Who is mass timber for, anyways? This carbon-sequestering marvel of engineering has come to symbolize complementary virtues of ingenuity and environmental stewardship. Architects and developers alike love to toil with the evolving possibilities – thanks to more advanced building codes – that building with mass timber offers. Mass timber high rises have ascended, literally and figuratively, to become the crown jewels of towns and cities throughout much of the Western world, from Melbourne to Munich. Such shining examples, however, are invariably large commercial and luxury residential towers.

Addressing the “So what?” questions

The issue of who these buildings are for is further complicated by what editor and author William Richards calls the “So what” questions. In the introduction for his new book Against the Grain: Mass Timber in the Home (Schiffer, 2024), Richards ponders, “So what if we can achieve twenty stories with mass timber; what about sustainable forestry? So what if code officials say we can; can the supply chain manage it? It’s a sobering set of questions that several designs firms have attempted to answer.”

For the moment, the practice of building with mass timber and those who commission that work is mostly the purview of people who can afford it and thus may care more for virtue signaling than practicing virtue. That’s the pessimist’s view. And given the relative nascency of this building technology, a healthy dose of pessimism is worth holding onto. As Lloyd Alter noted back in 2018, “I am really coming to wonder if [cross-laminated timber] has not become too fashionable, when there are other, simpler wood solutions that use less material, save more forest, and build more homes.” Since such time, mass timber supply chains have become attuned to regionalizing their operations, and the industry has even managed to make modest strides into the affordable housing market. (Alter has conceded this much in subsequent writings on the topic.) These cases remain outliers, but they speak to broader aspirations about mass timber’s potential to become less a pursuit of dilettantes and more a means for equitable building and responsible land management.

Richards notes in his book that mass timber has “become a more inclusive field in the last decade, as more and more architects have been able to take advantage of robust supply chains and myriad manufacturers – creating an environmental benefit that’s tangible and measurable.” He further points out, in what amounts to a call to arms, that mass timber “is about more than asking if the cost is worth it. It’s about asking if the carbon is worth it. If shelter remains as elemental to architecture’s fundamental purpose as anything else, then mass timber must become as purposeful as possible in sheltering our planet and ourselves.”

With that in mind, let us for a moment adopt a more optimistic viewpoint and ask: So what if mass timber has thus far been largely co-opted by builders of luxury condominium towers and the like? What about its potential to inform how we design healthier, more sustainable homes?

Working “against the grain”

Against the Grain is composed of 12 case studies, each one a private home (single and multifamily) constructed principally from engineered mass timber products and located in a host of forested, rural, and urban settings across North America, the UK, Central Europe, Scandinavia, and Oceania. In a recent discussion with GBA, Richards admits that whittling his selection down to a dozen projects wasn’t as difficult as one might think.

The initial list was “easily 40 or 50 projects,” he says. “Mass timber is not incredibly prevalent at the residential scale, certainly not at the single-family scale. So most of those projects were non-starters for a bunch of reasons.” He also highlights the fact that not a single living architect “has designed and built” more than a few dozen single-family mass timber homes. The final selection of homes in the book, he notes, are “not emblematic of an entire industry; they’re emblematic of this strategic approach to design and construction, where it’s not just about the material and constructing X number of units. It’s about a design perspective. It’s about a design attitude and an intellectual framework as well.”

Richards’ intent with this book is to shift focus away from “the novelty” of mass timber and apply first-hand accounts of “what it means to live within the walls” of these homes and “within the designs created by these architects.”

A grand home on a small footprint

Richards’ first case study, a 2,200-sq.-ft. timber-clad house in the Atlanta suburbs named Haus Gables, feels like an appropriate opener and one that befits the book’s title. Designed by Jennifer Bonner (one of the few architects Richards says he “knew for sure” he wanted to feature), Haus Gables strikes a sculptural, cathedral-esque posture, with “unadorned, white-painted, cross-laminated timber” that easily sets the home apart from its neighborhood context of Cape Cods and bungalows.

The design is both grand and minimalist. Bonner’s roof plan is composed of irregular pitches and gables that evoke the sense that an A-frame mated with a chalet mated with a garden shed, all of it “working downward to give the space a logic,” writes Richards. The resulting interior makes the most of every off-center angle and geometric push and pull, while the natural warmth of the blonde timber paneling is beautifully paired with various finishes of vinyl and terrazzo that shine and pop with color. All told, it’s more pop art than Scandinavian chic; Richards refers to Haus Gables as Bonner’s “stake in the ground for CLT’s possibilities.”

According to Bonner, who built the home with no client (and thus no design restrictions) and sold it shortly after completion, “If we’re going to build on dense parcels, our footprint will be small, which means we need to have a volumetric interior. It needs to feel grander than it is by the footprint.”

Shotgun-style flats on a tight urban site

In the London borough of Hackney, northeast of the city center, Victorian- and Edwardian-era rowhouses and other buildings recall the area’s history as a home base for industrial mill workers. The neighborhood bustles to this day and has become an international melting pot. Within this multifamily context, the design firm Groupwork, led by its founder Amin Taha, has built a five-story apartment building named The Spruce.

The gabled building comprises six apartments; two three-bedrooms, three two-bedrooms, and one one-bedroom, each designed with flexible layouts and unadorned interior walls that reveal nearly every element of the building’s superstructure. “Spruce sap, still tacky to the touch, oozes out of the ceiling in some places,” notes Richards.

Apart from the unique façade of brick laid in an open stretcher bond for ventilation (“less of a structural strategy and more of a skin over the CLT super-structure of the building”), the project is notable for its use of prefabricated CLT panels, which line every square inch of the apartments’ interiors, floor to ceiling. This design choice has allowed the wood to lighten with sun exposure and even reveal minor splits as the panels settle.

The next frontier

Other case studies in Against the Grain go on to highlight projects like the atelierjones-designed CLT House in Seattle, a modest 1,500-sq.-ft. home that’s been celebrated as “a love affair with wood”; Bridge House by Etienne Design, an elegant convergence of West Coast design and a lakeside cabin, located in the rural reaches of Denman Island near Vancouver; and Gudbrandslie Cabin in Filefjell, Norway, designed by Helen & Hard, a project that clearly demonstrates the resiliency potential for prefabricated CLT when sited in a remote and harsh natural context.

Richards insists that he chose each of the book’s projects not by location or architect but on their own merits. He says he was drawn to each one for combining various attributes including visionary design, technology, construction speed and efficiency, building performance, occupant wellness, responsible use of building resources, and other factors. “In our time and age, mass timber isn’t the only building material out there, obviously. But it’s the only one that has such a compelling story. It’s not just about being a market force; it has a design ethic attached to it.”

It is also Richards’ hope, as it is for many, that that design ethic will continue to catch on. As the industry expands, he says mass timber’s “next frontier” must tackle the question of “filling in that middle scale.” “Much ink has been spilled about affordable housing, and rightly so. I think that if we can at least make a really good attempt at solving the affordable housing question, then why shouldn’t we utilize mass timber . . . ? Why not make that housing better and healthier and more humane? It certainly goes up faster!”

To be fair, none of the 12 case studies come close to qualifying as affordable or “middle scale” housing, and that is because such examples that employ mass timber are incredibly rare. (Of note, Richards does mention at length in the introduction the work of Colorado-based Timber Age Systems, a business that sources regional ponderosa pine lumber for CLT production to make affordable homes, and in the process helps in forest management and wildfire prevention efforts.) What each of the 12 projects does represent, however, is a combination of methods and virtues that are worth heeding in every mass timber project, regardless of scale. Every project in Against the Grain embodies some measure of grand ambition and due restraint.

“If we’ve figured out the codes and the value chain for mass timber production, then to what end is it supremely useful?” Richards writes. “Is it a viable alternative to steel at anything below twenty-five stories? Certainly. Can its rapid fabrication and construction time efficiently deliver sorely needed market rate and affordable housing? Absolutely.”

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Justin R. Wolf is a Maine-based writer who covers green building trends and energy policy. His latest book, House Up on the Hill: The Revolutionary HMTX Headquarters, was just published by Ecotone.