Business View Magazine May 2023

91 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE VOLUME 10, ISSUE 5 T IMBERLAB offices – build-to-suit or spec,” Evans says. “Since then, we’ve had COVID, which put a hold on office buildings. We thought, in 2020 and 2021, what’s going to happen to the mass timber industry in 2022 and 2023 if the office sector has slowed down? Will this market continue to grow? What’s happened -- the silver lining of the pandemic -- has been a heightened sense of awareness of the fragility of the earth and more and more people coming to design their buildings in a more sustainable and responsible way.” Even though the office sector has slowed down, the increase in momentum in putting mass timber in buildings has dramatically increased. The trend for the next two, three, and five years will be multi-family, multi-level housing that once would have been concrete and now will be timber. The office will come back, but that’s the trend that we see coming down the pike,” Evan continues. Spiritos extrapolates on mass timber’s environmental virtues: “The opportunity that mass timber presents is to build with renewable, sustainable materials and offset some of the significant carbon emissions associated with the production of concrete and steel. The construction industry is responsible for 40 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions and of that total, about 11 percent comes from the manufacturing of concrete and steel. Wood is also a carbon-based material, so we’re giving the tree a ‘second life’ in the building after it’s cut down, storing all the carbon that’s stored in the tree, in that structure for as long as that building stands. And timber is a rapidly renewing resource; in the U.S., we harvest less than what grows annually here.” Timberlab’s next new showcase is going to be the centerpiece of Portland International Airport’s terminal redevelopment project, “We’re building a nine-acre roof – 400,000 square feet, with 80-foot-long Glulam arches supplied by Zip-O Laminators,” says Spiritos. “The whole roof structure is this undulating, geometric shape, and it’s going to be really amazing and a stunning display of locally-sourced mass timber.” The new roof, comprising 3.3 million board