Our use of wood is good and world will know about it
John Bermingham
Province
Vancouver’s award-winning Convention Centre expansion features a ‘living roof.’ Created to extend a folded landscape up from Stanley Park, it uses treated blackwater from the building’s toilets. Photograph by: Arlen Redekop, The Province
B.C. wood is good, and the province’s forests minister plans to tell the world all about it.
Pat Bell said green-building features at Olympic venues, nine of which were honoured in Vancouver yesterday, will showcase the potential of B.C. wood for commercial buildings worldwide.
“The world’s decision-makers are going to be in Vancouver,” Bell said.
“I think if there’s going to be a story told through the games, it’s going to be the use of wood products in all of the various buildings.”
Housing construction has a boom-bust cycle, but commercial building is more resilient, he said.
“We’re competing with concrete and steel,” added Bell.
“In a new, low-carbon economy, where people are looking at building larger group buildings in a green way, reducing their carbon footprint, utilizing wood makes all the sense in the world, and has a great story to tell.”
The Globe Foundation and World Green Building Council presented green-building awards to architects who have helped make the 2010 games the greenest Olympics ever.
Dan Doyle, who headed venue construction for the Vancouver Olympic Games Organizing Committee, said organizers kept their promise to build sustainably.
“We did everything we could possibly do to make sure we had the greenest venues,” he said, after receiving the award for VANOC. “We are going to be leaving a green building legacy, and some very beautiful buildings.”
Award-winner Ron Beaton, lead architect for construction at the Vancouver Convention Centre expansion, said its “living roof” was created to extend a folded landscape up from Stanley Park.
“The roof will change over years and seasons,” Beaton said. “It will change colour. It will change species.”
The roof uses treated blackwater from toilets. After the games, the walkway outside will add 90,000 square feet of retail and commercial space. “There will be restaurants, a bike-rental place, an ice-cream parlour,” Beaton said.
Bob Johnston, lead architect in the Richmond Oval project, said the facility’s huge ceiling was built from salvaged mountain-pine-beetle wood by nailing together two-by-fours. “These wood-wave panels
. . . have gaps in them and allow sound to go into the voids between the wood-framing members, that makes the building acoustically very, very good,” Johnston said.
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