In the Press

Exhibition Review: Timber City at the National Building Museum

After 19th-century construction codes limited wood’s structural use—a response to devastating fires in Boston and Chicago—it seemed the future of cities’ skylines would belong to concrete and steel. But as a new exhibition at Washington, D.C.’s National Building Museum (NBM) demonstrates, wood deserves renewed consideration in the design and construction of large edifices, and engineers and architects are starting to explore the possibilities.

More than a dozen recent buildings are presented throughout the exhibition as examples of how engineers and architects are using mass timber to go bigger and higher, including… a theoretical 42-story tower by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (2013).