December 2024

Steel-Timber Hybrid Buildings Report Highlights Potential for Tall Building Market Growth

Reaching the lumber industry’s vast market share potential will require growth of a variety of lumber-based and hybrid building systems, but steel-timber hybrid construction represents one of the greatest areas of opportunity. According to an analysis for the SLB by Forest Economic Advisors, steel and mass timber warehouses represent a potential annual volume of 2.4 BBF, while steel and mass timber multifamily projects represent 3.6 BBF of annual opportunity. 

The SLB has been working with the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat and constructsteel to unlock this opportunity, beginning by launching the Steel-Timber Hybrid Buildings Conference in 2022. The partnership continued this year with the launch of “Steel-Timber Hybrid Buildings: Case Studies,” a CTBUH research report funded by the SLB and constructsteel. The organizations celebrated the launch in September at the CTBUH 2024 International Conference (pictured below) with CTBUH CEO Francisco Javier Quintana de Uña; Ryan Flom; Kimberley Olson, Director of Construction Solutions at Nucor Corporation and Vice-Chair of constructsteel; Cees de Jager; and CTBUH Director, Research and Thought Leadership Daniel Safarik.

“Increasing pressure towards more sustainable construction methods is driving great interest in engineered mass timber,” the report’s authors write, “not only because of its perceived lower carbon footprint in production, but because of timber’s ability to sequester carbon from the atmosphere as it grows and produces.”

“This publication is a key step forward in understanding the full potential of steel‐timber hybrid structures in high‐rise buildings and clarifying the benefits of steel‐timber hybrid construction for the tall building industry,” says Terrence Busuttil, Director of constructsteel.

To advance the partnership and collaboration with the steel industry, de Jager recently spoke at the constructsteel conference in Charlotte, North Carolina, about the opportunities for both industries to grow the use of steel-wood hybrid construction in the U.S. Attended by top executives from leading steel manufacturers, the event provided an opportunity to further strengthen the relationship between the two industries. As markets increasingly demand cost-effective, pragmatic solutions that reduce a building’s impact on the environment, steel and wood offer the best of both worlds: combining the sustainability of wood and the strength of steel.  

Mass Timber Insurance Playbook Addresses Barrier to Wood Use

With last month’s release of the Mass Timber Insurance Playbook – U.S. Edition, WoodWorks is addressing a challenge many teams experience on their mass timber projects. While materials such as cross-laminated timber are becoming more mainstream across the country, they do not yet have a history of loss data that allows insurers to accurately assess risk. They’re also relatively new in the U.S. market, and insurance professionals who have never insured a mass timber project are often reluctant to do so. The Playbook is intended to support project teams seeking insurance, as well as the insurance industry as it develops knowledge and data in this space.

The U.S. Edition was adapted by Mike Hastings of M.D. Hastings Risk Consulting from the original Mass Timber Insurance Playbook developed by insurance and building resilience specialists in the United Kingdom in partnership with the Alliance for Sustainable Building Products. It gives developers, design/construction professionals, and insurers a framework for working together to resolve challenges that impact the insurability of mass timber buildings, making it easier to bring more of these projects to fruition.

“Adapting the Mass Timber Insurance Playbook is part of our commitment to helping address challenges related to innovative wood buildings in the U.S.,” said WoodWorks President and CEO Jennifer Cover. “Dodge data shows that, in 2023, more than 1 billion square feet of new construction could have been built using sustainable wood materials by code—and wasn’t. This represents a significant opportunity to reduce the carbon impact of the built environment.”

While not a guarantee, adhering to the principles in the Playbook should help project teams achieve the best pricing, terms, and conditions available in the current insurance market.

WoodWorks Video Offers Engaging Summary of Wood’s Life Cycle Benefits

In a new video, “Defining Sustainability in Wood Construction,” WoodWorks invites listeners to “take a big step back” to understand the benefits of wood buildings. Starting with the fact that wood is natural, plentiful, and renewable, Senior Technical Director Ashley Cagle touches expertly on all the key issues—embodied carbon, cities as carbon sinks, sustainable forest practices, the link between strong wood markets and healthy forest ecosystems, life cycle assessment, EPDs, and biogenic carbon. It’s a compelling case—stated simply and effectively in just over four minutes.

WoodWorks continues to position itself as a knowledgeable educator for the design and construction industry, not only on wood construction systems and their benefits, but also how wood can be used to achieve lower embodied carbon buildings. The video helps design professionals dig deeper into the WoodWorks library of sustainability resources so they can make informed decisions on building material selection.

Engineering Faculty Workshop Equips Professors with Wood Instruction Confidence

An SLB-sponsored engineering faculty development workshop hosted by Cal Poly Pomona brought together 20 faculty members from 18 universities across the country for a comprehensive introduction to wood products, systems, and building types. The workshop, which drew significant interest with 52 qualified faculty applicants vying for just 20 spots, highlighted the growing demand for wood education in academia. This event marked the fifth this year for SLB’s workshop series, which has engaged 101 faculty members across 81 unique programs in 38 states—effectively expanding wood education in architecture, engineering, and construction management curricula.

The Cal Poly Pomona workshop aimed to equip faculty with the tools and knowledge to champion wood as a viable, sustainable building material. The highlight was a field trip to a nearby four-story light-frame housing development over a concrete podium, where attendees saw firsthand the practical application of wood in multi-story construction.

Unlike traditional concrete and steel design courses, which focus on material properties and individual member capacities, this workshop emphasized the broader perspective of wood design. By teaching wood, especially light-frame construction, faculty can help engineering students gain a deeper understanding of how entire buildings function as integrated systems, with specific attention to load paths. This holistic approach better prepares students for the engineering workforce, as they develop insights into how buildings manage and transfer loads—an understanding that is often missing from many engineering programs. As groups like the National Council of Structural Engineers Associations push for curriculum changes, the SLB’s faculty workshops are essential in equipping educators to train a new generation of workforce-ready engineers with a strong grasp of wood’s benefits and practical applications.

“Before attending the workshop, I was not confident in my ability to teach a timber design course,” says Megan Voss-Warner, Assistant Professor at University of Evansville. “Learning about wood and hearing how experienced faculty members have designed their courses helped me build my confidence and grow a new excitement for offering this course to my students.”

To further support faculty in integrating wood education into their curricula, the SLB is committed to providing ongoing resources and tools. These include ready-to-use teaching materials to enhance classroom instruction, an immersive virtual reality tool for hands-on learning about mass timber, and fostering a community of practice for faculty to continue to share ideas and resources. These initiatives ensure faculty are equipped to inspire the next generation of engineers and architects to embrace wood as a sustainable, innovative building material.

The AWC Makes Progress for Wood Products at Building Code Hearing

In late October, staff at the AWC traveled to Long Beach, California, for the International Code Council’s (ICC) Group A Committee Action Hearing 2 (CAH2), the second public hearing for the development of the 2027 I-codes. The I-codes are developed through a multi-year process of consensus building and several rounds of public comments and hearings. The AWC is highly involved in the development of the I-codes to ensure that wood products and wood construction are treated fairly and not impaired in the building codes. 

CAH2 results were overall positive and favorable for wood use. The AWC’s proposal to incorporate the 2024 Fire Design Specification for Wood Construction (FDS) was approved, recognizing the use of the FDS as an acceptable method for fire protection of wood connections and providing designers additional options to meet code requirements.

Additionally, another AWC proposal was approved that removed the requirement for sealants and adhesives in joints and intersections of mass timber (Type IV-A, IV-B and IV-C) construction where they are unnecessary for fire performance, allowing reduced construction costs. The AWC also successfully testified in support of disapproval of a proposal to consolidate wildland urban interface (WUI) construction classes from three classes to one, maintaining more material choice depending on the extent of defensible space and severity of WUI fire hazard.

However, CAH2 results included an unfavorable approval of a proposal to the International Wildland-Urban Interface Code (IWUIC) that will potentially limit construction material options for lower-severity WUI hazard areas. The AWC is already preparing to submit public comments in response to this approval by the March 14, 2025, deadline.

The results of CAH2 will be made available for public comment in December, and a public comment hearing that includes a vote on Group A and Group B changes will take place in 2026. 

Think Wood Shows Office Design Teams How to Differentiate with Wood Construction

Although office building vacancy rates are rising as a whole, a “flight to quality” trend for employers means that many high-quality new buildings are thriving—creating an opportunity for developers to differentiate their office projects with beautiful, biophilic wood construction. According to a Forest Economics Advisors outlook for the SLB, the office market remains one of the strongest opportunities for lumber market growth, with an incremental annual volume potential in the office and bank sector of 345 million to 413 million board feet of lumber.

Think Wood is developing a variety of resources to show how wood construction can help office developers and designers enhance the occupant experience, boost sustainability, and increase overall value. The latest eBook in Think Wood’s mass timber case studies series highlights 6 Commercial Projects that Pencil Out, featuring replicable solutions that design teams can envision using in their own projects. Earlier this year, Think Wood developed a video featuring the design and development teams from two mass timber office projects, T3 ATX Eastside and the Houston Endowment Headquarters, providing insights and lessons learned on how they used mass timber to enhance their projects.

Another recent Think Wood project profile featured LEVER Architecture’s 843 North Spring Street, one of the first large-scale uses of cross-laminated timber in a contemporary Los Angeles office building. The steel-timber hybrid project saved an estimated 1,357 metric tons of carbon compared to traditional building methods by reducing the amount of concrete needed in the garage foundation, while also providing a more desirable workspace for tenants. 

“Timber is a natural material that people connect with in the same way that people connect to landscape and to outdoor space,” says LEVER Architecture Principal and Founder Thomas Robinson in the article. “It allows people to feel really comfortable being at work.” 

WoodWorks Helps Award-Winning Architect Select Light-Frame Construction Over Steel Alternative

Each month, the SLB features a new wood project that demonstrates the real-world results of the programs funded by the SLB. This month features a multifamily development where WoodWorks support helped an architect select light-frame construction over steel.

Blue Oak is a new light-frame wood development designed by Form4 Architecture, a winner of the American Prize for Architecture with a passion for creating environments that are emotionally resonant and conceptually thoughtful. 

Architect Cullen Hollyn Taub has attended numerous WoodWorks education events, including two lunch-and-learns at the Form4 office. After a presentation on Type III detailing, he contacted a WoodWorks Regional Director to discuss Blue Oak. 

Taub was considering a cold-formed steel structure and wanted to better understand the Type III/light-frame wood option. The RD met with him and his team to discuss questions on exterior wall requirements, shaft walls, and fire-tested wall assemblies. She followed up with details they could potentially use from the WoodWorks website and continued answering questions as they arose during design.

Form4 ultimately chose Type III light-frame construction, a construction type typically used for larger projects, to accommodate an interpretation by the local fire marshal that would have required ladder access around the building with another construction type. Informed by a California Bill that encourages density, the 51,000-square-foot Blue Oak includes 20 units on a relatively small, 20,463-square-foot site, at a scale that still reflects the local community’s small-town character. Projected to use 14 bf/sq. ft., Blue Oak is Form4’s first Type III project, and Taub says they now have the knowledge to apply to others in the future. 

“WoodWorks is an extremely valuable resource for wood construction,” Taub says. “The Regional Director has helped our firm on complex issues while also being able to provide a structural engineer’s view on assemblies. We are thankful for her and WoodWorks’ support and the role they play in the design and construction industry.”

Could Mass Timber Revolutionize Data Center Construction?

The data centers that power our ever-growing digital infrastructure represent both a huge construction opportunity and a correspondingly large carbon footprint. According to the architecture firm Gensler, global spending on the construction of data centers will reach $49 billion by 2030. In addition to the emissions generated through their power-hungry operations, the construction of these data centers has a large embodied carbon footprint, with concrete representing 85 to 90 percent of a building’s embodied carbon impact, according to Gensler.

A new Microsoft collaboration with Gensler and Thornton Tomasetti, however, explores a hybrid construction model that uses renewable, low-carbon mass timber to reduce a data center’s carbon footprint by 35 percent compared to conventional steel construction, and 65 percent compared to typical precast concrete.

In an article on Microsoft’s news site, structural engineer David Swanson says mass timber can be installed more quickly and safely and can overcome material cost premiums through reduced construction time and less need for skilled labor. “We’re constantly trying to validate the suitability of these novel materials for use in a data center environment,” he says. “We want to make sure that they’re going to perform, they’re going to be safe, they’re going to be resilient, and provide all the features that we’ve grown accustomed to all these hundreds of years that we’ve been using those other materials.”

WoodWorks began supporting Microsoft’s efforts to consider wood eight years ago with a presentation on sustainability. Since then, WoodWorks has continued the relationship, providing a free pass to the International Mass Timber Conference as well as ongoing support to their design team, contractors, and others on this project.

WoodWorks’ strategy for growing the warehouse and industrial wood construction market is to engage companies with environmental and net-zero carbon goals and provide support that allows them both to achieve cost-effective wood solutions and share wood’s benefits with others. With data centers set for growth alongside strong demand for warehouse and manufacturing facilities, the SLB and its funded programs are positioned to support an expanded market share for wood products in this market.