Remember those old-fashion Lincoln Logs children once played with back before they became glued to their tablets?
Today, creative design using picket materials is not just for youths.
Across the globe, wood-framed architecture is increasingly reaching recent aesthetic and technical heights.
The move is being fueled by developments in “mass timber” — factory engineered wood produced from layers of planks fused together to extend their structural strength and integrity.
Though mass timber has been manufactured for industrial use in Europe since the Nineteen Eighties, it’s gained recent attention from architects and builders for its promise as a sustainable, eco-friendly alternative to concrete, one of the world’s most notorious polluters.
Across the globe, mass-timber sales reached just over $1 billion last yr, in accordance with Acumen Research and Consulting, a figure that’s set to treble by 2030.
The necessity for innovation is clear: Building construction contributes 40 percent of the world’s carbon emissions, with cement alone accountable for nearly 10 percent of that tally.
![The Hotel Magdalena in Austin by architects Lake | Flato was the first all mass-timber building in the US. Mass timber is a growing niche within the architecture and construction arena, currently worth $1 billion and expected to triple in size by 2030.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/07/10038_P_N15_board.jpg?w=1024)
Mass timber, meanwhile, is carbon sequestering — absorbing an estimated one ton of carbon for each three cubic feet in use, in accordance with the University of Toronto’s Mass Timber Institute.
Higher still, unlike concrete — an eco-harming cement derivative — mass timber is naturally renewing when forested sensitively.
Every few weeks, one other timber architecture superlative seems to come back out of the woodwork.
On Manhattan’s West Side, as an example, architecture leaders Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) recently installed a 260-foot-long Alaskan Yellow Cedar truss bridge that extends from the High Line into Moynihan Train Hall.
![NHERI, a 10-story mass timber frame by Lever Architecture that withstood the equivalent of a 7.7 magnitude tremor under testing.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/07/NYPICHPDPICT000013577621.jpg?w=1024)
The cedar is actually pieces of glulam, glued wood laminations sealed tight to withstand moisture.
Milwaukee is currently home to the world’s tallest timber tower, the 284-foot Ascent by Korb + Associates Architects, which barely beat out its Norwegian rival, the 280-foot-tall Mjøstårnet tower by Voll Arkitekter, last yr.
More recently, London’s annual Serpentine Pavilion, which opened in June, has been designed by Beirut-born/Paris-based architect Lina Ghotmeh using cross laminated timber (CLT), a plywood-like material made of picket planks stacked at right angles.
![Inside the Ascent Tower in Milwaukee, which at 284 feet high, is the world's tallest mass-timber structure.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/07/NYPICHPDPICT000013633030.jpg?w=1024)
Most ambitiously, plans were just announced by a Stockholm real estate developer for an almost 2.7 million-square-foot mass timber housing and retail development, which shall be the largest in the world.
And the Texas-based architecture firm Lake | Flato — whose Hotel Magdalena in Austin was the first all mass-timber building in the US — is now embarking on a pair of grandiose picket designs, the Amy Guttman Hall at the University of Pennsylvania together with Dickie Hall at Trinity University in San Antonio, the nation’s largest mass timber project.
“Each symbolically and really, Mass Timber is the building material that our culture needs at once,” says Ryan Jones, partner at Lake | Flato. “Mass Timber transforms the structural demands of a building right into a warm and tactile environment that also feels organic. In terms of carbon footprint, Mass Timber’s is lower than 50% that of steel or concrete,” he adds. “All of this is crucial at this moment after we are experiencing the global impact of climate change.”
Despite the frothy accolades, mass-timber construction stays removed from mainstream.
Regulations vary from country to country – and even state to state — but they’re evolving rapidly.
![A unit within Timber House in Brooklyn, one of the first mass-timber housing developments in New York City.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/07/NYPICHPDPICT000013577298.jpg?w=1024)
Take Milwaukee’s Ascent Tower. At the time of its initial design in 2018, mass timber construction was permitted to top out at a mere 85 feet.
But the project’s architect Jason Korb successfully circumvented International Building Code (IBC) regulations to push it far higher after his design exceeded expectations during a three-hour fire test conducted on its columns.
In Brooklyn, architect Eric Liftin of Mesh Architectures designed Latest York’s first mass timber condominium building, 670 Union, whose 14 condos hit the market last yr.
The project’s convoluted approval and design process demonstrates the lack of clarity around the use of mass-timber in Latest York City. Initially, 670 Union was imagined to be built from CLT, which is even stronger than glulam and has been utilized in Europe since the Nineteen Eighties.
![The cedar bridge connecting Moynihan Station to the High Line stretches a full 260 feet along Manhattan's West Side.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/07/NYPICHPDPICT000013667312.jpg?w=1024)
Latest York City’s Department of Buildings green-lit the CLT plan, but then decided against it because the material had not yet been approved for residential construction. Liftin quickly pivoted to glulam — which had been allowed for many years — and with the support of then-City Council member and progressive politico Brad Lander, took the project over the finish line.
All of its apartments sold out – many above asking price.
In late 2021, Latest York City finally approved CLT use for structures as much as 85 feet in height – one of some 7,400 revisions to the city’s construction codes signed off during the first comprehensive overhaul in nearly a decade.
Meanwhile, the IBC also updated its mass timber allotment in 2021, which now permits construction of as much as 18 stories.
![The architect Sir Norman Foster will cap an active railyard at Stockholm Central Station with a bespoke mass timber system.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/07/NYPICHPDPICT000013630547.jpg?w=710)
Liften, the architect behind 670 Union, applauds the recent revision, but says there stays an extended strategy to go before mass-timber becomes the standard in Latest York City. “NYC has legalized CLT, but its use is still quite limited and requires conditions that might be counterproductive,” Liften says.
In the latest DOB permissions temporary, as an example, CLT can’t be used for elevator cores or the types of drop ceilings that typically house mechanical equipment.
Still, on this moment of increasing eco-consciousness, mass timber’s appeal is only more likely to rise.
For one thing, it’s way more sustainable than common building materials equivalent to concrete and steel. It may be precisely prefabricated off site to avoid wasting time, construction waste and — most crucially — money.
Mass timber is fabricated from young wood so when sourced sustainably, from well-managed, repopulating forests, “it is a carbon sink,” says Korb.
Through the use of wood relatively than steel and concrete, as an example, his Ascent tower’s construction process removed the equivalent of 2,400 cars from the road for a whole yr.
![Architect Kim Van Holsbeke sees great potential for mass timber to become more commonplace within the construction arena, but only if both standards and supply-chains are expanded.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/07/NYPICHPDPICT000013667305.jpg?w=1024)
Mass timber is also lightweight, which allows for building additions that don’t overload existing structures and perform well during earthquakes.
This past May, as an example, the University of California, San Diego successfully tested a 10-story mass timber frame by Portland, Oregon- and Los Angeles-based Lever Architecture that withstood the equivalent of a 7.7 magnitude tremor.
Because of timber’s natural ability to char and self-insulate, it may resist fires to beyond code requirements, while burning more predictably than steel beams that twist when heated.
In the case of Ascent, Chicago-based structural engineer John Peronto of Thornton Tomasetti worked with the USDA’s Forest Products Laboratory to finish its fire testing—amongst the most stringent ever for glulam construction.
The tower’s seven-inch-thick CLT floor plates proved capable of maintaining their integrity while burning for a full two hours, similar to traditional concrete slabs, says Peronto.
![The future New York Climate Exchange on Governor's Island will include new and converted buildings mostly composed of mass timber.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/07/NYPICHPDPICT000013667342.jpg?w=1024)
Nevertheless, mass timber’s newfound architectural notoriety has not come without consequence.
Take it from one of the material’s longest-term advocates. Hermann Kaufmann, principal of Austrian firm HK Architekten, has been working with mass timber professionally for the last 35 years.
He became fascinated with wood while studying architecture at University in Innsbruck in the Seventies.
Although still bullish on mass timber, Kaufmann is highly cognizant of its limitations. “Building with wood requires an ideal deal of knowledge and planning,” he says, warning that when not properly constructed, timber structures grow to be liable to wood’s best enemy—moisture, and its subsequent rot.
Then there are the structural limitations of wood, which is still outmatched by more traditional building materials. “As the load on structural elements gets larger, there are natural limitations of wood fiber strength in comparison with concrete or steel,” says Peronto.
Which implies, at the very least for the moment, steel beams will proceed to reign supreme on towers above a certain height. Just how tall is being always tested by far-sighted mass timber pioneers.
![“Both symbolically and actually, Mass Timber is the building material that our culture needs right now,” says architect Ryan Jones, partner at Lake | Flato.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/07/NYPICHPDPICT000013678485.jpg?w=1024)
There is also the issue of geography. Architectural timber can reduce the overall embodied carbon of a project—the total carbon produced from construct to operation to destruction—but most meaningfully if the material is locally sourced.
Mass timber cultivation, nonetheless, stays area of interest, with places like Oregon, Canada, and Switzerland accountable for much of the global production.
This becomes an issue, says SOM partner Kim Van Holsbeke, when attempting to scale mass timber while still benefiting the environment.
Like Kaufmann, Van Holsbeke views mass timber as ripe for innovation, but still lacking each the proper certifications and supply-chain systems needed to satisfy consumer and environmental demands.
“The timber industry is not as …standardized for large-scale projects as we would really like it to be,” says Van Holbeke, whose firm is currently building Stony Brook University’s Latest York Climate Exchange on Governors Island, where all recent buildings—in addition to a handful of existing former barracks — shall be constructed from wood. “There is a shortage each in timber and fabrication plants that may produce the quality and customization that now we have in the steel industry,” she continues. Until things change, architects shall be forced to return to building methods that had them longing for brand new solutions in the first place.
![Lake | Flato's Dickie Hall at Trinity University in San Antonio will be the nation's largest mass-timber project.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/07/NYPICHPDPICT000013671466.jpg?w=768)
Still, as sustainability becomes increasingly vital to homebuyers, mass timber is more likely to grow to be more commonplace, says Timber House developer and Brooklyn Home Company co-founder Bill Caleo. It’s a wise investment.
“As buyers grow to be more aware of their [carbon] footprint…mass timber will bring us one step closer to building future-proof spaces” with minimal environmental impact, he says.
Though Latest York’s DOB regulations still lag behind much of the world, the city’s architecture community believes that mass timber is the building block of the future—inside reason.
“Mass timber is an actual architect’s material: delightfully engineered, simply effective, beautiful,” says Liftin, who is now designing a row of five mass timber townhouses in Brooklyn. “But most of us don’t expect mass timber to overtake all other structural systems.”
![Another shot of Dickie Hall.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/07/NYPICHPDPICT000013671467.jpg?w=1024)
A scarcity of ubiquitous timber resources will demand moderation (and iteration) sooner or later, if not now. “In the future… we [will] need to make use of wood sparingly,” predicts Kaufmann, who says recycling existing timber will grow to be key.
Also useful: Technologies that pair conventional building materials equivalent to steel and concrete with mass timber.
“It’s composite systems…which might be the future,” says Peronto, the structural engineer, who is currently consulting for architect Sir Norman Foster on a project to cap an lively railyard at Stockholm Central Station with a bespoke mass timber system.
In the hybrid systems Peronto describes, taller buildings get the sustainability and aesthetic advantages of a mass timber structure, while benefiting from the core strength, height and construction ease that steel and concrete provide.
Structures 18 stories and shorter can totally go picket if their locality makes it possible. “I would really like to see mass timber in buildings up to almost 20 stories, although I don’t see that taking place soon in Latest York,” says Liftin, as he laments Latest York’s existing timber restrictions.
“Meanwhile,” he adds bullishly, “we should always be building lots of six- and seven-story timber buildings—residential, industrial, and institutional.”
Elizabeth Fazzare is a former editor at Architectural Digest