The Material Revolutionizing the Construction Industry? Wood

When the empire state building was completed in 1931, the 102-story skyscraper ranked as the tallest in the world, a beacon of American progress as well as a lightning rod for Midtown Manhattan. And the material that made it possible was steel - or so people believed until 2015, when Canadian architect Michael Green showed that an identical structure could be fabricated out of timber.

Green was not proposing replacing the 20th-century icon. His plans are far more radical. Green wants the global construction industry to replace steel and concrete with high-tech plywood.  “We’re not even close to meeting global needs when it comes to housing people in a safe and affordable way,” he says. Plus, the construction of buildings is responsible for around 10 percent of all global climate emissions. Green claims that these interrelated problems can both be addressed by building with timber from sustainably grown forests. To show the high-reaching potential of wood in the real world, in 2016 he erected a seven-story high-rise in Minneapolis, the tallest wooden building in the U.S. at the time.