to frame single-family home and for everyday products such as paper and furniture, the southern yellow pine grown along the Gulf Coast could soon be destined for structures unlike anything United States has ever seen: wooden high-rises 18 stories tall.
Engineering advances have greatly increased the strength, rigidity and stability of wood as a building material. As a result, the International Building Code, which forms the basis of many cities’ building regulations, decided in January to more than double the allowed height of a wooden building to 18 stories.
The new code has the potential to transform both foresting communities and cityscapes.
“We are very excited about it,†Hughes said. “There’s still a place for a skyscraper built of concrete and steel. But if it’s a smaller building, within what’s allowable, we hope that people consider buildings made of wood instead.â€
Reinforcing wood’s appeal
There was a time when timber ruled construction in North America.
“When Europeans arrived … they had all these old forests with 200-, 300-year-old trees, and that’s what the country was built of,†said Jesus Vassallo, a professor of architecture at Rice University. That changed around the turn of the 20th century, for a number reasons, including the Great Chicago Fire, the advent of steel-reinforced concrete, stricter buildings codes and the limited supply of old-growth forest.
“When we ran out of that forest, we had to stop that kind of construction,†Vassallo said.
Mass timber — a category of engineered wood products using glue or nails to turn layers of stacked lumber into large panels and beams — addressed many of the concerns surrounding wood structures. Fire studies have shown that the large wood panels burn much differently than two-by-fours: mass timber forms a layer of char that actually acts as insulation, helping it resist burning for more than two hours.
It will likely take another two years before cities begin adopting the code, but developers have begun to push up against current limits. Houston-based Hines has built multiple 85-foot-tall wooden buildings (which is the current height limit) and says there is no reason it could not go higher when limits increase.
“We’re just on the forefront of this wave,†said Gensler architect Taylor Coleman, who designed the first building in the nation to use southern yellow pine in a mass timber product known as cross-laminated timber. Cross-laminated timber, which has its origins in Germany in the 1990s, consists of several layers of boards that are dried and then glued and stacked in alternating directions before being placed under pressure to form panels suitable for construction use.
More:
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/article/East-Texas-nation-s-wood-basket-13707045.php
