The Future is North Carolina + Tall Wood Buildings
An exploratory trip to the Pacific Northwest tells all
In May 2019, I traveled to the Pacific Northwest to study the viability of tall wood buildings.
Mass timber (also known as cross-laminated timber or CLT) is a new construction technique that allows towers of 20+ stories to be supported only by wood.
There is no steel. There is no concrete—just wood.
I’ll get into the specifics and the predictable objections. But first, let me say this: it is hard to overstate the beauty of mass timber.
I have the world's most contemptuous relationship with modern architecture, and I rarely find any 5+ story building attractive or inviting. Yet, by returning to the essence of nature - unpainted wood - something innately changes.
Mass timber is creating a revolution in American building not seen since Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Sullivan melded the natural and industrial ambitions that defined the Chicago School.
The next great building innovation is always being pitched. Most quickly come and go. But mass timber has staying power. You can see it gain a beachhead in Europe and the Pacific Northwest. This trip was designed to understand it more fully.
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It was a packed itinerary. We would be touring the continent’s best mass timber buildings, meeting with their architects, and interviewing the code reformers who are responsible for making these buildings possible.
The first building we observed on the trip featured the largest open-span glulams in North America. These massive wooden beams spanned 100’ between load points and were installed with little to no steel, bringing to life an otherwise bland, soulless, utilitarian building.
These beams were so iconic that they alone defined the space with their sheer size, warming it with their golden red color.
What beauty. What grandeur. It was both awe-inspiring and comfortable.
Of course, we hadn’t left North Carolina yet. We were in Terminal 2 of the Raleigh-Durham Airport.
The joy of this trip came in little reveals showing how North Carolina is intimately connected with the mass timber industry, mainly without even trying.
Many of the paradigmatic buildings of North Carolina’s Renaissance are built with timber framing, such as the repurposed historic mills of Durham’s American Tobacco and Golden Belt.
The difference between historic timber framing and modern mass timber is that the former is solid wood, and the latter is engineered.
Old-growth wood (“timber timber”) is either in short supply or too valuable for structural components.
But today, this mass timber technology emerging from Austria assembles standard 2x stock into floors, roofs, walls, and columns to create endless possibilities.
American Tobacco was built with 12x12 solid timbers. American Tobacco Phase 2 (2025) may be built with seven 2x12s glued and pressed together to form 12x12 engineered timbers.
They are different paths to the same end. Mass timber is simply a new method to honor an old building technique.
The engineering, however, makes the wood cheaper, more dimensionally predictable, and less wasteful.
On the waste side, the environmental benefits of mass timber are only starting to be understood. They appear to be game-changing.
For starters, understand that steel and concrete are two of the worst environmental offenders on earth. Let’s start with the sad fact that cities are built almost entirely from steel and concrete. It is not sustainable.
If these worst offenders can be largely removed, or their use substantially reduced and replaced with renewable wood, huge gains can be achieved.
At scale, there are few better options for carbon capture than wood, which, over its growth cycle, captures and sequesters CO2 very efficiently. Left to rot in the forest, the CO2 is slowly re-released into the atmosphere. However, it is captured when wood is harvested and put into cities. It is a carbon sink. Theoretically, it is captured permanently.
In fact, wood buildings may be the best carbon sink strategy man has thus far invented.
Even the head forester of Nature Conservancy said, “Grow it. Harvest it. Grow it again.” His directive - to timber the forest faster - took environmental absolutists by surprise. But he wasn’t wrong. Wood is the most sustainable product we have to work with.
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The Pacific Northwest exists at the Mecca of the mass timber market. It is the epicenter of talent. It features seasoned designers, ambitious developers, and problem-solving politicians.
In this author's view, the most beautiful city in America is Seattle. It is only rivaled by its northern sister, Vancouver, the most beautiful city in North America.
Seattle and Vancouver are the gates to Cascadia, with the world's largest and most productive forest. A temperate and remarkably northern rainforest, Cascadia runs from Northern California to Southern Alaska. It is home to a plurality of America’s logging industry.
I met with Architect Michael Green, whose TED talk became the rallying cry for the mass timber industry’s ambition and policy reforms.
I told Green that I envied his local access to the unrivaled productivity of the British Columbian forests. Green replied “Actually, North Carolina pine trees grow to maximum yield in 20 years, British Columbia’s Douglas Fir take 70 to get there.”
In other words, according to Green, North Carolina forests were actually better suited for the smaller, quick-growth timber that the industry relies on.
Another coincidence? Michael Green got his start working for Duda Paine, whose offices are in Durham.
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We then toured the Bullitt Foundation’s landmark HQ, in the heart of Seattle’s Capitol Hill. The stunning building may be the greenest building in the country (for reference to that standard, your author is the at-risk developer of 2 LEED Platinum Buildings).
The Bullitt Center is almost entirely built out of mass timber. The ceilings are assembled like a butcher block, stunningly beautiful and natural, and nothing more than simple 2x4s nailed together. The desks are gorgeous: simple vertical grain Douglas fir.
The Bullitt Foundation specializes in safeguarding the natural environment by promoting responsible human activities and sustainable communities in the Pacific Northwest.
Before touring the building, I had never heard of Bullitt. Where did the Bullitt’s create their wealth? We were told they made their money in North Carolina Timber (though an effort to verify it later pointed to Michigan and Kentucky roots).
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The University of British Columbia built the tallest mass timber building in North America, an 18-story student dormitory. Remarkably, it took only six weeks to top out.
Recreation centers across Vancouver are built with mass timber, creating an indescribably (and ironic) warm feel to ice hockey rinks.
The snowball effect appears to yield tremendous growth, local industry, jobs, great design, and even affordability.
America is clearly late to the game. And it’s an industry with nearly zero presence on the Eastern seaboard. Mostly, this is due to regulatory issues: mass timber is governed by the International Building Code Type-IV construction, which currently allows little flexibility to build over four stories. This forces mass timber to cost-compete with stick frame, where it does not pencil.
The 2021 IBC code changes this, offering prescriptive paths to build 9, 12, and 18-story wood frame buildings, each with increasing life-safety requirements. Practitioners and code officials completed the research at building science centers, mainly in Cascadia.
Then Oregon did a remarkable thing. They accelerated the code.
In 2018, the State of Oregon took the 2021 code (which was already complete but unlikely to be adopted by states until 2021-2025) and made the mass timber section legal. As in right then and there. They accelerated adoption.
All it took was a simple vote of the legislature, which authorized its building agencies to accelerate its legality. The State of Washington followed suit in 2019. In both states, the adoption of the 2021 IBC mass timber code passed overwhelmingly with bipartisan support.
Oregon and Washington then got a colossal jump start in creating the industry and now have dozens of mass timber buildings and a plurality of the industry and skilled trades.
So why not here? Why not in North Carolina? According to the most well-known thought leader in the industry, North Carolina is better positioned to be a leader in this industry than the Pacific Northwest.
And Michael Green was only referring to the forestry stock. He made no mention of North Carolina’s intellectual capabilities, our relatively affordable quality of life, or our centrally located access to significant population centers, or our engineering schools at NCSU and Duke, or planning school at UNC, or architecture at State. Or the environmental programs at all three.
I was left to ponder the skyline of Raleigh as the epicenter of the East Coast mass timber industry, with Dix Park flanked by dozens, maybe hundreds, of locally grown, renewable wood buildings.
Like Washington and Oregon, all it takes is 1 line of legislation. And that industrial and architectural future might be North Carolina’s destiny and rightful taking. North Carolina is behind. But there is no better time to catch up than right now.