What if I told you that in a few years we'd all be living in a plyscraper? Not sure what that is? Let me walk you through it.

The building you see is the Horyu-ji Temple, located in Japan, but to better convey the concept of this post, for us it will simply be called: "the world's oldest surviving wooden building".

At the end of the post I'll tell you how old our friend the temple is, but in the meantime, take a guess.

Why am I telling you this? Because it is tangible proof that wooden buildings can be very durable. But the best part is yet to come: if we built 90% of our new buildings out of wood we could reduce our global carbon emissions by 4%. That's more than the total climate footprint of flying!  

What? Yes, you're right, building wooden buildings means cutting down trees but as long as you're not chopping down ancient forests, you're maintaining the wildlife, replanting, and putting the wood to long-term use, it's sustainable and way more ecological than using concrete!

Smell the smoke already? No, technology comes to the rescue with the creation of cross-laminated timber. Tests of CLT panels in a blaze have shown they tend to form a charcoal layer that protects the core and when combined with heat-resistant glues and claddings they can match or exceed the fire resilience of conventional buildings.

So, to sum up, using wood is not only an ecological, safe and recyclable solution but also durable and aesthetically super cool (the latter one is just my opinion, there are no scientific studies about it yet).

So, back to our friend the temple, how old is it? He's 1,414, not bad looking, is he?