New structural systems come along rarely, and when they do, they usually wind up transforming cities. When steel replaced iron at the end of the 19th century, the path from the ten-story Home Insurance Building in Chicago to the Empire State Building took less than 50 years. Today, mass timber (the umbrella term for CLT and glulam) could have a similarly radical impact, because it gives architects and builders a chance to think in fresh ways — “the first new way to put up tall buildings in 100 years,” says the Vancouver-based architect Michael Green. Everyone responds to the charm and idiosyncrasies of wood — violin and guitar-makers have always understood wood’s strength and emotional power — and at a time when almost all new big buildings are glass-wrapped boxes of concrete and steel, the resurgence of an old-time building material feels like a hopeful breeze. And yet architects have only just begun to assimilate the imaginative tools that new timber technologies give them.
Right now, even the largest, most advanced buildings are built by hand, with workers on a windswept slab hundreds of feet in the air enacting old rituals, pouring concrete and welding steel. Mass timber is different: Designers sitting in a Manhattan studio can send electronic instructions to a factory in Oregon, which can spit out 1,000 slightly different components in the same time it takes to make 1,000 copies of the same part. Timber panels arrive on site like a prefabricated kit, with openings for windows, doors, and ducts already cut out. Assembly can be startlingly quick, “like a glorified Amish barn raising,” says Christopher Sharples, an architect at the New York–based firm SHoP.
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