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.

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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.

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.

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.

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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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Most mass timber conversations focus on the structure. That’s the easy part. It's everything at the edges, where the timber meets the facade, where the floor meets the wall, where the warm inside meets the cold outside, that determines whether a building lasts 20 years or 200.

Chris is a structural engineer and senior design principal of StudioNYL, a Lerch Bates company. 
He's worked on 25+ mass timber structural projects and another dozen on the facade side. On many of them, he's done both. He breaks down why aluminum facades act like cookware and how moving insulation to the exterior keeps condensation away from your timber, why the biggest moisture threat to mass timber is the rainstorm that hits mid-construction, how panelized facade systems speed up weathering-in but introduce thermal risk at the stack joints, and how fabrication advances are letting timber replace aluminum as the spanning element in curtain walls.

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Learn from real mass timber projects and industry leaders. 
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Budgets are tight. The client wants exposed wood. And somewhere around 90% DD, someone asks if you can just swap the steel grid for timber. Mason Brandt has seen that question blow up more than one project.

Mason is the president of Woodcore Engineering out of Lancaster, Pennsylvania — a specialty engineering firm focused on wood and timber. He's worked on north of 25 mass timber projects, and on more than one of them he's been the person who kept timber on the table when the budget said otherwise. In this episode he breaks down why the timber decision has to happen in SD, not DD — including how species selection affects structural capacity, bidding leverage, and interior finish, the difference between design assist and delegated design, and why getting a fabricator in the room early is one of the most practical things a team can do to protect schedule and budget. Real examples from a train station in Maine and a school addition outside DC. 

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Mass timber evolves through global conversations. But, those ideas move through people who've worked across the entire system from end to end. Sebastian Bildau is one of those people.

Nearly two decades of experience. Multiple continents. Projects spanning ecological land remediation, affordable housing, robotic prefabrication, government offices, and bamboo towers.

Connect with Sebastian

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Download the Mass Timber DfMA Process Diagram: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kIDk7Alphz1wHhE6HQrZyFwXp_AkegYv/view?usp=drive_link

Ever watched a mass timber budget skyrocket because a minor grid shift triggered endless rework? How about the chaotic site logistics that arise when erection sequence isn’t dialed in?

Early collaboration on DfMA strategies sets the tempo for smooth site coordination, faster schedules, and fewer RFIs. Kevin Rocchi from Element5 breaks down how locking grid lines, nailing slab extents, and clarifying load paths help architects and engineers avoid costly uncertainty. He also shares a behind-the-scenes look at their new glulam line, advanced scanning tech, and the best practices for mass timber project success. For AEC professionals chasing tighter margins, the key takeaway is predictability: fewer unknowns, better sequencing, shorter install windows, and a more attractive ROI for developers. Clear expectations and timely responses feed a virtuous cycle—one in which mass timber can consistently hit budget and schedule targets. 

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