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By Nancy B. Solomon, AIA

David W. Hess, senior associate at Cesar Pelli & Associates in New York, thinks highly of FSC, but notes that, during the design phase of The Solaire at Battery Park City in New York—in the fall of 2000—relatively few FSC-certified woods were available, and they were being offered by smaller companies that lacked easily accessible showrooms. The firm opted for a noncertified European ash, supplied by Bacon, as the veneer for the paneling in the lobby of the 27-story residential tower. This ash—which is a different genus from its American counterpart—comes from a temperate forest in France that has been in operation for generations. “Western Europe has incredibly good sustainable forestry practices. It made sense to us to use the wood, even though it was not FSC-certified, because it was handled in a way that was ecologically sound,” says Hess.

 

A wine cellar incorporates oak lumber from an Irish brewery and English cider mill. Photography: © Peter Vanderwarker

To maximize the green content of the paneling—and obtain credits for the building’s overall LEED rating, which was ultimately set at the gold level—the firm specified a medium-density-fiberboard (MDF) substrate. According to Hess, this engineered product is made from 100 percent recovered and recycled wood fiber and, unlike many FSC-certified products, does not rely on formaldehyde, which has its own environmental drawbacks, as a binder. Today, with better access to a broader selection of sustainable materials, the firm plans to specify FSC-certified English beech for another residential tower at Battery Park City.

One interesting twist to the potential sustainable-exotic quandary is the reuse of lumber from demolished foreign structures. Mountain Lumber Company in Ruckersville, Virginia—founded by Willie Drake in 1974—has salvaged highly desirable woods from some highly unlikely locations. For example, when Guinness Breweries in Dublin, Ireland, and Bulmer Cider Mills in Hereford, England, replaced their traditional wooden vats with state-of-the-art stainless-steel containers a few years back, Mountain Lumber imported 170,000 board feet of English brown oak. From this antique wood, they were able to develop several lines of flooring, including one with a rich reddish patina that resulted from the interior face of the wood soaking for years in cider. Some of this wood—plus a large wine cask made of French oak that Mountain Lumber brought back from Chateau Talbot in Bordeaux, France—found its way into a new wine cellar that Jay Dalgliesh designed for a refurbished house in Charlottesville, Virginia, which was completed in 2002.

And, just this year—after three-and-a-half years of negotiating—Mountain Lumber obtained 100,000 board feet of ancient Chinese elm timbers that had been dismantled from 400-year-old Ming Dynasty structures in China’s Luliang Mountains to make way for modernization. Some of these beams are 20 feet long and 25 inches in diameter—large enough to make flooring planks that are uncommonly long and wide. Its heartwood is a golden yellow and its grain dark brown. “The wood is gorgeous,” says John Williams, general manager at Mountain Lumber. “It has a certain glow to it that makes it come alive.” The first installation of this flooring was completed in September, for Verity Blue—a Charlottesville company that specializes in Italian tableware.