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mean 200 billion more trees,” says Mark
Wishnie, the Nature Conservancy’s director
of global forestry and wood products. “Mass
timber isn’t a silver bullet for growing more
forest, but we’re hoping that it’s part of the
silver buckshot.”
Mass-produced cross-laminated timber
(CLT, in industry parlance) was first con-
ceived in central Europe. Austrian foresters,
looking to make better use of smaller trees for
traditional building techniques that favored
large exposed beams—think Bavarian cha-
lets—created the first mass-timber presses
more than 30 years ago. Scandinavia fol-
lowed suit, but the U.S. was slow to embrace
the idea. That finally started to change in
2013, after the Forest Service initiated stud-
ies of CLT technologies. Around the same
time, a few forward-thinking Americans and
Canadians began incorporating Austrian-
made CLT into one-off buildings. Even so,
as recently as 2016, organizers of the For-
est Business Network’s annual mass-timber
conference could point to only a handful of
domestic projects.
Since then, mass timber has taken off.
This spring, Woodworks, an advocacy group
for wood construction, counted 549 active
CLT projects, and analysts expect that to rise
into the thousands in short order. Interest inmass timber has been boosted by high-profile
buildings like Carbon12 (a mixed-use luxury
showpiece in Portland, Oregon, that at eight
stories is the tallest CLT building in the coun-
try), Minneapolis’s seven-story T3 building,
and a hip new hotel in downtown Bozeman,
Montana, called the Lark. Sidewalk Labs,
owned by Google’s parent company, Alpha-
bet, has proposed creating 3.2 million square
feet of new mass-timber buildings in Toronto,
some up to 30 stories high, as well as a CLT
factory in Ontario. Then there’s Walmart,
which in May announced that it will build its
new corporate headquarters in Bentonville,
Arkansas, using mass-timber materials.
The Department of Defense is also keen
on wood. In collaboration with the Forest
Service and Woodworks, the Pentagon con-
ducted blast simulations on an assortment
of mass-timber buildings; it’s now planning
to erect wood-construction hotels on mili-
tary bases considered to be at high risk for
a terrorist attack. Other research suggests
that CLT is resistant to earthquakes and—get
this—fire. The outer layers tend to char, insu-
lating the wood from the flames, and the lack
of oxygen in the highly compressed material
offers minimal fuel to burn.
“We’ll never look back,” says Ben Kaiser,
the architect and developer behind Carbon12.“We’ll only build using mass-timber prod-
ucts going forward. We’ve seen firsthand that
this methodology is approaching a panacea.”
Many experts believe that the real growth
opportunity in North America involves build-
ings between four and twelve stories (which
mainly means office parks and apartment
buildings). Rosy guesstimates from some ana-
lysts have mass timber amounting to as much
as 10 percent of U.S. construction within the
next 30 years. Part of this will happen because
CLT projects can be completed much more
quickly, but a major underlying factor is that́ 0 DVVWLPEHULVQ·W
a silver bullet for
growing more forest,”
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