Timber!

“We may be left with just the diehards,” joked Tanya Luthi as she began her tutorial on the design of 6-to-18-story timber buildings at the end of this year’s Timbercon. The two days of panels, roundtables, and keynotes had many similar moments of self-awareness. Apart from Alan Organschi’s opening keynote, which identified the stakes and macro-scale consequences of timber construction, the majority of the presentations focused on real-world application, with many questions from the audience on technical and logistical minutiae. While several presentations covered new construction in burgeoning hot spots for timber buildings such as Portland and Vancouver, Aaron Schiller of Schiller Projects and Vince Lee of Rogers Partners discussed two local and decidedly smaller projects in Brooklyn, demonstrating the material’s applicability for interior retrofits. With the upcoming version of the International Building Code expanding to include three new timber construction types, as well as broader changes to allow for high-rise mass construction, timber appears to be on a soli…