Mass timber parking in Wendlingen, Germany

240

Very cool. I love it. How’s the building cost compared to concrete?

171

u/r_sole1 Dec 14 '24

I can't find any publicly available information about the cost but I'd guess the initial capital cost would be somewhat higher than concrete if viewed in the narrowest terms. Most parking decks in the US are built using hollow core concrete planks which are also modular and go up pretty fast but their initial fabrication uses mountains of carbon. Most probably don't get reused and end up in landfill. They're heavy, adding to transport costs and they generally look grotesque, are often places where people feel uneasy and add very little to the environment (except functionally as places to store cars).

The advantages of timber, apart from looking better, is that it stores carbon, enriches the environment and costs less to transport, depending on where the timber is sourced. It's light, bright, welcoming and could actually be repurposed when it's design life is over (i.e: when we're all sitting in those goofy robotaxis)

83

u/brostopher1968 Dec 14 '24

Another benefit of the lighter mass timber (could be as much as 75-80% lighter than concrete) is that foundation can be shallower.

44

u/DIYThrowaway01 Dec 15 '24

I wonder how much this cancels out the excessive costs over concrete construction? Depth of foundation is a huge factor in cost of construction. The deeper you have to excavate, the deeper kind of shit you get into cost and risk wise.

Someone show me your spreadsheets plz

19

u/MangoCats Dec 15 '24

A disadvantage around here is: all the chemicals required to keep the timber from becoming bug food.

28

u/Aberfrog Dec 15 '24

There are no termites in germany. I don’t think that there are many wood eating bugs around. The roof of my uncles farm is from 1740 or so and as far as I know there are no chemicals involved in it’s conservation.

Dry rot on the other side is an issue.

18

u/MangoCats Dec 15 '24

I believe dry rot is wood eating microbes, so technically they're just really small bugs...

12

u/MegaJani Dec 15 '24

My inner biologist just combusted

-3

u/brostopher1968 Dec 15 '24

I would definitely be more concerned in an open air parking garage

12

u/minxwink Dec 15 '24

The acoustic attenuation of wood is another benefit

19

u/1h8fulkat Dec 15 '24

One obvious negative about wood, which you seem to neglect to note, is that it burns. In a building like a garage, I feel like that's a pretty big negative.

15

u/SovereignAxe Dec 15 '24

Mass timber structures are actually designed to char on the outside, creating a fire resistant layer, protecting the structural timber on the inside.

17

u/Benjamin244 Dec 15 '24

Depends on the type of wood, but I assume a softwood was used in this garage so that is correct. Hardwoods are actually typically quite fire resistant, since they char and the layer of ash stops oxygen from accessing deeper layers.

We also intuitively think that fire is mainly a risk for materials that burn, but steel (rebar) is incredibly sensitive to heat and will lose a lot of its strength in a fire, which is why reinforced concrete needs a minimum thickness of concrete around its rebar to stop heat from reaching it (well, slow it down really).

I think the main issue with timber is that it requires careful detailing to deal with rot, and a lot of maintenance.

11

u/wasmic Dec 15 '24

Concrete itself also loses its strength rather quickly if heated to just 300 C. The water that gets bonded into the chemical structure during the curing process is liberated by the heat, making the concrete much weaker in short order. This is why concrete buildings are nearly always torn down after a fire, even if the building is still standing.

2

u/senapnisse Dec 15 '24

Wood char on surface acts like insulation from heat stopping fire from progressing deeper.

4

u/Axe_Care_By_Eugene Dec 15 '24

Nature rules

2

u/Majestic-Owl-5801 29d ago

And there is pretty effective fireproofing for this stuff now IIRC

2

u/Kvalri 29d ago

What about ongoing maintenance? They’re going to have to put new coats of sealant and that’s a lot of surface area

3

u/r_sole1 29d ago

If protective treatments are applied in a factory environment and installed with care, they can last 150 years or more without reapplication, far exceeding the design life of the building

1

u/Kvalri 29d ago

The wood pictured doesn’t appear to be pressure treated

38

u/hak8or Dec 14 '24

And how does insurance compare, especially fire?

46

u/GeoffdeRuiter Dec 15 '24

They do better than stealing concrete because they char up and can't continue to burn after the fuel source is taken away. There's not enough oxygen to surface area. If it's concrete, it can break off and pop off. Lots of fire burn tests with mass timber. :)

10

u/The-Invalid-One Dec 15 '24

wood is the future !

21

u/GeoffdeRuiter Dec 15 '24

I always encourage big wood to be erected!

13

u/Tobiassaururs Dec 15 '24

Wood has its benefits and drawbacks, in the end it really comes down to the individual purpose of your building and the ressource sources you are using.

Using wood from healthy forests is far worse than using wood from artificial "forests" (they are mostly just glorified tree farms) and also worse than using concrete. Here in germany we almost eliminated every last inch of true untouched forest so it's mainly artificial farms everywhere.

7

u/umotex12 Dec 15 '24

imo the best benefit of the wood: you can grow more

meanwhile with concrete uhhh we are slowly but using sand

1

u/MangoCats Dec 15 '24

Did they finally commercialize the Black Forest? In 2000 they were trying to return it to natural state: no maintenance.

3

u/JohnProof Dec 15 '24

Same with steel: I was surprised to see fire proofing applied to steel beams while neighboring wood beams were left bare. I never would've guessed wood had a slower failure rate in a fire.

1

u/MangoCats Dec 15 '24

Of course the interesting question in a parking garage is: how does it do when a few hundred gallons of gasoline are spilled on it while burning...

1

u/GeoffdeRuiter Dec 15 '24

Definitely well the gasoline is burning It is slowly burning away the wood, but once the gasoline dies down the wood should be sufficiently charged enough to snuff itself out.

2

u/rly_weird_guy Dec 15 '24

Glulam is much safer then steel for fire

5

u/Jonesbro Dec 15 '24

Likely more expensive but mostly because there's no scale. I'm sure the manufacturer claims it will eventually be cheaper. My concern is using wood in moist and salty environments.

7

u/happy_puppy25 Dec 15 '24

It’s sealed pretty well. In fact, concrete also struggles very much with those issues. Look at any bridge or parking garage next to the ocean, they will have spalling and exposed rebar. Same for areas that salt roads. The concrete must be sealed but in reality it isn’t except for the top deck, so it’s no different than wood

1

u/dbxp Dec 15 '24

I think modern ones are steel prefabs

5

u/Jonesbro Dec 15 '24

Steel is never used in garages. Salt and moisture don't work with steel plus it needs fireproofing. Precast concrete panels is common for new garages

2

u/Drumbelgalf Dec 15 '24

The parking garage of my university was constructed with a steel frame it has a coating to prevent rust.

Same with several parking garages of companies in my city.

36

u/ktoph Dec 14 '24

Ok That’s incredible

15

u/Colonelfudgenustard Dec 14 '24

Yes! This would be extra exciting if a parking garage didn't have to cost a zillion dollars, but maybe it would anyway.

9

u/AltruisticSalamander Dec 15 '24

a new university near me used this type of construction for two of their buildings (so far). Promising

38

u/loose_the-goose Dec 15 '24

The irony of trying to sustainably build a fucking parking garage for cars

1

u/thegamer101112 28d ago

It's directly next to the train station. Its there to encourage park and ride to Stuttgart via the s-bahn

6

u/plausocks 29d ago

Whats neat is with wood that thick it can actually take quite some time before its burned away

18

u/VetteBuilder Dec 15 '24

German cars leak so much oil it will glisten in the sun

21

u/DIYThrowaway01 Dec 15 '24

my BMWs only leak from on top of the engine and from the sides of the engine and somewhere near the oil pan so idk what the big deal it

6

u/VetteBuilder Dec 15 '24

I had an E46, even the struts leaked

1

u/Drumbelgalf Dec 15 '24

Did you do any maintenance on the car?

It's at least 24 years old.

3

u/VetteBuilder Dec 15 '24

It was 5 years old, owned by my boss. It was babied and had valves adjusted twice a year.

Biggest pile of shit, I got hooked on CTS-Vs and never looked back

3

u/gunnesaurus Dec 15 '24

Wood you look at that

2

u/milkshakeofdirt Dec 15 '24

Any ideas what’s impeding the adoption of this type of construction?

4

u/SociallyContorted Dec 15 '24

It is being adopted!! More and more widely. It hasn’t been as viable for really big buildings in the past due to fabrication limits, but they have made impressive strides in mass timber sizing and can do some pretty spectacular stuff! I posted a link to an article featuring some really great examples above!

2

u/milkshakeofdirt Dec 15 '24

Thank you! Will check out the link. Cheers

2

u/Informal_Recording36 Dec 15 '24 edited Dec 15 '24

Super interesting. I could see this coming our way. I would guess one needs to make some design considerations for water/moisture, and snow, to protect the wood members and you’re in business.

It looks like they’ve made the ramps out of concrete(?) and I wonder what they do for the parkade deck.

Edit: ok the article filled some of that info in. 2/3 wood, 1/3 concrete. Precast concrete ramp decks. 120mm thick plywood decking. Didn’t discuss the parking deck surface though.

1

u/minxwink Dec 15 '24

🥵

1

u/SuperVGA Dec 15 '24

I wonder what it sounds like.

1

u/ambiguouspeen 29d ago

Any projects going on in the US? Any contractors that focus on them?

1

u/Top-Dog-7521 29d ago

nice, i wonder how it will work together with burning EV vehicle 😆

1

u/Milburn55 27d ago

😂😂

1

u/-sTuCki- 21d ago

still better than a concrete park garage

1

u/Top-Dog-7521 11d ago

please could you explain? i worked in company producing fireproof materials and concrete is exponentially better than any other ordinary material. Its for wider debate, but even with most modern fireproofing chemicals is wood incomparable. In this case of multilayered beam is even worse. So please enlighten me and send me some link to serious study 🤔😉

0

u/senapnisse Dec 15 '24

The one big problem with wood in construction that nobody has mention in this thread, is that you need old big trees to find such wood and we have cut down all the old trees so it is almost impossible to find more for making such houses. New fast growing trees are planted to replace the old but they have big thick year growth not suitable for construction. They are for paper mills.

2

u/wasmic Dec 15 '24

It depends a lot on how tall you're trying to build. For a 1-3 story house, you don't need big old trees. Most buildings are about that size.

Also, the outer cladding for a wooden building doesn't even need to be hard wood either; the fast-growing types of wood are very suitable for that purpose.

Also also, even the fast growing timber types can be laminated together with modern technology to allow for these wide timber beams. So you don't even really need old growth wood for that, either.

1

u/No_Cat_No_Cradle 29d ago

No, this is mass timber, the ELI5 is it’s a new way of gluing small pieces of wood together to make a really strong product

-4

u/eesaitcho Dec 15 '24

Pretty, but I have recurring dreams about getting lost in parking garages so the picture startled me initially.

2

u/adudeguyman Dec 15 '24

Are they different garages each dream? Do you park in parking garages often?

2

u/eesaitcho Dec 15 '24

It’s a different garage. Sometimes it’s a mall, sometimes it’s work, sometimes it’s some non-descript town I find myself living, at least once it was a parking lot but the story is always the same. I park my car, do something, come back to the lot/garage and cannot, for the life of me, find the car.

I haven’t driven regularly in over 10 years so no clue why my anxiety is suddenly fed through this vehicle (excuse the pun)

-12

u/michaelrage Dec 15 '24

Looks beautiful but a massive waste of wood in my opinion.

33

u/atlantis_airlines Dec 15 '24

The great thing about wood is that it's a renewable resource. It also stores carbon.

Concrete on the other hand requires mining of resources and its production requires massive amounts of fuel giving it a massive carbon footprint.

New laminate wood products are great because the trees used don't have to be anywhere near as large as trees used in traditional timber production. They're basically cutting down little trees and gluing them together to make large structural elements. Laminate is also stronger.

0

u/obscht-tea Dec 15 '24

This is greenwashing af. If you care about decarbon and natural resources. Build public transport and not this grap where people park thier v8 suv after a 5km ride.

8

u/SovereignAxe Dec 15 '24

Don't let perfect be the enemy of the good.

Less cars and more walking/biking/PT is the goal, but cars are unfortunately here to stay, and for a long time. While they're here we may as well store them in a building using sustainable construction.

4

u/atlantis_airlines Dec 15 '24

What an absolutely stupid comment you just made.

Nowhere have I EVER said we shouldn't be investing in public transportation you sanctimonious parrot. I'm talking about how wood is both a sustainable material and traps carbon. Should we be building houses out of trains and busses? No? Then shut up and let us build more stuff out of wood.

17

u/LucasCBs Dec 15 '24

Actually much less wasteful than the equivalent concrete would have been.

Concrete production is one of the top reasons for CO2 output into our atmosphere. Somewhere in the top 5 globally. Also, you need a finite resource for it, which is running out very fast: coarse sand. You can only use sand from beaches for it, not sand from deserts. We have destroyed thousands of kilometers of beaches, waterfronts and maritime ecosystems to pump up sand for concrete production.

At the same time the trees would have been planted and bonded CO2 in order to grow. The wood used here is basically CO2 storage

3

u/AltruisticSalamander Dec 15 '24

it'd be pretty surprising if this wasn't plantation timber

2

u/rly_weird_guy Dec 15 '24

These aren't made of giant spans of timber

They uses a fuck ton of short pieces glued together

0

u/[deleted] Dec 15 '24

[deleted]

4

u/r_sole1 Dec 15 '24

It's a continuous wood product, glulam timber which is laminated together to create a high strength composite. It's not that different to Laminated Veneer Lumber which is quite commonplace. There is steel in the fixings and bolts but little to no concrete in the structure itself. As u/GeoffdeRuiter said, wood naturally develops a fireproof layer around itself at high temperatures that starves the fire of fuel.

It's not a magical material and it won't save the world but applied well, like in this example, it's a strong, attractive, low carbon alternative

3

u/rly_weird_guy Dec 15 '24

This is glulam, none of those are issues

And no there won't be any concrete except in the foundation

-9

u/sir_syphilis Dec 14 '24

Okay cool, but why does a parking garage need to be demountable? Can it forever be demounted or does wear over time prevent me from reusing structural parts anyway? Is this really a cheap, doable alternative?

4

u/r_sole1 Dec 15 '24

Cheap? No but doable, yes and a key part of the economic logic of building like this in the first place is that it unlocks long term value by repurposing the material, even if it's not to build another parking garage but sliced up and reused to construct other building types. The large amounts of steel embedded inside concrete makes this impractical

-1

u/Cold-Flan2558 Dec 15 '24

They have extra wood after removing a shitload of old growth for wind turbines. Lmao burn it up boys.

-8

u/dbxp Dec 15 '24

Pretty but those beams take up a lot of vertical space

3

u/AxelAbraxas Dec 15 '24

Because you need ultrahigh ceilings in a car parking?

0

u/dbxp Dec 15 '24

If you've got planning permission for a building of x height then this construction method would hold fewer cars

-6

u/scrappy-coco-86 Dec 15 '24

Nothing special here. I've seen other parking garages like this here too.