NYC Events Recognize Wood’s Sustainability | SLB November 2024 Newsletter

Each year, as the United Nations General Assembly comes to an end, New York City kicks off Climate Week, a week of hundreds of climate- and sustainability-focused events across the city. This year’s theme, It’s Time, highlighted the urgent need for climate action, specifically in the areas of energy, the built environment, and finance.

This year, the American Wood Council (AWC) and WoodWorks co-hosted their first-ever Climate Week event, Building with Wood: Nature’s Climate Solution. The event featured an introduction to mass timber, a panel discussion on the entirety of mass timber’s lifecycle, and concluded with a networking reception. The panel discussion was led by Katie Fernholz, President of Dovetail Partners; Alexis Feitel, Team Carbon Unit Director at KL&A Engineers and Builders; and Sandra Lupien, Director of MassTimber@MSU.

The event proved to be a success with over 80 in-person attendees as well as additional online attendees. The audience was highly engaged in the panel discussion, asking a variety of questions and staying for the networking reception to follow up with the panelists and the AWC team. The audience represented a wide range of individuals and companies including nonprofits, Fortune 500 companies, federal agencies, architects, and academics. The AWC has received overwhelmingly positive feedback from the event and has been able to follow up with multiple individuals with additional resources related to mass timber, wood product production, and sourcing. This event is another example of the AWC’s lead role in ensuring that wood products are properly recognized for their low embodied carbon and significant stored biogenic carbon benefits.

Building with Wood was one of many Climate Week events focused on the climate benefits of wood products. Earlier that day at the same venue, the New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) hosted the final presentations from the seven teams of the inaugural Mass Timber Studio funded by the SLB and USDA Forest Service. The NYCEDC also announced plans to field a second cohort of teams who will receive another $29,000 grant each in 2025, also funded by the SLB and USDA Forest Service. The rest of the week included key events that discussed wood products such as Adapt Together: Urban Neighborhoods Against Climate Change and Nature Positive, Climate Positive Bioeconomy Solutions.

When it comes to mass timber, seeing truly is believing—its impact is best understood when experienced first-hand. To make that experience possible, the SLB is sponsoring “Managing Mass Timber: From Forest to Future,” a traveling exhibit and lecture series aimed at showcasing the benefits of mass timber directly to students and faculty at leading engineering, architecture, and construction management schools across the Northeast and Great Lakes regions. 

The exhibit kicked off at Kent State University (KSU), with mass timber experts and KSU construction management faculty Anthony Mirando and Lameck Onsarigo guiding it to five campuses throughout the Fall 2024 semester. The interactive display is designed to efficiently educate students and faculty on every aspect of mass timber—from sustainable forest management to how it all comes together on site as a prefabricated kit of parts—highlighting its advantages over alternative materials.

After KSU, the exhibit traveled to Syracuse University, with additional stops planned at the Associated Schools of Construction Region 3 conference in Chicago, Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh for the AIAS Northeast Quad Conference, and the National Organization for Minority Architects’ (NOMA) Annual Conference in Baltimore, where it will reach an audience of 1,500 participants, including 500 students. Many architecture, engineering, and construction management students have never had the chance to experience wood solutions up close. Being able to see, touch, and truly experience the potential of natural materials can reshape their understanding of the future built environment.

Think Wood’s work to protect residential market share has expanded from a primary focus on decking and outdoor applications to include projects that use exposed softwood lumber for appearance wood and cladding. A recent Think Wood single-family project profile, the Tree House in Jonestown, Texas, highlights a central pine-and-concrete stair uniting two wings of the house, as well as decking and cladding applications. This type of content helps residential contractors visualize additional uses for wood products in homes beyond framing and decking that provide aesthetic benefits in a highly crowded and competitive market segment. Residential project profiles also help our commercial audiences understand the applications possible with wood that they can use in their own projects, as single-family homes have long been considered a laboratory for design innovation in the building industry.

Single-family content remains some of Think Wood’s most popular content not just with residential contractors, but across all audience sectors. Think Wood’s work to defend market share brings in commercial leads while continuing to nurture residential ones. In Q3, the Single-Family Home LookBook became Think Wood’s second-most downloaded resource, bringing in 333 new contacts across all audience sectors. This quick ascent suggests a second edition in 2025 will effectively bring in more commercial and residential users.

An architectural firm reached out to a WoodWorks Regional Director after attending several of her seminars. The firm is at the early stages of a project that proposes four mixed-use buildings, each 10-14 stories and 200,000 square feet. The developer is potentially interested in using mass timber, but a local general contractor said one of its key benefits—construction speed—doesn’t really offer savings over traditional high-rise materials. Thinking WoodWorks could help keep tall wood as an option, the architect asked them for support, as well as the names of contractors who might be more positive and architecture firms that might want to collaborate since the project is so large. As an initial step, WoodWorks provided relevant technical resources as well as WIN links for experienced architects, contractors, and partner manufacturers. 

General contractors are a priority audience for WoodWorks as their lack of familiarity with mass timber materials is the reason many projects don’t go to construction. WoodWorks is leading a multi-faceted solution that includes technical resource development, online and in-person education, third-party installation training, and project support. Resources such as How to Successfully Cost Manage a Mass Timber Project are part of a WoodWorks initiative to help contracting companies work effectively in the mass timber space.