We spent one afternoon wandering secluded streets like Rue des Portes Mordelaises, which was hidden behind an arched doorway in a remaining slice of the stone ramparts that once protected the city, and into plazas humbler than Place de la Mairie, like Place du Champ Jacquet, which is lined by a fully intact row of those towering timber-framed houses.
Oh, and of course you need the power to outrun a hurricane, and the maneuverability to avoid the timbering, towering metal boxes (SUVs) flipping over left and right.
Soon they arrived at a clearing, near a couple of fishing piers, which had become a makeshift lumberyard for the wreckage of the Rockaway boardwalk: more than a mile's worth of decking and timbers, in towering stacks.
In a side-by-side comparison of a 20-story reinforced concrete tower and a corresponding mass timber tower, the timber tower is demonstrated to have roughly half the mass and twice the flexibility of the reinforced concrete tower.
Ilhéus — a provincial port in 1885 (sugar, coffee, timber) — became a boom town, with gaudy baroque mansions, cacao barons, night life, a celebrity prostitute, towering warehouses, harbor congestion, brokers, lawyers, tax inspectors, the agencies and excesses of sudden wealth.
Building code minimum for acceleration and maximum for drift govern the lateral design of the theoretical mass timber tower, whereas code minimum acceleration and strength govern the reinforced concrete tower.
A timber tower uses a lot of wood.
Meanwhile an exhibition opens on Monday with 21 of the 43 surviving figures displayed in a timber tower lit from inside with LED bulbs, built inside the Chapter House.
Building the Timber Tower would require the equivalent of 1,700 miles (2,700km) of two foot by four foot (60cm by 120cm) planks.
But new innovations are coming thick and fast: the USDA recently announced a $2m investment for wood innovation, and in the previously scorched city of Chicago, mega-firm Skidmore, Owings and Merrill published a study that re-imagines the 42-storey Dewitt Chestnut apartment block as a timber tower.
