WoodWorks expects U.S. mass-timber building total to exceed 1,500
U.S. architects and developers are turning to mass timber, a wooden alternative to steel and concrete, for hotels, libraries, offices, apartments and other large buildings. The Wall Street Journal reported that projects started this year will bring the U.S. total to more than 1,500, compared with fewer than 100 a decade ago. Proponents say the shift can create a larger market for a wood glut that has depressed prices and placed U.S. timberland at risk of being cleared.
Mass timber is made by pressing and gluing layers of dimensional lumber, often two-by-six boards, into large panels and beams. A single slab can serve as ceiling, floor and load-bearing elements, combining structural and visible surfaces. Patrick Shay, a Savannah, Ga., architect, said, “When I heard about mass timber, they had me at hello.” He added, “I haven’t talked to a single architect who doesn’t want to use it.” Shay has put much time and effort into hiding the steel, concrete and other structural elements of the hotels he has designed around the tourist city; for his latest project, he looked for ways to showcase more of the building’s bones, because this time they are Southern yellow pine. He chose the material for the Sabal House hotel, scheduled to open next month in Savannah’s historic district, as well as for a new public library he designed in another part of town.
The market case begins with weak markets for traditional timber products. Proponents say mass timber can absorb the glut of wood that has depressed prices and put timberland at risk of conversion to shopping centers and solar farms. Timber growers have long viewed the product as a route into the relatively stable commercial-construction and public-building market. Collapsing pulp and paper markets and a housing market slumping under high borrowing costs have brought urgency to the campaign, with the downturn forcing sawmill closures.
Many choosing to build with mass timber are drawn to its cozy aesthetics and to burgeoning research on biophilia, which suggests that humans function and feel better in buildings that incorporate natural elements. Others are interested in smaller carbon footprints: wood stores carbon dioxide absorbed by trees, while making metal and concrete emits greenhouse gases. Those considerations have drawn architects and developers toward mass timber alongside its structural capabilities.
Cost comparisons remain mixed. Architects and developers said mass timber itself usually costs more than steel-reinforced concrete, but they reported savings on finishes such as drywall and paint, along with labor and construction time. The Wall Street Journal also linked higher prices for traditional building materials to data-center demand, supply disruptions from wars and President Trump’s tariffs.
WoodWorks chief operating officer Bill Parsons said the U.S. is adding about 10 million square feet of mass-timber construction a year. Parsons put that figure against a potential domestic construction market of about 1 billion square feet. WoodWorks is partly funded by the U.S. Forest Service. “We’re really just scratching the surface,” he said.
Mass timber has been used occasionally in the U.S. since at least the 1930s. A church bell tower built in 2011 in Gastonia, N.C., is often credited as the country’s first mass-timber structure. Adoption then remained slow because building codes lacked provisions, requiring testing and extra review for each project. Contractors were hesitant to work with unfamiliar materials, and components often had to be shipped from Europe.
The 2021 International Building Code addressed mass timber and allowed wooden buildings up to 18 stories, from six before. Among the projects that followed were a 25-story wooden apartment tower with a variance being topped off in Milwaukee, a nine-acre mass-timber roof at Oregon’s Portland International Airport and 2.4 million square feet of mass-timber office space built by Walmart in Bentonville, Ark.
Other recent projects include college dormitories in Michigan and Maine, a riverfront pavilion in Philadelphia, an amphitheater in New York’s Hudson Valley, a private school north of Dallas, a public school in Seattle, New Jersey’s Bruce Springsteen Center for American Music and a library in the East New York neighborhood of Brooklyn.
The push has extended to data-center developers, which have dominated construction spending. Devin Stockfish, chief executive of Weyerhaeuser, the largest U.S. timberland owner, said forestry companies are trying to persuade them to use mass timber. Stockfish said developers’ emission-reduction goals and race to complete projects favor the material. “We’ve got to convince the developers that you can get mass timber up more quickly than the alternative building product,” Stockfish recently told investors.
Loren Smith, a Google executive, said the technology company is already committed to mass timber. Google salvaged 85-year-old Douglas fir lumber from a decommissioned World War II air hangar in California to make mass timber for a data-center office in The Dalles, Ore., Smith said at a mass-timber conference in Philadelphia last month. Google has also opened a mass-timber office building in Sunnyvale, Calif., and has worked with architects on repeatable mass-timber office designs for its data-center campuses.
Shay said the Sabal House plan carried a 10% to 20% premium over steel and concrete. The added cost was quickly recouped, he said, because of the ease and speed with which a six-man crew assembled wooden elements made at a mass-timber plant in Dothan, Ala. Some elements were roughly 60 feet long and 3 feet thick; erecting the building with concrete and steel would have required dozens of workers and taken much longer, Shay said. Further savings came from leaving the wood exposed in much of the hotel interior, reducing how much drywall had to be hung and painted, Shay said. “You just show it,” he said. “It’s much more economical and much more beautiful, in my view, than the old way of covering everything up and decorating it.”