Mass timber is in the news because projects are going vertical across the country. Carbon storage, efficient installation, and demand for natural materials make multistory cross-laminated timber (CLT) and glulam a real competitor to concrete and steel, and the 2021 International Building Code gives developers prescriptive paths to tall timber.
The towers are not where most of the opportunity is. The sweet spots are hospitality, sports halls, bridges, schools, and homes: buildings where a repeatable timber structure, left exposed inside, does the architecture and the structure at once.
Why the small end matters
A tower proves the material. A home is where people actually live with it. At residential scale the panels are the walls and ceilings you see every morning, the structure goes up in a short, planned crane sequence, and the decisions that make it work are made by a small team around one table.
That is the work we do in the Mountain West, from Jackson Hole to Park City. The rest of this series takes the two questions owners ask first, then the one they ask right after: what it costs.
Adapted with permission from a note by our colleagues at Red Falls Timber Co.
