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“Urban Sequoia” concept from SOM envisions cities of carbon sequestering & carbon removing structures gains steam 🌲

With severe climate related oddities starting to take hold worldwide, people are once again panicking over the potential impacts of climate change (for good reason) and rushing towards sustainable development. Having our own industry, the construction sector, contributing up to 39% of global CO2 emissions is an absolute nightmare, but this also means that we have a lot of the power in how we as industry professionals deal with it (like with SE2050).

SOM, one of the most well known architectural firms in the world, has an answer to this in the form of Urban Sequoia, an ambitious high-rise building concept that seeks to use carbon sequestration, carbon capture technologies, and an “inversion” of the traditional floor system to absorb “more than 300 percent of the amount of carbon emitted in its construction and operation.”.

While the vision is definitely something to behold, the non-existent details of the structural system, material choices, and construction methodology, as well as the extremely high costs of current direct carbon capture systems makes me a bit hesitant to regard this as anything more than architectural fluff and a marketing ploy.

Other, actual, efforts in the area of high-rises utilizing carbon sequestering materials (aka wood) as the primary structure have already borne fruit and can be better evaluated. Some quick examples include the Brock Commons Tallwood House at the University of British Columbia and Voll Arkitekter’s Mjøstårnet tower in Norway.

However, a large part of what makes tall-wood projects so difficult is the current regulatory framework surrounding wood-based construction in both Canada and the United States. Though there is much precedent and research done to support this, many tall-wood projects will still need to follow the alternative solution pathway and its many hurdles for the design to be accepted by the jurisdiction.

Lightning Round

• US financial markets (S&P 500 at $5149, DJIA at $39 097) as well as Bitcoin ($67 662) reaches all time highs as investors jump in to the markets

• Elon Musk, who was one of the co-founders of OpenAI, sues OpenAI for “abandoning original mission for profit”

• BC implements a 20% Home Flipping Tax to curb speculation

Quick Tips

• Excel quick tip!

  • Use PivotTables, and PivotCharts to organize, sort, aggregate, and visualize your data → Don’t overly mess with the original table of source information to do data aggregation as that can lead to a lot of data-related headaches down the line.