Mass Timber: The Sustainable Solution for the Design Industry (Part 2)

Gensler Design Exchange Podcast
2 min readFeb 6, 2023

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In 2022, the world’s tallest hybrid mass timber structure was completed. Ascent is a 25-story luxury apartment building, with 19 stories and 273,000 square feet of mass timber providing 260 residential units to the Milwaukee, Wisconsin market. Ascent’s completion is a crucial catalyst in the growing mass timber movement. In fact, this trend of decarbonizing our built environments is one of the ten new Meta Trends outlined in the Gensler Design Forecast 2023.

In this episode of the Gensler Design Exchange podcast, we are continuing a conversation around mass timber. If you didn’t listen to Part 1 this episode, go back and listen to that first.

Gensler’s design for the First United Bank regional headquarters in Sherman, Texas relies heavily on mass timber

Gensler guest-hosts Erik Barth and Taylor Coleman are joined by Erica Spiritos at Timberlab, a fabrication company whose mission is to accelerate the mainstream adoption of mass timber in the U.S. and commercial construction market. And from the engineering standpoint, Erik and Taylor talked with Ian Boyle of Fast+Epp, an international structural engineering design firm dedicated to reducing carbon in the built environment.

Walmart’s new 350-acre home office in Bentonville, Arkansas is the largest mass timber campus project in the United States.

In a time where the construction industry is increasingly tasked with building dense housing for a growing population while reducing its reliance on highly carbon-emitting materials like steel and concrete, mass timber is a solution that is rapidly growing in interest.

Tune in to hear the full conversation. As always, thanks for listening!

Host:
Brandon Larcom
Product Development Leader, Senior Associate
Gensler

Guest-Hosts:
Erik Barth, AIA, LEED AP BD+C, NCARB, WELL AP
Project Architect, Senior Associate
Gensler

Taylor Coleman, AIA
Architect, Senior Associate
Gensler

Erica Spiritos
VP & Director of Preconstruction
Timberlab

Ian Boyle
Principal
Fast+Epp

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Gensler Design Exchange Podcast

The Gensler Design Exchange creates a dialogue between design experts, creative trendsetters & thought leaders to discuss how we can shape the future of cities.