But the biggest and most transformative benefit of mass timber is invisible. Since trees absorb and store CO2 as they grow, they have the potential to sequester carbon at scale — if harvested responsibly. Buildings could go beyond net-zero and achieve negative emissions.
By Matt King
1.
Over the last few years, Wisconsin has enjoyed a mighty, fleeting recognition. Its biggest city, Milwaukee, perched on the shores of Lake Michigan, is home to the world’s tallest wooden skyscraper. At first glance, the tower — aptly named “Ascent” — might not look all that unusual. Outlined in a trim black frame, the dark slab of glass, stretching twenty-five stories high, could be any luxury tower dropped into a gentrifying downtown district. But, look again, and you might notice a change: blonde columns that frame each floor, like giant toothpicks; or, the glowing flashes of wood paneling along the rooftop pavilion. If you can sneak inside one of the minimalist apartments — ranging from 1 to 3 bedrooms, and $2,000 to $7,000/month — or visit the building’s lavish amenity spaces, the exposed wood along the walls and ceilings, speckled with dark spots and grainy streaks, might be a revelation.
For Tim Gokhman, lead developer behind Ascent, it was aesthetics that first attracted him to the timber material. “In multi-family [buildings], most end users don’t put enough value on sustainability for it to be in and of itself a justification,” he explained to me, when we first spoke shortly after the building opened in late 2022. Mass timber is a novel engineering method and alleged climate savior that promises to unwind the construction industry’s massive carbon emissions. The technique glues together standard two-by-four planks and smaller wood fragments into Jenga-like pillars that rival the strength of concrete or steel. While Europe has built low-rise mass timber for decades, the U.S. only recently caught on – and this new “sustainable” race to the skies is in its first chapter.
A native son of Milwaukee, Gokhman had long wanted to bring a state-of-the-art residential tower to the city’s downtown. As managing director at New Land Enterprises, the firm his father started over 30 years ago, after immigrating from Ukraine, Gokhman has established a track record of inventive projects. “Rhythm,” the first micro-unit apartment building in Milwaukee, recreated the efficiency of a Hong Kong studio, with hidden storage drawers and dining tables that convert into beds. “Black Cat Alley” was a neglected pathway on the city’s East Side before the New Land team helped transform it into a year-round arts destination, with street art murals and pop-up concerts, classes, and vendor markets. Just off the alley is the Oriental Theater, a historic 1920s-era movie palace also in Gokhman’s portfolio. Now, it was time to build a proper luxury apartment tower, like he’d seen in countless other downtowns across the U.S.
When first setting out his plans for Ascent, timber was far from Gokhman’s mind. He admits he was just as likely to proceed with a traditional steel or concrete playbook. Until, one day, he stumbled across a drawing. The digital rendering of a beachwood tower planted along the glass canyon of Chicago’s riverfront. Exposed wooden beams framed every floor in a tall, narrow grid of boxes. The wood reminded Gokhman of buildings in Milwaukee’s Third Ward and Walker’s Point, many of which had been converted to condos and lofts, bars and restaurants and galleries. While the beechwood concept, unveiled in 2017, never moved beyond the drawing board, its example helped inspire a wave of projects like Ascent that are now altering city skylines.
Ascent has since become a poster child for mass timber, featured in interviews with NPR, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Vox, and PBS NewsHour, among many other outlets. Its arrival also coincides with a broader global awakening to the potential of timber construction, primarily across North America, Europe, and Australia. For the recent 2024 Olympics, France built its new national aquatics center and much of the Olympic Village from mass timber. In the U.S., a growing list of corporations are building their next headquarters from the material: Amazon, Microsoft, Adidas, Walmart, Google, Under Armour. Top universities, too, are embracing wood for signature projects, from a sports arena at the University of Idaho to a new culinary science center at Auburn University. This summer, Portland International Airport unveiled its much-anticipated new terminal, an airy cathedral of latticed Douglas fir beams, sourced from four Indian tribes in Oregon and Washington, including salvaged wood from a 2019 wildfire.
Though aesthetics may be the primary economic driver, mass timber is also being hailed as an urgent climate solution. Some view it as a last-ditch effort by the construction and real estate (CRE) industry to reign in its sprawling externalities. Reports estimate that buildings produce 39% of global emissions, gobble up half of all raw materials, and account for 36% of material waste. The CRE sector can single-handedly derail any Paris Agreement target or multilateral climate accord. Nearly half of this massive CO2 footprint is from embodied carbon, the upfront emissions required to build each structure. Developers are only now beginning to address this gaping blind spot. Even today’s most aggressive “green building” certifications, such as LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design), measure only the ongoing carbon efficiency to operate a building.
Mass timber offers a cleaner, faster construction process, not unlike a jumbo set of Lincoln Logs. The prefabricated kit of parts for Ascent included over 2,000 columns and beams, in nearly 100 different sizes and lengths, with giant screws (some 30’’ long!), cordless drills, and plenty of rechargeable battery stations. This intricate planning demands advanced 3D models, and often dozens of more pre-construction meetings. But since each wooden piece is precisely manufactured, there’s drastically less waste. The entire bill of materials requires only one-fourth the cargo space. Smaller crews build floors in half the time, versus pouring cast-in-place concrete or welding heavy steel beams; plus, they enjoy a much cleaner and safer work site (and less of a mess when they get home).
For consumers, the benefits of mass timber aesthetics are not just superficial. The “biophilic” presence of natural materials like wood has been shown to possess many positive health impacts, from reduced stress and lower heart rates to faster healing and improved productivity. For anyone concerned about the idea of mass timber and fire, that oldest and most pervasive threat to cities, these worries, too, have proven moot. Extensive tests by the USDA Forest Service have proven mass timber’s resilience. The outer, sacrificial layer of wood can char and withstand hours of burning without incurring structural damage. Some evidence suggests that mass timber is more fire-resistant than steel or concrete.
But the biggest and most transformative benefit of mass timber is invisible. Since trees absorb and store CO2 as they grow, they have the potential to sequester carbon at scale — if harvested responsibly. Buildings could go beyond net-zero and achieve negative emissions. Rather than invest in unproven carbon-capture pipedreams, countries could plant more trees, and use those natural carbon sinks to rebuild our cities. Whether it’s adding more homes and apartments, or space for schools, offices, gyms, or factories, mass timber has the potential to clean up our atmosphere while growing a carbon-free building supply. Is it too good to be true?
2.
Timber has always been part of our architectural legacy. Wood built the earliest nomadic shelters and teepees; it supported the ancient pagodas of Japan, the stave churches of Scandinavia. Trees built the first version of today’s modern cities. In the U.S., the northern forests of the Great Lakes provided the means of westward expansion. Wood was necessary to create houses, barns, schools, churches, wagons, fences, boats, railroads. “Lacking a ready supply of wood, no town could come into being or aspire to become a metropolis,” writes historian William Cronon in his book Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West.
For a brief time in the mid-1800s, the Midwest was the greatest lumber market in the word. Wholesalers preferred its white pine, for its versatile texture and durability, but most importantly: its ability to float for easy transport. As quickly as the railroad elevated Chicago into the central node of trade, it soon spelled its demise, as the rails reached into more rural towns and sources of timber closer to retail buyers. To make up for falling lumber prices, sawmills in Michigan and Wisconsin overproduced, believing “centuries will hardly exhaust the pineries above us.” Just three decades later, the damage was undeniable, in the cutover landscapes of stumps, branches, and debris, often stacked fifteen feet high. This abandoned wasteland became tinder for the dry seasons of the late 1800s, when great infernos ripped through cities like Chicago, Milwaukee, and Cincinnati. When it was time to build again, it was the steel furnaces of America’s heartland that wrote the next chapter of urban growth, followed later by the postwar rise of concrete.
The origins of mass timber commonly trace back to Central Europe in the 1980s. In the densely forested regions of Austria and Germany, a small number of timber specialists and graduate engineers began tinkering with multi-layered, laminated panels. The breakthrough came with Dr. Gerhard Schickhofer’s 1993 thesis on cross-laminated timber (CLT), a technique that supported stronger, wider panels with potential for commercial applications. Within the next decade, the technique began taking off across northern Europe, as well as far-flung cities like Melbourne and Vancouver. In 2009, London welcomed the first “plyscraper,” a nine-story residential building made entirely of CLT framing. In 2017, the University of British Columbia opened its new 18-story Brock Commons dormitory, the tallest world record-holder before Ascent.
Only in the last decade has the U.S. finally caught up with this timber revolution. Starting in 2015, a series of changes to the American construction industry guidelines — arrogantly named the “International Building Code” — gradually permitted mass timber heights of five, then six, and most recently 18 stories. This code must be individually adopted by each local jurisdiction, and can be further modified for specific projects. To secure a “special variance” for Ascent’s 24-story height, the building design included a six-story concrete podium that contains its multi-level parking garage and indoor pool.
Mass timber has taken off most on America’s coasts, across the Pacific Northwest and Southeast, areas rich with softwoods ideal for mass timber. But Rust Belt cities have been the first to go tall with timber. The country’s previous record-holder was Cleveland’s nine-story INTRO apartment complex, completed in early 2022, just before the NBA All-Star Weekend. Cities like Sandusky, Ohio and Appleton, Wis. built mass timber pavilions in their downtowns as part of broader redevelopment efforts. Milwaukee’s own fire department became familiar with the material in 2019 while testing and approving the Timber Lofts, a four-story redevelopment of a 130-year-old Pabst Brewing warehouse.
“Part of it is just coincidence and luck,” Gokhman says. “It’s not like we chose Milwaukee. We live in Milwaukee, and that’s what we wanted to build. That said, had we lived in Chicago, New York, or Los Angeles, there would be zero chance at Ascent, because code wouldn’t have allowed it. The great thing about these mid-size markets is that it’s easier to do something innovative, because there’s less bureaucracy.”
The list of Ascent’s reported benefits is staggering. Overall, the project required 90% fewer vehicles, 75% fewer on-site workers, and three to four months’ less construction time, compared to a comparable concrete or steel project. Its wooden frame sequestered the equivalent CO2 of taking 2,400 cars off the road for a year. If scaled up across the construction industry, these efficiencies could radically reduce our carbon footprint. Recent academic studies show that mass timber buildings would lower global warming potential by up to 94% versus structural steel or reinforced concrete; when applied broadly to all mid- and high-rise buildings, mass timber saves over 16.5 million tons of CO2 every year, or the equivalent of nearly 4 million cars removed from our roads.
Gokhman has quickly become a major advocate of this eco-miracle. “I make the comparison to Tesla,” he explains, while noting he’s also a proud owner of the electric vehicle. “Other EV makers struggled because they were always some sort of compromise, and Tesla wasn’t. That compromise is the path of, ‘Well, it’s sustainable, therefore we should do it.’ To me, that’s insufficient for mass adoption. It has to be a better product, period.” In March 2024, he launched a new consultancy, Timber + Partners, dedicated to building more Ascents in downtowns across the country. The firm is raising its first development fund, with plans to get a handful of projects in motion in several possible underrated mid-sized markets like Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Charlotte, Denver, Dallas, Seattle.
State and federal funds are also finally starting to flow into mass timber. The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act earmarked $350 million to reduce embodied carbon in the building sector, with $32 million specifically for mass timber research and development. A recent designation by the Biden-Harris administration of the Pacific Northwest as a Mass Timber Tech Hub released an additional $50 to 70 million in funding for these projects. A few major cities like Boston, Atlanta, and New York have unveiled mass timber accelerator programs to raise awareness as part of municipal goals to become carbon neutral by 2050.
The growing tide of tall timber in the U.S. rises each year. As of June 2024, over 2,200 projects were in progress or completed, according to WoodWorks, a nonprofit that supports free industry education and development. This is a fraction of the total CRE market, but those yearly jumps are only getting bigger. In one optimistic projection, dubbed “The Marshall Effect,” after Steve Marshall, former head of the U.S. Forest Service, the number of mass timber buildings are projected to double annually. In this best case scenario, the North American construction industry stores more carbon than it emits by 2034.
3.
As with any new technology, there’s the risk—perhaps an inevitability—that mass timber’s transformative potential is diluted into commercial window-dressing.
Some argue this ruse is already underway. Ascent, marketed as the world’s tallest “mass timber” skyscraper, is indeed mostly wood; but, roughly a third of its structure is concrete and steel, used for its connectors, stairwells, elevator shafts, foundation, and other core elements. The building’s carbon footprint could have been drastically reduced without the indoor pool and parking garage, but as Gokhman noted, sustainability was never an explicit priority of the project. For some architectural observers, Ascent’s claim to the tall-timber throne is arguably contested by Norway’s Mjösa Tower, which is shorter at 18 stories but all-timber from the foundation up.
There are certainly worse offenders, and many outright imposters. Buildings across the U.S. market adopt the mass-timber moniker while using the material for a fraction of its structure, sometimes as little more than a visual accent or accessory. This is a tiny gesture in the right direction, but hardly a meaningful change. It’s not hard to imagine the term “mass timber” becoming as vague and pervasive as “organic” or “sustainable” in the grocery shopping aisle; yet another way for the construction industry to greenwash conventional steel-and-concrete buildings as something new or enlightened.
Probably the biggest critique of mass timber is its potential impact on our natural forests. A sensible concern, given that Earth has lost almost a third of its forests in just the last three hundred years. Deforestation remains a major threat across South America, Africa, and Southeast Asia, regions that have also lagged behind in adopting mass timber. But timber producers across Europe and North America have recently managed to harvest trees without decreasing forest area. In press interviews, Gokhman is quick to share that all the wood required to build Ascent is replenished in natural growth forests every 23 minutes. Many mass timber manufacturers feature certifications from sustainability watchdogs like the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) and the Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification (PEFC).
“We have more than enough wood,” says Dr. Raju Pokharel, assistant professor of forest resource economics at Michigan State University. He speaks to me on Zoom from a hotel room in Loveland, Colorado, where the Society of American Foresters (SAF) is meeting for its annual conference. “Mass timber actually increases sustainability. Right now, our forests are degrading because we don’t have the money to manage them properly. If you’re not harvesting forests sustainably, it leads to tree deaths and wildfires that become net carbon emitters.”
By providing a revenue stream to land owners, responsible harvesting can help manage forest risks. Mass timber doesn’t require large 4×4 lumber; it can glue together 1×1 sticks, and other small-diameter pieces. The latest CLT fabrication methods can even make use of discarded or diseased plant matter that previously posed a risk as kindling for wildfires, or if collected, was likely sent to landfill. This approach has been hailed by environmentalists and public officials alike as a win-win-win: better fire suppression, more sustainable construction, and a new jobs for rural communities.
But researchers are still poking holes in mass timber’s seemingly airtight climate equation. One recent paper suggests that on average as little as 25% of a harvested tree makes it into the final laminated pallets, leading to much greater waste than anticipated which must be buried or burned, potentially releasing more carbon than it had stored. Moisture has been a concern for high-rise mass timber, if leaks in taller buildings were to go undetected. There have been recent reports of unexpected mold issues at projects in tropical climates like Singapore, though early investigations point towards poor management rather than an issue with the material.
Some environmental scholars insist on a more rigorous accounting of the entire value chain. In his polemic study, Empire, State & Building, Kiel Moe laments how architects are trained to focus on the 20% of emissions associated with a typical North American building’s daily operations, while ignoring the 80% of its carbon debt that stems from the various stages of the building process. “To properly understand, and thus design, a mass timber building requires designers to begin to see the forest for the tree,” he writes in a recent op-ed for The Architect’s Newspaper. Wood can only effectively sequester carbon if it comes from responsibly managed forests. Even then, any “savings” must be weighed against the emissions by which the wood is “extracted, transported, processed, installed, maintained, and eventually demolished.”
To realize mass timber’s full sustainability potential, the U.S. still needs to develop its own manufacturing capacity. Like many of its American precursors, Ascent sourced its wood from across the Atlantic, opting for the blond hem-fir and spruce trees of the Austrian Alps, and the expertise of the area’s long-standing CLT fabricators. In recent years, a handful of CLT plants have opened in the Pacific Northwest, as well as Greenville, S.C. and Conway, Ark., to support the new Walmart headquarters. The greater Midwest is still awaiting such a local supply chain.
When Ascent was in development, there were zero mass timber producers in the Great Lakes region. Just a few years later, the region now has one mid-size operation in Ontario, as well as a smaller CLT plant outside Chicago. But these initial outposts haven’t yet led to a broader influx of investment. “We want to see mass timber production happening in the state of Michigan,” says Sandra Lupien, director of the MassTimber@MSU program. “We’re heavily forested. We have a history of paper product industries that have been in decline. We have a strong manufacturing culture. Naturally, the Great Lakes region should be producing products for our buildings.”
In its earlier heydays, the Midwest has supported hundreds of saw mills and independent lumber operations. The small town of Peshtigo, Wisconsin was in fact the first place in the U.S. to use glue-laminated timber in construction. Back in 1934, German architect Max Hanisch fabricated a three-hinged arch to support the roof of a new school gymnasium, a technique that would be replicated in countless schools, churches, and bridges across the region. Peshtigo also happened to be the site of America’s most devastating forest fire, half a century earlier in October 1871, claiming over a thousand lives, millions of trees, and hundreds of millions in property loss. Today, with global supply chains further entwined by aircraft and cargo ships, Midwestern sawmills are closing at a rapid clip, as developers increasingly import wood at cheaper prices. But, as regional history has shown, through multiple techno-historical inflection points, it’s never too late to begin again.
Even a modest investment could reinvigorate the Great Lakes’ dormant paper plants and saw mills and struggling rural communities. In a paper released March 2024, Pokharel and his MSU co-authors outline a case for two new mass timber production facilities in Michigan’s upper and lower peninsulas. Even with the most conservative market growth estimates, these plants add over $18 million in total economic output to the state and create at least 125 additional jobs; these gains also rise exponentially as demand for mass timber grows.
Another potential hurdle is the region’s native tree species. Over 70% of northern forests are predominantly hardwood species, which aren’t yet approved for use in mass timber products. That could be yet another historical coincidence. “One of the reasons we’re certifying softwoods first is simply because that’s where mass timber started,” says Lupien. “The Pacific Northwest is abundant in Douglas Fir, which requires active forest management. They had unhealthy forest density due to years of fire exclusion, and a strong need to address that – along with demands for more housing and state-wide climate plans.”
Researchers at MSU and Michigan Tech are investigating plastic resins that could allow for hardwood in hybrid or pure CLT products. Pokharel is optimistic that some species could be approved in the IBC code as early as 2025. Projects like Ascent have shown that code changes can happen quickly once a viable solution, and willing capital, is on the table. In 2023, the Michigan Department of Natural Resources broke ground on the state’s first all-timber building. It also wanted to use locally sourced wood for its CLT panels. First, it had to find a way to certify red pine, a local softwood and one of the state’s fastest-growing trees. The team shipped samples to Washington state to conduct R&D, fabricate and convert into CLT, test and certify, then ship back to Michigan. But the team diligently followed those steps, and within a year, red pine was approved for the supply chain. (The DNR building is slated to open in December.)
Based in East Lansing, Lupien and the MSU team are tracking over 50 active mass timber development projects in Michigan alone. They work from a newly renovated STEM Teaching and Learning Facility, the state’s largest hybrid timber structure, and an adaptive reuse of the campus’ old coal-fired power plant. The new building retains this industrial footprint and centers one of the boilers within an art exhibition about local energy use patterns. In a podcast interview, Lupien described the potency of this mish-mash aesthetic: “You have the original steel building structure, and above, the [cross-laminated timber] floor decks, and this unique combination of materials comes together in this really cool way… People like to say it looks steampunk.”
This clash of styles is all but missing from most modern high-rise architecture. Many of our tallest buildings and downtown districts have become an interchangeable sea of glass and steel, vast open floor plans ringed by drywall and fluorescent ceilings. These designs are not only alienating and dehumanizing, but disconnected from any sense of place or geography. As Cronon writes in Nature’s Metropolis, the slaughter of the Great Lakes’ white pines was easier to forget “the farther one traveled from the north country, and easiest of all when one stood in the shadows of the tall stone buildings of Chicago’s Loop.”
If and when more mass timber plants come online, we could see our built environment again reflect its natural surroundings and geography. In a recent industry panel, mass timber expert Erica Spiritos describes “a future that’s like farm-to-table for a mass timber building. You walk into a building in Arkansas and recognize the wood as Southern Yellow Pine, and in Oregon you see Douglas Fir, and in New York there’s the Black Spruce. That celebration of the regional material is so important in creating a sense of respect for the natural materials that our lives depend on.” The spirit of this architectural ethos would extend beyond wood as well, to materials such as bamboo, dirt, or clay — recapturing the warmth and wisdom of vernacular architectures in even our newest buildings.
4.
On a recent visit to Philadelphia, I finally glimpsed a mass timber construction site for the first time. As our cab zoomed through the UPenn campus, we halted at a red light, and across the street was the half-assembled wooden frame of Amy Gutman Hall. Steel support beams ran along the ground floor, but everything above and within appeared to be timber. Each naked floor resembled an IKEA bed frame – a grid of slatted horizontal cross-beams, supporting broad rectangular CLT floor panels. The construction site was clean and quiet, as expected. But it was also remarkably exposed — guarded only by a flimsy perimeter fence, much shorter than the high wall boards and orange curtain nets that obscure most city build sites.
Like Milwaukee’s Ascent, or Cleveland’s INTRO, or Vancouver’s UBC dormitory, this UPenn project was a signature building, a showpiece for the university. The vast majority of mass timber projects still fit this profile. But with the promise of carbon-friendly growth, mass timber must support as many routine commercial and residential projects as possible.
Having lived in a dozen grubby city apartments in as many years, I’m also interested in mass timber’s ability to address the affordable housing crisis. Over the past half century, residential development along metropolitan transit hubs has hardly kept pace with growing urban populations. The United Nations estimates this gap will double by 2060, requiring 2.4 trillion square feet of new housing — the equivalent of adding New York City every month for the next 40 years. Some U.S. cities are doing better than others in rolling back draconian zoning codes to encourage development.
Gokhman insists that mass timber will never be as cheap as one- and two-story stick frame dwellings. But, this lower upfront price tag is also deceiving. It ignores the externalized costs of sprawling single-family development, with its greater car dependency and sprawling roads, sewers, and water pipes that are expensive to maintain. When factoring in these municipal burdens, the marginally higher cost of a subsidized timber high-rise near mass transit and public parks might seem like a bargain.
There’s another, more realistic path by which timber can improve affordability. With its lighter weight, mass timber offers an easier way to build atop our existing urban architectures. Although Ascent was a new-build project, its hybrid timber-and-concrete design presents a model of this adaptive approach, stacking timber-framed apartments atop a concrete base. Through infill development, cities can add density without having to demolish buildings, which unleashes megatons of carbon back into the atmosphere. Property owners can stack new wooden stories atop yesterday’s steel and concrete structures, transforming a bit more skyline into lots more housing supply.
“The building that has the lowest carbon footprint is one that already exists,” says Gokhman. “Since mass timber is lighter, you’re able to add more stories where previously you couldn’t with concrete. If you think about places like D.C., or San Francisco, or New York, which are land-constrained, all of a sudden, you have the ability to add on without chewing up additional land.”
This trend towards vertical extension is already happening. D.C. just welcomed the East Coast’s first infill project last November, tacking on two extra-tall timber stories atop an existing concrete-and-steel office building. In New Haven, ACME Lofts added two stories of apartments atop a three-story, 150-year-old masonry building, using Alabama-sourced yellow pine. In the Bay Area, developer oWOW is adding multiple stories of affordable apartments atop retrofitted warehouses.
But the burgeoning mass timber industry also faces growing opposition. Incumbents in the construction trades have launched multi-million-dollar PR campaigns, like the mixed concrete lobby’s “Build with Strength” campaign which stokes fear and uncertainty about timber’s reliability. By pointing out legitimate concerns with unique edge cases like buildings on sandy coastlines, these marketing efforts aim to diffuse the general enthusiasm for timber or any alternative construction methods.
No country is yet doing enough to force the issue. Every year, the construction trade gets away with heinous emissions beyond the wildest dreams of oil-and-gas executives. A handful of governments are at least trying. In an email exchange, UNSW Sydney professor Philip Oldfield noted to me that France is the most aggressive legislator thus far. The country’s 2022 law requires at least half of the materials for all new public buildings to be made from wood or natural materials. France also has been among the first to roll out embodied carbon limits, a tactic that Toronto also introduced for all new city-owned buildings.
Sometimes, it’s simply the friction of old software that stands in the way of progress. “Any green tech starts as more expensive for early adopters, and incentives help get over this hump,” says Lupien, of MassTimber@MSU. “It’s time for mass timber to have those policies, but an even more important barrier to adoption is the cost estimating process.” Legacy construction tools with limited information inputs keep general contractors and construction managers in the dark. These calculators also fail to account for the full benefits and cost efficiencies of mass timber. For example, faster build time can save a project weeks or even months of work, which means significant savings in terms of financing, equipment rental, or on-site labor.
Whatever the mix of causes, mass timber’s sluggish arrival in the U.S. is nothing less than an environmental catastrophe, and a historic missed opportunity. The Covid-19 pandemic unleashed a building bonanza across the Sun Belt boomtowns of Austin, Miami, and Nashville, as remote workers and other nomadic laptop professionals sought better weather, lower rents, and looser social distancing restrictions. Now, these skylines are filled with countless nodding cranes, erecting luxury high-rises and office towers, and even a few outrageous supertalls, each detonating a fresh carbon bomb of steel-and-concrete before timber ever got a hearing.
5.
In the midwest, boosterism around mass timber obscures a deeper predicament. While metro areas across the south and mountain west have grown steadily for decades, attracting retirees and young professionals with an outdoor streak, most towns across the Rust Belt have been losing population. This is true even for the regional lodestar of Chicago, which has nearly 1 million fewer residents than in 1960. Growing up outside the city, I’ve counted first-hand as friends and relatives have moved away, myself included, for any number of reasons: school, work, weather, lifestyle. The situation is even more dire for the region’s smaller cities.
Today, Milwaukee’s population is at its lowest point since 1930. Suburban flight, smaller family sizes, and the loss of manufacturing jobs have all fed this doom loop. Mayor Cavalier Johnson has ambitions to reverse this trend and double the city’s size to one million residents, through relaxed zoning laws and rapid bus transit. Gokhman and other local developers are planning additional residential towers for Miliwaukee’s downtown corridor, hoping to drum up a self-fulfilling prophecy of investor interest and incoming residents. But what exactly will this new city look like? Can a critical mass of midwesterners be persuaded to abandon their cars?
For all its aesthetic ingenuity, the mass-timber icon of Ascent also resembles a modernist fortress. Lacking any ground-floor retail or commercial space, it is a gated community unto itself. Residents are a short elevator ride away from the building’s private lounge, play room, terrace, pool, sauna, rooftop cinema, indoor golf simulator. Such amenity-filled condo towers repeat the same trap as any sprawling suburban mall or hotel resort complex. What else would the city need to attract people, and most critically, families, from across the economic spectrum, to again return to downtown?
Soon enough, Ascent’s world record will be usurped by a series of ever taller timber towers. Its principal architect, Jason Korb, is already designing a 29-story hybrid apartment building in St. Louis. In 2026, Software company Atlassian is slated to open its 39-story hybrid-timber headquarters in Sydney. Local officials in Perth recently approved plans for a 50-story hybrid tower that would be the first to meet the modern definition of a skyscraper. But Milwaukee is also poised to keep fighting for its newfound title. Just down the street from Ascent, another local developer, The Neutral Project, is breaking ground on a 32-story hybrid-timber tower; the team also recently unveiled plans for a second nearby project that could reach up to 55 stories.
Some developers are even looking for additional use cases. Timber has been used to create pedestrian bridges in Lower Manhattan, and road bridges in the Netherlands. Earlier this year, the world’s tallest timber wind turbine began operation in Skara, Sweden – the product of some 200 spruce trees typically sold during the Christmas season. “Because wood is lighter than steel, you can build taller turbines with less material,” says developer and architect David Olivegren. European telecoms have claimed embodied CO2 savings of up to 50 percent for phone masts made from mass timber in Germany and Italy.
Time will tell whether mass timber proves a turning point in our architectural record. But, at this rare historical moment, when several of our most essential construction orthodoxies are on the table, it’s exciting to feel like we’re back at some kind of beginning. Where once the status quo of wood was thought to be irredeemable, and the industrial might of steel our new savior, we’ve now found ourselves in a similar predicament – and the oldest method might be the only way forward.
Matthew King writes about waste, urbanism, and inequality for publications like The Atlantic, The New Republic, and The Baffler. A former MFA nonfiction fellow at Emerson College, his essays and reportage have been featured in the Best American series and Longreads. He grew up in Illinois and lives in New York. Follow his work at http://matt-king.me or on Twitter/X at @_mattking.”
