The Mass Timber Podcast: Explore Mass Timber industry conversations

Josh Dortzbach of FOREFRONT Structural Engineers on why timber gets cut at pricing, and the labor, system, and design decisions that keep it in the building.

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How CLT and glulam are made, what a small plant costs compared to a big one, and how fast each gets product out the door. With Ledinek’s Jaka Bradač.

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Ledinek Engineering: https://www.ledinek.com/

Jaka Bradač on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaka-bradac-843394248/

Read the article: www.masstimber.group/podcast/building-a-clt-plant-why-starting-small-can-beat-starting-big

0:00 Intro
1:32 Meet Jaka Bradač, Ledinek Engineering
2:37 How European and North American CLT plants got started
5:42 Why European producers grew more carefully
8:06 The case for small CLT plants: $25M vs. $250M
9:36 Demand for new plants in North America
11:08 What a small CLT plant should make
14:08 Who’s building small lines
15:21 Build time: 100,000 m³ vs. 30,000 m³ lines
17:06 How a small line adds capacity
20:51 How small European plants grew
22:40 Sawmill integration and fiber costs
25:31 How CLT is made, from log to panel
29:45 Machine setup for different species
30:35 The Southern Yellow Pine test
33:09 Hardwood CLT and yellow poplar
35:10 Making bigger beams for taller buildings
40:22 Wrap-up

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Learn from real mass timber projects and industry leaders.

Join our Newsletter: https://www.masstimber.group/newsletter-youtube

Connect with the mass timber industry. 

Attend our conference: https://www.masstimber.group/summit

An ambitious mass timber design usually meets the same three answers. It's not feasible. It'll be too expensive. Switch that part to steel. This episode is about a manufacturer that built its entire business around a fourth answer: yes.

Dave Savard, Director of Sales and Marketing, and Geneviève Constancis, partner and Director of Business Development at Art Massif, break down Aspen Pure, the company's new structural glulam made from quaking aspen, and the Samuel H. Scripps Theater Center canopy for Hudson Valley Shakespeare.


0:00 – Meet Art Massif
2:10 – How they started
4:35 – Aspen Pure
7:45 – Aspen design values
10:05 – Why aspen
16:30 – The Samuel H. Scripps Theater Center
20:00 – Design assist
27:30 – Architects are allowed to ask for what they want
30:40 – How 3D curved glulam beams get made
40:00 – First timber project advice

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Attend the Mass Timber Group Summit: https://www.masstimber.group/summit

Mass timber needs steel, and steel needs mass timber. This episode is a panel on hybrid mass timber construction: where CLT, glulam, and cold-formed steel contribute to industry growth, and why hybrid systems are how mass timber scales in North America. It covers what actually drives cost in a mass timber building, how to control fiber volume and connection design, why standardizing connections and erection the way the steel industry already has with AISC is the next step, and how composite crews of ironworkers and carpenters erect mass timber faster and safer than a single trade. 

If you're exploring mass timber for your own projects, one of the first questions is often "who makes the right product for my project?"

To help with that, we created a Mass Timber Producer Map featuring 39 North American producers and fabricators. You can explore manufacturers near your project, see the products they produce, visit their websites, and connect directly with them.

👉 Get access to the Mass Timber Producer Map by joining our newsletter! https://www.masstimber.group/newsletter-youtube

Find New Projects & Partners at the Mass Timber Group AEC Convention

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Mass timber projects don't succeed because of one company, but entire ecosystems. 

Most of us working in mass timber design it, engineer it, or build it. A few are inventing the products that will take it to the next level. 

Zenon Radewych is one of them. He's a principal at WZMH Architects, a 65-year-old firm based in Toronto, and the person behind sparkbird, the R&D lab WZMH built inside their own office. 

In this episode, Zenon walks through what's coming out of sparkbird on the mass timber side (TIMBERCLAD™, Pillar & Plank, Speedstac, and ELEVATE), why an architecture firm would take on the cost of running a lab in the first place, and what the industry looks like when more firms stop waiting for better building products and start inventing them.

If you're exploring mass timber for your own projects, one of the first questions is often "who actually makes the materials?"

To help with that, we created a Mass Timber Producer Map featuring 39 North American producers and fabricators. You can explore manufacturers near your project, see the products they produce, visit their websites, and connect directly with them.

Find New Projects & Partners at the Mass Timber Group AEC Convention

Grow your mass timber network. Join our newsletter

Hybrid mass timber is often the smarter structural choice. But it comes with a trade-off most teams just accept. The exposed steel beam, the ductwork overhead, a finished building that doesn't quite look like the one we had in mind. 

Mike Lipke is the president and owner of Torzo Surfaces, the only U.S. manufacturer of Thin CLT panels. Thin sheets of cross laminated timber, available in almost any species, made from new material or remanufactured scrap. He's been making them since 2011, well before most people in the U.S. had heard of CLT. In this episode Mike breaks down what Thin CLT actually is, where it solves problems for design and build teams, how it gets made from both new wood and salvaged scrap, and where demand is actually coming from. Plus how custom Oregon white oak panels for the Portland International Airport were built partly from MPP scrap pulled off the same job site.

If you're exploring mass timber for your own projects, one of the first questions is often "who actually makes the materials?"

To help with that, we created a Mass Timber Producer Map featuring 39 North American producers and fabricators. You can explore manufacturers near your project, see the products they produce, visit their websites, and connect directly with them.

Find New Projects & Partners at the Mass Timber Group AEC Convention

Grow your mass timber network. Join our newsletter

Mass timber projects don’t succeed because of one company, but entire ecosystems.

Office buildings in major U.S. metros are sitting at roughly 20% vacancy. Data centers? Less than 1%. The U.S. is building data centers at a pace the construction industry has never seen, and for the mass timber world, that's a real opportunity.

Erik Barth is a Senior Associate at Gensler in Boston, where he leads the firm's Mass Timber Collaborative. In this episode he breaks down where mass timber fits in the data center boom, why Type III construction has become the sweet spot (not Type IV), how his team handles the structural loads of high-density equipment with a five-ply CLT panel on a steel primary system, what's shifting in cooling tech and code, and why committing to mass timber up front is the difference between projects that work and ones that don't.

If you're exploring mass timber for your own projects, one of the first questions is often “who actually makes the materials?”

To help with that, we created a Mass Timber Producer Map featuring 39 North American producers and fabricators. You can explore manufacturers near your project, see the products they produce, visit their websites, and connect directly with them.

Find New Projects & Partners at the Mass Timber Group AEC Convention

Grow your mass timber network. Join our newsletter

Mass timber projects don’t succeed because of one company, but entire ecosystems.

Erich Roden retired as a Deputy Chief of the Milwaukee Fire Department after 34 years and now runs Murphy Roden Group. He served on the UL Fire Safety Research Institute and the Wisconsin Mass Timber Task Force that built the variance pathway for the Ascent. Mason Brandt is President and Principal Engineer of WoodCore Engineering, with 25+ mass timber projects designed. 

Together they break down where fire service skepticism comes from, what fire performance actually requires at the connection and member level, how the Ascent in Milwaukee got pulled from concept phase to the world's tallest mass timber building at completion, and what's shifting in East Coast markets, including FDNY's move from a flat "no" to running a mass timber primer in their own trade magazine. 

This episode explores fire safety in mass timber and how collaboration between engineers, architects, developers, manufacturers, and fire departments makes projects like the Ascent possible.

Find New Projects & Partners at the Mass Timber Group AEC Convention

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Want to know who’s actually building the mass timber industry?

We have a housing problem. The upstream cause isn't zoning or interest rates. It's that we still build essentially the same way we did sixty years ago.

This week's episode is with OD Krieg, co-founder of Intelligent City, the company behind the largest prefabricated mass timber residential project in North America. He's building what an actual solution looks like: industrialized, productized, scalable across cities.

Projects like this don't happen alone. Behind every mass timber building, architects, engineers, manufacturers, and developers are working together. So we turned that network into something practical: a curated directory of companies shaping the industry.

Use it to discover key players, explore collaborators & understand who’s driving innovation.

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Construction is the only major industry whose productivity has gone backwards since 1965. The houses we're building show it. Short lifespans, high energy bills, and a workforce being pushed out of the trade. This episode lays out why that happened and what it looks like to do it differently.

Kyle Hanson is the Founder and CEO of Timber Age Systems, a vertically integrated CLT manufacturer based in southwestern Colorado. He built the Timber Age Modular Building System (TAMBS), a factory-built assembly with a three-inch CLT backbone, two continuous membranes, 12 inches of dense-pack cellulose, and pre-installed windows, shipped cladding-ready. 

Kyle walks through the building science behind why most homes rot from the inside out, why a monolithic CLT wall assembly fixes it, how a crew of five dries in a two-story home in days instead of months, and why the residential industry needs to borrow coordination practices from manufacturing if it wants to keep up. 

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