Category Archives: Wood, Paper & Green Building

A Cleveland-based developer has a new plan for the southwest corner of High Street and Ninth Avenue that calls for a much taller building and a new-to-Columbus construction method. Harbor Bay Ventures wants to build a 15-story building on the site…. Dan Whalen, VP of Design and Development for Harbor Bay Ventures, said that the company anticipates utilizing mass timber for the building’s structure, a construction material that has a lower carbon footprint than concrete or steel and has grown increasingly popular in recent years. Harbor Bay has used mass timber in other projects, including Intro Cleveland, a nine-story mixed-use development that the developer calls the largest mass timber-framed residential building in the country.

Clemson University broke ground March 8 on a new home for its Department of Forestry and Environmental Conservation (FEC) and, from a broader view, on a new era of stewardship for South Carolina’s natural resources.  Upon projected completion in early 2026, the 85,000-square-foot building will replace Lehotsky Hall as the department’s nerve center. South Carolina’s forests are among its most valuable assets as both a distinctive feature of its landscape and a renewable resource with recreational, wildlife and environmental benefits. …President Jim Clements said at the groundbreaking that it served as an important reminder of why the university was founded, quoting the Will of Thomas Green Clemson, its founder and namesake. …Clemson’s new forestry hub positions the department for future growth at a time when both its undergraduate and Ph.D. enrollment have reached all-time highs and research funding skyrocketed to more than $20 million last year from $2.6 million in 2020.

When Amazon set out to design and build Metropolitan Park—the 2.1-million-square-foot first phase of the company’s HQ2 development in Arlington, Virginia—company officials had one question when it came to sustainability. …As a result, Met Park recently became the largest project ever certified Platinum under LEED v4 for Building Design and Construction. Even more important, perhaps, the project unlocked lessons that have already influenced Amazon’s other construction projects and will reverberate throughout the green building industry for years to come. …Met Park’s meeting center heavily incorporates mass timber in its design. The meeting center ceiling was constructed with cross-laminated timber and is supported by ten 70-foot glue-laminated timber beams. “Wood is a great way to reduce carbon, because the wood has sucked that carbon from the atmosphere, and then it holds onto it throughout its life,” Klem notes.

CONCORD, NEW HAMPSHIRE — Eastern Hemlock, a ubiquitous and underutilized evergreen tree species in the northeastern United States, is now available for commercial cross-laminated timber (CLT) building projects for the first time after a multi-year project brings the tree species to the market. …Up until now, only timber species from the south and western U.S. and outside the country were available for CLT buildings. “Functionally, this is the first time that the building community can call a manufacturer and order CLT panels made from Eastern Hemlock. This is an exciting step that supports the regional forest economy,” notes Charlie Levesque, Executive Director of the North East State Foresters Association who led the efforts.  …For the hemlock project, CLT manufacturer SmartLam participated in the first phase at their plant in Alabama while ongoing commercialization is occurring at the Phoenix, Illinois CLT manufacturer Sterling Structural where builders can now purchase CLT made from the species.

Natural wood has served as a foundational material for buildings, furniture, and architectural structures for millennia, typically shaped through subtractive manufacturing techniques. However, this process often generates substantial wood waste, leading to material inefficiency and increased production costs. A potential opportunity arises if complex wood structures can be created through additive processes. Here, we demonstrate an additive-free, water-based ink made of lignin and cellulose, the primary building blocks of natural wood, that can be used to three-dimensional (3D) print architecturally designed wood structures via direct ink writing. The resulting printed structures, after heat treatment, closely resemble the visual, textural, olfactory, and macro-anisotropic properties, including mechanical properties, of natural wood. Our results pave the way for 3D-printed wooden construction with a sustainable pathway to upcycle/recycle natural wood.

MEMPHIS, Tenn. – Memphis Urban Wood is going back to the drawing board after cancelling plans to develop an urban lumber sawmill operation due to staunch opposition from some members of the community and Memphis City Council. Memphis Urban Wood proposed converting “a blighted property in North Memphis into a facility that would upcycle lumber into other useful products.” The operation would have created approximately 10 jobs to recycle trees removed due to age, storm of other causes. Memphis Urban Wood is an affiliate of The Works Inc. (TWI), a not-for-profit community development project focused on developing housing in distressed neighborhoods. Taking a not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) stance, a group of neighbors and some city council members voiced concern about potential air quality and health issues the facility could cause. …Memphis Urban Wood is “building a zero-waste urban tree system that generates jobs and community-wealth in distressed Memphis communities as well as a tree planting program.”

MINNESOTA — For all projects constructed of wood, a primary maintenance concern is the impact of moisture over long periods of time. According to Sullivan, an impenetrable envelope, in concert with a well-conditioned space, is critical for the longevity of mass timber, which can have a lifespan beyond 150 years (as exhibited in historic mill structures). “Additionally, mass timber projects are more quickly constructed, allowing these buildings to become watertight at a much earlier point in the construction process – when compared to steel and concrete framed buildings,” Sullivan says. “When completed, moisture levels can be monitored and mitigated with systems already utilized for most modern environments.” Additionally, if the mass timber elements are intended to interact directly with the exterior environment, special maintenance strategies should be considered. [Part 1 of this series is titled Examining the Mass Timber Trend]

Cincinnati Public Radio’s (CPR) is building a new $32-million headquarters in Evanston. The 35,000-sq-ft structure’s lateral system is composed of cross-laminated timber (CLT) shear walls, creating a building with a superstructure almost entirely composed of mass timber, explains Dean Lewis, director of mass timber and prefabrication at Skanska, the project’s construction manager. “The entire column and beam structure, second floor, roof structure and a selection of interior shear walls and exterior perimeter walls are made from mass timber,” he says. Upon completion in early 2025 it will become the first two-story mass timber building in both Cincinnati and the Midwest region. …The facility’s studios were designed with solid CLT walls, and each one is acoustically isolated with a box-within-a-box design. The floors feature a structural slab topped by a floating acoustical slab. Neither the framed walls nor ceilings touch the building structure and all penetrations were sealed as well.

David Heldebrant

NEW ORLEANS — Buildings and production of the materials used in their construction emit a lot of carbon dioxide (CO2), a potent greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming and climate change. But storing CO2 in building materials could help make them more environmentally friendly. Scientists report that they have designed a composite decking material that stores more CO2 than is required to manufacture it, providing a “carbon-negative” option that meets building codes and is less expensive than standard composite decking. …Apart from a few types of cement, carbon-negative composites are scarce, according to David Heldebrant, an organic chemist who is one of the project’s principal investigators. The composite decking his team has developed “is one of the first composite materials to be demonstrably CO2 negative over its life cycle,” he says.

Not exactly known for environmentalism, Staten Island will become a showcase of mass timber construction — if city officials can persuade a developer to try it. The city issued an RFP Thursday for someone to build 500 apartments using wood. Two 50-foot-tall buildings would go on city-owned land along the Stapleton waterfront on the North Shore, about a mile from the Staten Island ferry terminal. “This is the biggest opportunity to use mass timber at scale in the city,” said Melissa Román Burch, chief operating officer of the city’s Economic Development Corporation, which put out the request for proposals. Up for grabs are 99-year ground leases on two parcels just south of the Urby, a 571-unit residential project developed by Ironstate at 7 Navy Pier Court, where tenants can watch boats come and go from the Homeport pier that juts into the New York Bight.