Architect Magazine has awarded Timber Tower with an honorable mention in its annual R+D Awards, formally announced in the publication’s July issue. Spearheaded by Benton Johnson, SOM Associate in the Chicago office, the structural engineering research project examines how tall buildings can use mass timber as the main structural material in order to minimize embodied carbon footprints.
The system is benchmarked against Chicago’s 42-story DeWitt Chestnut building, completed by SOM in 1965 and regarded as the firm’s most structurally efficient residential project of its time. The research projects that Timber Tower would cut the building’s embodied carbon footprint from an estimated 9,500 tons of CO2 to approximately 2,100 tons of CO2, a reduction in the range of 60 to 75 percent.