A Great Carbon Reckoning Comes to Architecture,Concrete is the most carbon-intensive material found in the built environment, and rammed earth is a viable alternative—at least for projects of a certain scale. The San Antonio–based architecture firm Lake|Flato has opted for rammed earth on two of its residential projects, such as this one in West Texas.Courtesy Kyle Melgaard/Pilgrim Building Company

A Great Carbon Reckoning Comes to Architecture,Mass plywood panels at the Freres Lumber Co. plant in Lyons, Oregon. Courtesy George Barberis

A Great Carbon Reckoning Comes to Architecture,Rammed earth is used for the house’s walls, which are built using formwork and pneumatic tamping techniques. “The earth is the wall, but also the skin, veneer, and insulation. It’s the entire package inside and out,” says Harris. Courtesy Kyle Melgaard/Pilgrim Building Company

A Great Carbon Reckoning Comes to Architecture,Rammed earth appealed to Lake|Flato principal Bob Harris because it suited the conditions of the site: “There’s a lot of adobe in the area. The labor force there is not great with steel frame....It’s really all about cement block and the masonry trades there.” Courtesy Kyle Melgaard/Pilgrim Building Company

A Great Carbon Reckoning Comes to Architecture,The architecture community is beginning to take account of embodied carbon, which denotes the expenditure of the element in the manufacturing of a building’s materials. In response, firms are looking to source alternatives to carbon-intensive steel and concrete, including mass plywood. Pictured: a display of CNC-milled mass plywood panels designed by LEVER Architecture. Courtesy George Barberis

A Great Carbon Reckoning Comes to Architecture,Bamboo

A Great Carbon Reckoning Comes to Architecture,The Lyons factory supplies mass plywood to LEVER Architecture, a Portland firm that has specialized in mass timber construction. LEVER has begun incorporating mass plywood into many of its projects. Courtesy George Barberis

A Great Carbon Reckoning Comes to Architecture,The lab has received several grants to study ways of processing raw bamboo poles into cross-laminated panels, among other research pursuits. Courtesy Will Warasila

A Great Carbon Reckoning Comes to Architecture,With mass plywood, “there’s an opportunity to use smaller trees,” says principal Thomas Robinson. “They can go all the way down to eight-inch trees, relative to forest management.” Courtesy George Barberis

A Great Carbon Reckoning Comes to Architecture,Although the benefits of bamboo have long been known—it's incredibly strong and much faster to harvest than trees—it remains underutilized in the building industry. Pictured: A bamboo unit undergoes a stress test at the Materials and Design Lab at Virginia Tech. Courtesy Will Warasila

A Great Carbon Reckoning Comes to Architecture,“We’re trying to build these systems that [can] compete with CLT,” Hauptman says. Together with Katie MacDonald and Kyle Schumann of the University of Tennessee Knoxville, Hauptman is also trying to find ways to curve bamboo while retaining its strength. Pictured: Schumann arranges bamboo joints. Courtesy Will Warasila

A Great Carbon Reckoning Comes to Architecture,Inside the Materials and Design Lab at Virginia Tech, researchers Katie MacDonald (pictured), Kyle Schumann, and Jonas Hauptman find new uses for structural bamboo. MacDonald, who teaches at the University of Tennessee Knoxville alongside Schumann (the two are cofounders of After Architecture), holds a panel of cross-laminated bamboo, or CLB. Courtesy Will Warasila

A Great Carbon Reckoning Comes to Architecture,For the lab's director Jonas Hauptman (left), the aversion to bamboo boils down to its labor-intensivity (it's harvested by hand), material irregularity, and cultural connotations. (Some still associate it with Gilligan's Island, he says.) Courtesy Will Warasila

A Great Carbon Reckoning Comes to Architecture

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A Great Carbon Reckoning Comes to Architecture

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