Think Wood Welcomes New Leadership; SLB Partnership With World Steel Advances Case, Builds Enthusiasm for Tall Mass Timber-Steel Hybrid Construction | SLB August 2022 Newsletter

NAHB recently reported that wood framing remained the most dominant construction method for single-family homes in 2021, despite ongoing supply-chain challenges and pricing volatility. Using Census Bureau data, NAHB analysts determined that 92% of all new homes built in 2021 were wood framed. This equated to over 895,000 new wood-framed completions, an 8% increase compared with 2020.

In 2021, there were 71,000 concrete-framed homes completed, down from 2020 and 2019 figures. Despite this yearly result, overall concrete-framed market share is still trending higher, having increased from 4% to 7% from 2011 to 2021. Steel-frame tallied just 3,000 single-family-home completions in 2021, considerably less than the 5,000 completions achieved in 2019. The majority of non-wood framing methods are located in the U.S. South, enabled by favorable residential resiliency requirements.

Read more about 2021 single-family housing completions here.

Crow Holdings has announced plans to develop a seven-story, 235,000-square-foot mass timber office building as part of its larger, mixed-use The Offices at Southstone Yards development in Frisco, Texas. Designed by Duda|Paine Architects in partnership with Gensler, the building will become North Texas’ first-ever mass timber office building. The developer prioritized mass timber for its sustainability advantages, including its lower environmental footprint and higher thermal insulation.

The project will break ground this summer and is scheduled for completion in 2023. The initial office building will eventually be joined by a similar seven-story office building as well as two 10-story office buildings.

Read more about the project here.

Builder is reporting that the NAHB/Wells Fargo Housing Market Index (HMI), which measures builder sentiment in the market for newly built single-family homes, dropped 12 points to 55 in July, its lowest reading since May 2020. This is the seventh straight month of decline; all four regions of the United States posted declines; and all three of the HMI’s components—current sales conditions, sales expectations, and traffic of prospective buyers—trended downward. NAHB attributes the drop in builder confidence to several factors, including higher interest rates, inflation, supply-chain issues, and rising material and home-building costs, all of which have served to cool the housing market.

According to Ali Wolf, chief economist at Zonda, “After over two years of an exceptionally strong housing market, we’ve moved into an uncertain phase. Many consumers wholeheartedly would still like to buy a home, but affordability and fears of a recession are causing many to pause. Builders are trying to make sense of the quick downshift in demand and are looking for ways to strategize around what is next.”

Read more about these trends here.

The University of Virginia’s School of Architecture recently hosted a Biomaterial Building Exposition, related symposium, and gallery exhibition to demonstrate new approaches to biomaterial construction as a means of reducing wasteful building practices. The outdoor exposition featured five unique installations built using rapidly renewable, carbon-sequestering biomaterials, including wood.

A Houston-based practice, Office, built a wood structure using CNC–milled logs set amid trees. The design anticipates the structure’s weathering and eventual collapse, at which time the reclaimed lumber will be effectively returned to the forest. By thinking of the material’s life cycle through to entropy, the architects designed the structure to avoid material waste and environmental harm.

Design firm Somewhere Studio also sought to minimize construction waste by creating a structure made of suboptimal grades and species of wood retrieved from a construction site in Dallas. The company designed, cut, milled, and stitched together over 500 mixed pieces of lumber to create an enclosed wooden structure.

Read more about the exposition and see photos of the installations here.

Photo Credit: Office e.g. From Wood to Tree. Photograph by Tom Daly.

A study commissioned by the National Multifamily Housing Council (NMHC) and the National Apartment Association (NAA) indicates that the United States needs upward of 266,000 new apartment homes each year—and a total 4.3 million new units by 2035—to meet demand, including for affordable housing. The study found that from 2015 to 2020, the number of affordable housing units available declined by 4.7 million nationwide.

As rental needs grow because of affordability and scarcity, the study team believes that new incentives and development approaches and fewer restrictions will be necessary to ensure adequate housing. According to NMHC president and CEO Doug Bibby, “The lack of available housing is holding our country back. Whether it is a multifamily residence, duplex, or single-family home, we need a massive supply of new for-sale and rental homes—including millions of new apartments by 2035.”

Read more about the study and its findings here.

A new study by the University of Georgia’s Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources, funded by a USDA McIntire-Stennis grant, suggests that replacing coal with woody biomass in Georgia’s power plants for a 50-year period could both meet power demand and cut carbon emissions.

As part of the study methodology, the research team quantified and compared three scenarios—a business-as-usual scenario of burning coal; using pulpwood as a fuel source in place of coal; and using both pulpwood and logging residues to replace coal. The third scenario—using pulpwood and logging residues—proved to be the most carbon-efficient way to generate electricity in Georgia, capable of reducing carbon emissions from power plants by 43% while not requiring major facility upgrades. This scenario would require an additional 100,000 acres of forestland to be sustainably harvested annually, which is factored into the net carbon reduction. Integrating logging residues would also enable foresters to use every part of a tree versus the current, common practice of leaving behind and burning residue.

According to associate professor and co-author Puneet Dwivedi, “Torrefied pulpwood and logging residue can be used in coal-fired power plants without making major upgrades to the plant. This makes it a great alternative to coal, especially in forest-rich southern states. . . . The use of wood-based electricity will not only reduce the carbon footprint of the state, but it will potentially create local jobs, boost forest health, increase the income of rural households, and ensure the flow of forest-based ecosystem services.”

Read more about the study findings here.

Swiss architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron has released designs for Sixth and Blanco, an all-timber, mixed-use, infill development that will occupy an entire city block in Austin. The new mass timber structure will emerge through and above existing storefronts and structures that date to the 1920s, will be clad in wood, and will feature sloped wooden overhangs along the sidewalk. The project is Herzog & de Meuron’s first in Texas.

Read more about the project and see renderings here.