Making Prince George, the best to place to live in BC, one project at a time.

Thank you Gordo.

Nice image juxtapostion. Clearly shows that wood construction continues to be a smoke and mirrors magic show. What you see in the final show is not what you actually get behind the stage.

So far, it is the flavour of the day, or the decade. It is the façade appliqué, analagous to the false store fronts of western pioneering instant towns of the 19th century.

The use of wood is something that we wish to encourage. As long as the beams are made of real wood everything is fine with me. Even if they don't really support the roof alone.

Marble columns in many theaters, churches and mansions are not made of marble at all. The marble look pattern is artfully painted on plaster!

Fake. Yet it looks great!

Does anybody complain?

Does anyone boast ad infinitum on the use of Marble Columns like Bell rants about the use of wood.

Dont confuse the issue. BC boasts about the use of wood, but in fact uses very little in Construction (other than houses). We try and sell a concept to the Chinese that we dont use ourselves.

BS is the driving force behind this Government. Take away the BS and you have a empty shell, devoid of any ideas that warrant discussion.

To me structure is like a piece of sculpture, a piece of art, a musical passage. It can be discordant, or it can be harmonious.

The use of wood on the wall is harmonious because it is an honest expression of not only a traditional decorative material which is warm, but also one which acts acoustically to reduce the reverberation time in the atrium so that when someone walks on a possible hard floor, or rolls a cart with metal wheels on such a floor or has a louder conversation, it does not echo throughout the hall.

The wood beams which span across the atrium look deep enough or could be made deep enough to span the full space. They are simple structural elements such as we are used to for many decades, centuries and millennia. The decking is part of that structural systems that has existed just as long.

The "decoration" or structural redundancy comes in with the fanned, umbrella-like posts which spring from a vertical column which looks like it is not even wood. In fact, such columns typically are concrete as seen here in a photo of the new Kin Centre atrium.
http://www.opinion250.com/images/atriumin.jpg

Totally redundant for both span reduction as well as bracing to overcome building shear forces in such cases. It would be different if the building were totally supported on wooden columns without any shear walls in which case the bracing would be an honest structural expression.

Perhaps if we had a wood innovation centre here with some quality structural engineers who understood the nature of materials, natural forms and economies of structures, as well as aesthetics and the notion of "form follows function" we could get sopme more mature building design which truly respects the beauty of wood both structurally as well as decoratively.

It is a "nice" building, but just another one that suffers from a cliché of our times.

Here is some exploratory work at an engineering school which uses the properties of composite wood with today's computer technology applied to anlayse the structure and generate the patterns which are then cut by computerized routers.
http://www.itke.uni-stuttgart.de/en/en_research/en_research_pavilion.htm

Then we have the more traditional timber frame http://thetimberframe.wordpress.com/tag/timber-frame-ski-lodge

Both are clear expressions of structural form.

Here is a ude of wood that could be aplied to the stands at our won track and field facilities.

From one of several engineering firms in Austria which is frequently using wood in buildings, especially where it is often not used.
http://www.mkp-ing.com/projekte/offentlich/bodensee-stadion-bregenz-a

The senior partner in that firm is a speaker at the Vancouver Wood Solutions Fair on April 14.

http://www.wood-works.org/BC/Wood+Solution+Fairs/Wood+Solutions+Fair.htm