Mass Timber Construction Podcast
Mass Timber Construction Podcast
Mass Timber Market Updates - October 2025 - Week Fourty
Headlines celebrate the big wins, but the real story of mass timber lives in the details: policy nudges that turn into buildings, design that solves for climate and community, and projects that grapple with the cost shocks of a volatile market. We walk through a week where funding unlocks four new demonstrations in British Columbia, a tall hybrid tower in Milwaukee hits pause under tariffs and inflation, and a bold academic centre in Arkansas shows how timber can be both structure and story.
We start with BC’s $2 million push across Vancouver, Surrey and Nelson, where family housing, below-market rentals, mixed-use offices and a rural climbing gym show the range of what wood can deliver. Then we turn to resilience in delivery: the 31-storey Neutral Project pauses to reassess budgets and timing, a candid reminder that even low-carbon materials must navigate procurement risks and capital constraints. Along the way, we spotlight the Anthony Timberlands Center from Grafton Architects and Modus Studio—CLT spanning to glulam gutter beams under a cascading roof that shades, channels rainwater to bioswales, and establishes a civic landmark for arts and design.
Finally, we head to Oregon, where Portland’s Terminal 2 shifts from marine shipping to a mass timber research and manufacturing campus. Soil stabilisation, phased timelines, and a funding gap don’t dampen the ambition: create a regional engine that can lower housing costs, speed delivery, and cut embodied carbon. From Atlassian’s timber beacon in Sydney to local manufacturing bets in the Pacific Northwest, the throughline is clear—mass timber isn’t a trend; it’s an operating system for a cleaner, faster, more human city.
If you’re curious about where wood meets policy, design, and industry, this episode is a concise briefing on what matters now and what’s next. Subscribe, share with a colleague who builds or designs, and leave a review with the project you think will move the needle most.
Ladies and gentlemen, we are alive. This is the moment you all have been a waiting on. Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening wherever you are in the world today. Welcome to the Mass Timber Construction Podcast. My name is Paul Cramer, your host, and thank you for joining us again on another weekly update of Mass Timber Construction around the world. It's great to have you on board. Don't forget to hit subscribe, like, comment, share on any of our social media platforms. If you've got a journal manuscript that you want to have reviewed for research internationally, please put that through to our International Mass Timber Construction Journal. We'd be very, very pleased to review it. Let's have a look at what's making news around the world this week in Mass Timber Construction Land. First up, we're heading to British Columbia, who has awarded$500,000 each to four new construction projects to showcase the application of mass timber construction technology with a total funding reaching$2 million. The selected developments include buildings in Vancouver, Surrey and Nelson, and they form part of the fourth intake of the province's mass timber demonstration program according to the Forestry Innovation Investment System or scheme. The project will include a 12-story extension on Ronald McDonald House in BC and Yukon in Vancouver, named Willow House, which will provide 75 units for families visiting Royal Children's Hospital. The in Surrey, the Indigenous-led hybrid building, will offer 78 below market rental units accessing eight stories of one particular building. And the Nexus building is another building that will feature six stories, including four floors of office space along with daycare retail components. Nelson's Cube 2.0 is the fourth project, is a three-story building, Olympic level climbing gym focused on sustainability in rural locations. If you want to check out some of these impressive projects that are going to be coming online in the next few years, please go and check out our LinkedIn feed. And heading to Milwaukee now, and the neutral project, the 31-story tower in downtown Milwaukee, has hit a bit of a pause with rising tariffs and inflation, which is driving costs up, and it's halting work on the foundation and the steel placement for the particular project. This is no surprise for anybody in the construction industry with ascending costs and delays across the whole sector. This will be a pause, and we look forward to seeing the 350-unit 31-story tower at Edison Street take off again once they've overcome this disruption. But uh please rest assured, I believe that they'll be able to resolve these issues, and there are discussions and talks underway right now. We will also give you an update when we have more information at hand. I guess the Atlassian project stands as a bit of a beacon to attract technology to Australia. So congratulations to Mike Cannon, Brooks, and the team. We look forward to seeing how your new building evolves when it comes to fruition at the end of 2027. And to the US now, and Timber takes the spotlight in the Grafton Architects. A first for the US project raises the bar for mass timber design with the Anthony Timberland Center, the Pritzka Prize winner, and Motus Studios fusing cutting-edge research, regional materials, and climate-sensitive architecture into a storybook of timber for Arkansas and beyond. The building's most striking feature is its cascade roof, and it's composed of CLT spanning between monumental gulam gutter beams and the roofscape provides this opportunity for interior shadowing and its shades from the intense summer sun, channeling rainwater into a central bio waste for the landscape irrigation, and then the dramatic civic presence of the art and design district that are also included in this breathtaking building. It's 11,000 square feet fabrication and it holds anchors to the complex, to the surrounding classrooms, seminar rooms, and designs, and the galleries on the upper level. This is an impressive building. If you have not seen photos of it, do go and jump onto Grafton Architects website or go and have a look at our LinkedIn feed. And to Oregon now and the marine terminal that once shipped Oregon's wood and steel will soon re become a research and manufacturing of mass timber in an effort to ease Oregon's housing costs and address the state's housing shortage. The city of Portland Terminal 2 is a 39-acre concrete lot sitting largely empty in the city's Northwest Industrial District and is being reallocated in at least$15 million worth of soil treatments next year to ensure the riverfront site is on stable ground before it transforms into a mass timber research and manufacturing campus. While the campus first phase of construction should be finished in 2028, the Port of Portland told US Rep um on a visit recently that millions of funding gaps uh will support the campus in the next phase. So$20 million to$25 million funding gap remains for the campus, but we believe that they can get some support for that. It's going to be interesting to see how the development of this mass timber research and mass manufacturing campus evolves. We will keep you updated as time progresses. And so that's it, folks. That's all we've got time for this week in Mass Timber Construction Land. There's a lot happening around the world. I hope that you have an amazing week and we will catch up with you very, very soon. Don't forget that the International Mass Timber Conference is coming up next year. Get your tickets booked for that. It will be uh the tenth year it is running. Ten years is a long time, it's a decade, it's a great celebration. So get get along and see everybody at the networking event. And we look forward to catching up with you in the near future. So good morning, good afternoon, or good evening. We're everywhere in the world today. This is Paul Kramer signing off on the Mass Timber Construction Podcast.