Urban Life

But Quayside’s newsworthy for another, more encouraging reason: The plan is to build the place, not out of concrete and steel, but wood—and wood is looking good. A recent advance in wood technology should interest the neighborhood’s developers: Teng Li, a University of Maryland mechanical engineer, created with his colleagues wood that’s as “strong as steel, but six times lighter,” he said. Liangbing Hu, Li’s co-author on the study, added, “This kind of wood could be used in cars, airplanes, buildings—any application where steel is used.” Making it is just a two-step process. The scientists first boiled natural wood in a mixture of sodium hydroxide and sodium sulfite, to remove some of the lignin and hemicellulose, substances contained in the walls of wood cells (the former retard parasite and bacterial attacks, the latter cover and bind fibers). Then they put the wood in a hot press, which leads, as they say in the paper, “to the total collapse of cell walls and the complete densification of the natural wood with highly aligned cellulose nanofibres.” The result, they conclude, is a “low-cost, high-performance, lightweight alternative” to “most structural metals and alloys.”