Metropolis is honoring Green who has built some of the most significant timber structures in the world over his career.
Green’s firm, Michael Green Architecture, which he co-leads with Natalie Telewiak, has been recognized with over 50 awards for design excellence and now he is receiving the Planet Positive Visionary Award. Metropolis, the design website and publication, is presenting it in partnership with Teknion for “his pioneering work in timber architecture and his vision of an architecture fundamentally grounded in nature and the Earth.”
In the latest podcast episode of Deep Green, host Avinash Rajagopal sits down with Green to discuss the origins of mass timber, and the A&D industry’s climate responsibility when building with wood and more.
Rajagopal starts out asking Green how he first got involved with wood and forests: “There are two paths when I tell the story, and one is that when I was a little boy, my grandfather, who was a historian, just loved wood. I’m Canadian, but he was American, and he had a house in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and a woodshop. I would spend a lot of time there with him, and he would show me the wood and explain the different colors and the textures and how it moved.
“The other path was that I hiked a lot as a kid, and I ended up becoming a pretty avid mountain, ice and rock climber. It took me to all parts of the world, and in that process, I got to see the diverse ways people live—in remote communities and developing countries. That’s where I started seeing nature, the forests and people’s relationship with them quite differently, and started seeing a need for me to think about architecture differently, too.”
The podcaster then asks Green how mass timber construction got started in the US. “In 2010 the Olympics came to Vancouver, and before that, around 2006, the Austrian government—strangely, since I’m not of Austrian descent—asked me if I’d be interested in helping them design their country house for the Olympics, and they wanted me to learn about the technology happening in Austria.
“So, I went over, and I got an incredible tour of the early days of making cross-laminated timber. I’d already been building a lot in wood—big airports and things—but I got to see this new product, and I was, obviously, completely excited about it. But in Austria, wood was not the dominant way to build homes. In North America, we build in light wood frame. There, they were mostly building in concrete.
“The problem was they didn’t want to build like we do in North America. So they developed cross-laminated timber to build homes, single-family homes, with a material that felt a little more solid, like concrete or concrete block. But I knew that this material wouldn’t really work for that same purpose in North America. We already build light wood frame homes—they’re much less expensive and have been part of our building tradition here for 400 years.
“And so, I knew that this new CLT product in particular had to be doing something different. I came home and started playing with my six-year-old son, building these little slab-based, panel-based designs in the office. And all of a sudden, I realized, ‘Oh, maybe the answer is to build much, much taller. Maybe that’s what the difference is.’ And that was sort of the origin story of it, and it just grew and grew as an idea from there.”
The full podcast is available on the Surround Podcast Network.
