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.

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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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