A saddle-shaped timber canopy nicknamed “the Pringle” has been craned into position at a film studio campus outside Atlanta, Georgia, forming North America’s longest bending-active timber gridshell. That is according to StructureCraft, the Vancouver-based timber engineer and design-builder behind the superstructure, which set the doubly curved grid in place earlier this week, ahead of a grand opening early next month in time for the FIFA World Cup.

Wood Central understands the 370-square-metre Assembly Studios Bandshell rests on two precast concrete plinths at the edge of a new public greenspace, its elastically bent timber laths arching up from a near-flat lattice into a doubly curved span of close to 25 metres. Stainless-steel shingles will clad the finished shell, shaped to catch the Georgia sun from almost any angle.

Bending-active gridshells of this kind trace back to the experimental lath roofs of the 1970s, before the structural type fell out of use worldwide, held back by the engineering nerve and the fused design-and-build approach it demands. StructureCraft head of engineering Lucas Epp said no comparable timber gridshell had been attempted at this scale anywhere in North America.

“It’s going to be an eye-catcher for sure,” Epp said.

The $10 million budget covers site works, civil engineering, landscaping, and building services, with the bandshell opening the long-delayed second phase of Assembly Atlanta, the 49-hectare Grey Media production campus in Doraville. Apple TV’s forthcoming remake of Cape Fear is among the productions recently shot at the studios.

Fabrication ran entirely offsite, with the timber members shaped in Canada and trucked to Georgia before Bailey Construction hoisted the completed shell onto its supports and fixed it at six points. Gipson Company president Jay Gipson said the curved geometry forced every surrounding platform, wall and stage element to be built to a tolerance of around five millimetres.

“These woods have turns, they have twists,” Gipson said.

Crews were scheduled to fix the plywood diaphragm in the week after the grid was set, followed by the roofing and secondary components that finish the canopy.

The canopy is not the only timber structure on the site, with a ring of curved glulam arches rising over the bandshell’s concrete amphitheatre stage, each rib craned in and tensioned against the others to hold the sweeping form. Smith Dalia Architects, the Atlanta practice behind the bandshell, drew the arches and the saddle shell as a single composition, a timber set piece for a park built to host open-air screenings and full-scale concerts.

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A decade-long appetite for shimmering glass towers is giving way to heavier and more tactile materials, with architectural practices now reaching for brick, concrete, stone and rammed earth in buildings designed to stand for a century. That is according to property publication Domain, which cited climate urgency and fatigue with glass curtain walling as the forces opening the way for a more durable architecture, one in which engineered timber and hybrid construction could emerge as ways to deliver the qualities long associated with masonry.

One project already testing that thinking is SJB’s Surry Hills Village, which pairs an exposed mass timber frame with a mottled brick exterior, a contemporary reading of the warehouse character of the inner-Sydney precinct. Emily Wombwell, a director at SJB, said the commercial building had been conceived as a robust yet flexible structure in which timber carries the internal expression whilst brick holds it to its surroundings.

“Brick is everywhere in that part of the city,” Wombwell said.

The retreat from glass is partly a reckoning with craft, according to Peter Miglis, a director at Woods Bagot, who argues that prefabricated curtain wall systems have produced skylines of sheer, anonymous glass at the expense of material depth. Where a single trade can assemble a glass facade, he said, a building loses the layering of skill and intent that gives it character.

“Now there’s a yearning for solid buildings that age with grace,” Miglis said.

PROPERTY group Toga has unveiled the winning design for the revitalisation of the #SurryHills Shopping Village and at the same time, lodged the development application for the site. #cre #commercialrealestate #commercialproperty https://t.co/zts3bdMSWl pic.twitter.com/in8jgmVti1

— Australian Property Journal (@AusPropJournal) October 10, 2018

Heavier materials also carry a performance argument, because masonry and concrete hold significant thermal mass — the capacity to absorb, store, and slowly release heat through the day.

Patrick Nolan of Kennedy Nolan said thermal comfort in masonry buildings could be achieved with far less energy than in fully glazed or lightweight structures, provided the design accounted for orientation, shading and ventilation. The environmental case is more complicated, however, because concrete carries a high embodied carbon cost that the sector has yet to resolve through fly ash and alternatives to Portland cement.

Mass timber is where Nolan looks for a way through, suggesting that if timber or hybrid construction could match masonry’s structural and cultural offerings, the result would be genuine newness in the architectural cycle.

Whether engineered timber takes on that role more widely remains an open question, though projects such as Surry Hills Village show that timber and masonry already share structural and expressive work rather than compete for it. Nolan said demand for heavy buildings appeared to be long-lasting and that a change in architecture was both inevitable and welcome.

“It would be difficult to justify returning to fully glazed facades,” he said.

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US music icon Bruce Springsteen is just days away from the opening of a new museum dedicated to his life and legacy, the Bruce Springsteen Center for American Music at Monmouth University, on 13 June. The 2,750-square-metre building, first revealed in 2023, stands a short walk from the New Jersey shore where Springsteen wrote Born to Run.

Designed by New York practice CookFox Architects, the mass timber structure — its ceiling and support columns left exposed — houses Springsteen’s archives, exhibition galleries and a 240-seat theatre. The weathering steel and timber building has been conceived as a destination for exhibition, education, performance and research, anchored by a glue-laminated and cross-laminated European spruce frame.

A weathering steel rain screen wraps the rectangular volume in a nod to New Jersey’s dockyards and factories, whilst the structural frame uses harvested European spruce in both glue-laminated and cross-laminated timber sustainably. CookFox left all of the wood unstained to express its natural character, setting it against resin-infused paper millwork, a surface also used by guitar makers for fretboards.

Robert Santelli, the centre’s founding executive director, said the building places Springsteen within the wider story of American music rather than treating him in isolation. Recalling the moment he first put the proposal to the musician, Santelli said Springsteen told him he would prefer to be seen as a chapter in that ongoing story.

“A chapter in the ongoing story of American music,” Springsteen said.

Inside the 240-seat theatre, thin vertical timber slats give the room human scale and conceal acoustic panels tuned to absorb and reflect sound, whilst the end-grain wood block flooring of the kind once laid in factories reveals the growth rings of the trees it was milled from. A full window-wall behind the stage draws daylight into the space and connects the building to the surrounding campus.

The archives will preserve Springsteen’s papers and notes alongside recorded music, programmes, posters, ticket stubs and stage-worn garments across five separate climate and humidity-controlled environments. Exhibition designers C&G Partners have laid out eight galleries of rare artefacts, iconic photography, a hands-on rehearsal studio and an immersive concert experience, including a documentary on Springsteen’s place in American music directed by Thom Zimny.

Rick Cook, founding partner of CookFox, said the design grew from a personal connection to Springsteen’s work that ran through every decision on form, proportion and materiality. The practice drew directly on the musician’s creative instincts when shaping the visitor experience and the high-performing theatre, Cook said.

“As a team, we were inspired by Bruce Springsteen’s honesty, bravery and authenticity,” Cook said.

Targeting LEED v4 Gold certification, the all-electric, net-zero-ready building offsets more than 75 per cent of its energy use through Monmouth University’s campus-wide solar array, with Torcon as the project contractor and DeSimone Consulting Engineers as the structural engineer and facade consultant. The Bruce Springsteen Center for American Music opens to the public on 13 June, its archives holding more than 35,000 items tracing the musician’s life and the broader story of American music.

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China’s rural mass timber push has produced a 26-metre clear-span glulam workshop in Haotang Village, with 12 curved glued-laminated timber beams spanning an open production hall, returned to local carpenter Zhang on the same patch of ground his original village shed once occupied. The 405-square-metre Carpenter’s Home, completed by Shanghai-based studio Primary Architects under the village’s Eight Traditional Crafts Revival Program, replaces an aging woodworking shed at the rural settlement’s entrance with a digitally fabricated hybrid glulam-and-steel hall designed for woodworking, school workshops and community tea gatherings beneath a single sweeping roof in Pingqiao District.

The 12 curved glulam beams step down gradually from east to west across the workshop floor, with each member running to steel connection nodes in a hybrid system carrying the full 26-metre span without an intermediate column. The double-curved geometry was digitally modelled and parametrically controlled before being prefabricated off-site and assembled through a modular construction process at the village edge, with curved skylights cutting the timber shell in narrow ribbons that follow the curvature of the glulam.

Chief architects Xiang Huang and Songyan Mao approached the roof as an extension of the surrounding mountain, with the curving roofline tracking what the practice calls a dialogue of “disconnected form yet connected spirit” with the distant hills. Skylight openings were sized through sunlight simulations so the workshop operates primarily on natural light through the day, with operable polycarbonate facade panels carrying ventilation across the building envelope and the filtered light spreading evenly across the timber surfaces of the open-plan learning hall.

The open-plan hall accommodates research workshops and educational activities for up to two school classes at once, with flexible woodworking tables supporting traditional mortise-and-tenon teaching alongside contemporary timber experiments. Displays of hand planes, ink markers and timber sections line the walls, placing vernacular tools alongside engineered wood technologies as the workshop reopens the trade Zhang had practised at the original village shed.

The ground floor preserves a dedicated woodworking production area at one end of the hall, with the other section opening toward villagers and visitors through exhibitions, workshops and educational programmes. Upstairs, a tea room serves as a public gathering space and a waiting lounge for parents during school activities, with labour, teaching, hospitality and community interaction deliberately overlapping under one roof.

It comes as Wood Central reported on Canadian glulam gaining ground in China, with more than 20 Chinese glulam producers now operating across the country and Hem-Fir and Yellow Cedar laminations entering small-batch production in 2025. “The pathway is real, and the next step is repeatability,” Lance Tao, Export Development Program Manager for Canada Wood Group, said of Chinese glulam adoption, with the Haotang Village project sitting on the demand end of the same supply chain now scaling across Chinese civic and educational construction.

The Pingqiao District workshop joins a widening Chinese mass timber portfolio anchored by the Jiangsu Provincial Rehabilitation Hospital — China’s first large-scale wood-concrete composite building, delivered under a glulam certification programme established between the Canadian Wood Group’s Chinese office and the China Academy of Building Research. The Haotang Village hall sits on the smaller civic end of the same supply pipeline, with the 26-metre clear span and double-curved roof geometry showing how Chinese glulam manufacturing is feeding programmes well beyond the hospital and high-rise tier.

The 405-square-metre workshop was delivered for client Xinyang Pingqiao District Juxing Agricultural Investment and Development Co., Ltd. by Shanxi Junchen Construction Co., Ltd., with wood structure detailed design by Bowen Li — and carpenter Zhang now back at his bench on the same patch of ground his original village shed once occupied at the entrance of Haotang Village.

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State, federal and community leaders have set out final preparations for the 4 July grand opening of the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library, the first US presidential library built with mass timber, with a 1,776-drone show, free national park entry and a five-day Medora A250 festival now confirmed for the holiday weekend. That is according to North Dakota Governor Kelly Armstrong, who gathered the briefing in Medora and reaffirmed his 7 April executive order mobilising state agencies for America 250 events, including the library opening.

Casting the briefing as central to the state’s biggest tourism moment in a generation, Armstrong positioned the opening as the anchor event for the ND250 programme running across North Dakota through July. “We want residents and guests to enjoy this celebration safely and confidently,” Armstrong said.

Armstrong and Lauf walked the project site with the library and Medora Foundation teams ahead of the briefing, with crews still threading interior fit-out across the 96,000-square-foot building less than two months out from the 4 July grand opening. The walk-through took the delegation along the new entrance paving, through the auditorium build-out and across the main exhibition floor before the press conference convened on the wooden deck overlooking the Badlands butte.

Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library Executive Director Robbie Lauf set out opening-day plans, with the 1,776-drone show keyed to the founding year staged alongside an immersive exhibition programme inside the 96,000-square-foot mass timber building. The drone show will be a first for a US presidential library opening, with the choreography sized to the 1776 reference Lauf has built into the broader weekend programme.

Theodore Roosevelt National Park Superintendent Rachel Daniels announced the reopening of the South Unit Scenic Loop Road, with free park entry granted across the 3-5 July weekend to align with the library opening and ND250 holiday programme. Theodore Roosevelt Medora Foundation CEO Clarence Sitter outlined Medora’s A250 Week, a 2-5 July festival of free programming tied to the holiday weekend, with Tourism and Marketing Director Sara Otte Coleman briefing the same gathering on visitation trends and the broader economic contribution of the state’s travel sector.

The Medora gathering has been called the largest in the North Dakota Badlands since Theodore Roosevelt National Memorial Park was dedicated in 1949, with Wood Central reporting in March that approximately 40,000 people are expected across the $450 million project’s five-day opening programme. Wood Central understands state law enforcement has been folded into the policing plan for a town of 160 permanent residents, with three resident officers stretched well beyond normal capacity by the holiday weekend influx.

It comes as construction crews have driven the 93,000-square-foot mass timber structure across its final fit-out phase, with Mercer Mass Timber’s roughly 1,800 cubic metres of cross-laminated timber and glulam cubic metres of cross-laminated timber and glulam delivering a total carbon benefit of 3,031 metric tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, the same as powering 320 homes for a year.

Wood Central understands that every living US president will attend the dedication ceremony on 4 July before doors open to the 40,000 visitors anticipated across the five-day programme, with North Dakota’s tourism agencies operating under Armstrong’s 7 April executive order through to the opening weekend.

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Copenhagen’s last working shipyard has built its first public building, with Krohns Bådbyggeri applying the same timber slipway techniques once used to launch Royal Danish Navy ships to a 230-square-metre floating Douglas fir community space designed by Arcgency and MAST at the artificial island of Christiansholm.

That is according to Mads Møller, founder of Copenhagen studio Arcgency, who revealed that the project was designed to belong to the water. Bedding 1 is the first of three floating timber buildings planned for the canal-side development locally known as Papirøen, or Paper Island, with two further structures, a network of piers and a floating garden to follow under Cobe’s masterplan.

Anchored in the Arsenalgraven canal where the Royal Danish Naval Shipyard once stood, Bedding 1’s angular Douglas fir frame echoes the timber slipways once used to launch new ships from the site. Wood Central understands that Krohns Bådbyggeri remains the last active shipyard in central Copenhagen, carrying the construction work for Bedding 1 using techniques drawn from the same Danish shipbuilding tradition.

“Bedding 1 was conceived as something that belongs to the water,” Møller said.

Organised across two storeys totalling 230 square metres, the upper deck is level with the quayside and houses a single flexible community space designed to host events and gatherings. A metal staircase from the quay descends to the lower level, where two apartments provide accommodation for guests of the island’s residents and open onto a covered timber terrace with mooring for boats and kayaks.

Framing the long sides of the structure, angular Douglas fir supports recall the slipway scaffolding historically used to ease ships into the water, with the cabin-like building pulled back behind them and clad in horizontal Douglas fir planks for privacy. White walls and pale timber carpentry fill the interior, with large windows framing views of the surrounding canal and the Paper Island development beyond.

Cobe developed the masterplan for the Paper Island redevelopment, with Bedding 1 anchoring a wider canal-side scheme that will eventually include two further floating buildings, a network of piers and a floating garden. The Christiansholm work follows a wider Copenhagen push into timber neighbourhoods, with the Danish capital advancing all-timber housing and public space schemes as part of a citywide low-carbon construction agenda.

It comes as MAST’s floating residential masterplan for a disused Rotterdam dock advances through the Dutch planning system, with the Danish studio targeting 100 cross-laminated timber homes in the Spoorweghaven basin, which would become Europe’s largest floating housing district. The Copenhagen and Rotterdam projects mark a growing northern European turn toward timber as the material of choice for canal-side civic and residential architecture.

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As some MAY remember, years ago, the house next to me got rented out to some not so great renters, and I became very security focused after things started walking away...

Well fast forward to this past month and my oldest brother gifted me his now orphaned Wyze Pan Cam V3s. He went with a camera setup that doesn't have a subscription even though the Wyze subscription is relatively inexpenisve...

So between the gifted Wyze Cam Pan v3 that has auto tracking / pan / tilt, I also set up my Wyze Cam V3 that had been previously watching my fence line in the side of the house, now replaced with a Wyze Cam Battery with solar panel (had problems sourcing power for the cams without solar...).

Mind you I live in a decent neighborhood, but that's the problem. Thieves etc... from out of the area tend to stalk neighborhoods like mine since the PD that recognizes them is 2 towns away.

I hate th contribute to a surveillance state, but I can limit the monitoring range to the edge of my property. So since I am the one monitoring IN and ON my property, we should be good to go.

I have a couple of Ring devices left. A Ring Spotlight Cam wired, a Ring Doorbell cam, and a Ring Floodlight cam. I am trying to get off of Ring as the lag between event and notification is huge, like 30 seconds... WIth the Wyze it is almost instantaneous...

I have the Wyze floodlight cam to replace the ring that is basically the motion activated floodlight fixture typically seen in backyards and driveways but with a camera.

So to protect the shop itself I have the following coverage.

1 cam in the rear of the shop pointing toward the roll up doors
1 cam in the front of the shop pointing to the man door from the house.
1 cam outside down the driveway between the roll up doors.
Door contact sensors at each door
85db siren
Security keypad.

It stinks when the behavior of others makes you have to take security steps like this...

An open-air mass timber theatre carrying 475 seats under a curved glulam grid shell has been completed in Garrison, New York for Hudson Valley Shakespeare, with Studio Gang’s Samuel H. Scripps Theater Center targeting LEED Platinum as a first for a purpose-built US theatre.

The 14,850 square foot (1,380 square metre) venue establishes Hudson Valley Shakespeare’s first permanent home, replacing 39 years of seasonal productions inside a tent at the nearby Boscobel House and Gardens after construction began on the new site in October 2024. Bringing actors, audiences and back-of-house together under one roof for the first time, the building also extends the company’s performance season beyond what the seasonal tent could accommodate.

The timber-framed grid shell, a single sweeping canopy supported on prefabricated A-frame timber columns, was engineered by Thornton Tomasetti with mass timber design assistance from Quebec-based fabricator Art Massif and built by construction manager Consigli, which has delivered more than 20 cross-laminated timber and glulam projects across the Northeast US. The concentric glulam geometry shelters the auditorium without enclosing it, with the proscenium arch beneath framing direct views across the Hudson River towards Storm King Mountain, Snake Hill and Breakneck Ridge.

Targeting LEED Platinum, the Samuel H. Scripps Theater Center will be the first purpose-built theatre in the United States to achieve the rating, with mass timber and material strategies cutting Global Warming Potential by 24 per cent and passive design and active systems reducing overall energy use by 50 per cent against the standard baseline. Rainwater reuse and efficient fixtures cut water consumption by 78 per cent, with rooftop photovoltaic panels supplying roughly 10 per cent of the building’s energy load.

The wood structure replaced what the design team had originally explored as a tensile fabric tent, with Studio Gang rejecting that path on embodied-carbon grounds before iterating towards the timber frame that now defines the building. “We thought it could be a sort of tent,” Gang told Architectural Record.

Founded in 1987 and previously known as the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, the theatre company relocated to the 98-acre Garrison site in 2022 on land conveyed by philanthropist and conservationist Christopher Davis. Support pavilions clad in yakisugi, a charred Japanese cedar, house the rehearsal studios, dressing rooms, offices and concessions that the company has never previously had under a permanent roof.

The landscape transition has been led by Nelson Byrd Woltz, whose Senior Principal, Thomas Woltz, has overseen the rewilding of the former golf course into native meadow and wetland habitat across nearly 14 acres of new planting and 250 native or adaptive trees. “Our design celebrates the natural beauty of this extraordinary site,” Woltz said.

The opening season at the Samuel H. Scripps Theater Center runs from June to September 2026 with a production of King Lear, with Hudson Valley Shakespeare publicly committed to carbon neutrality by 2040 across the full 98-acre campus.

The post After 39 Years in a Tent — Curved Timber Roof Now Tops Hudson Valley Shakespeare appeared first on Wood Central.

Six of Australia’s most awarded architectural practices have used American red oak, cherry and maple to design heirloom-quality furniture as a direct challenge to disposable design culture, with the resulting works unveiled today at Cult Design’s Abbotsford showroom for the opening of Melbourne Design Week. KEEP: Forever Objects Designed by Six Australian Architects runs at Cult until 8 June 2026, following the show’s 2025 Sydney launch.

The exhibition has been curated by former Vogue Living Australia editor-in-chief David Clark, and is presented by the American Hardwood Export Council (AHEC) in partnership with Melbourne furniture retailer Cult Design and Evostyle. Clark has commissioned new works from Edition Office, Kennedy Nolan, Lineburg Wang, Neil Durbach, Richards Stanisich with Meg Ashforth, and Virginia Kerridge — with each practice asked to translate its spatial thinking into the intimate scale of furniture, working only with red oak, cherry or maple.

The Melbourne run is the second Australian staging of KEEP after the show’s 2025 Sydney debut, and the latest move in a design-sector campaign AHEC has run across more than 50 international markets over three decades. The trade body represents thousands of American producers — from family-run sawmills to major flooring manufacturers — and has promoted more than 20 commercially available hardwood species to designers, architects and furniture makers worldwide.

The resulting KEEP pieces range from sculptural seating and tables to lighting and experimental objects. Each work has been positioned as a direct challenge to throwaway furniture culture, asking what makes an object worth keeping.

“Historically, and in other places, it is more commonplace for architects to design furniture, for their own projects or for companies by commission,” Clark said. “In the nascent Australian furniture industry, it is less so.”

He said the exhibition is designed to test what Australia’s most accomplished practitioners might produce outside their usual spatial brief. “I thought it would be interesting to see what prominent and successful architects might design outside their usual focus, and perhaps, in the process and conversation, what they might bring to the texture and layers of the Australian design ecosystem,” Clark said.

Among the line-up is Brisbane practice Lineburg Wang, established by Michael Lineburg and Lynn Wang in 2018. The studio took out the AIA Queensland Architecture Medallion in 2023 and the Eleanor Cullis-Hill Award at the AIA National Awards in 2024 — placing it among the youngest practices in the show.

The three timber species at the heart of KEEP — red oak, cherry and maple — were selected for their performance, expressive qualities and environmental credentials. According to U.S. Forest Service Forest Inventory and Analysis data published by AHEC, American red oak grows at 60.6 million cubic metres a year against a harvest of 31.9 million, lifting net standing volume by 28.7 million cubic metres annually.

Cherry adds 5.4 million cubic metres of net volume each year, and soft maple adds 20.4 million. Each of the three species featured in the show is part of a forest resource where annual growth significantly exceeds harvest — the sustainability framing that has anchored AHEC’s design-sector messaging in Australia and globally for more than a decade.

“KEEP is a reminder that the things we choose to live with can carry meaning and memory,” said Rod Wiles, Regional Director of the American Hardwood Export Council. “These works are made to endure, not just in use, but in the stories they can hold.”

Installed at Cult Design’s Abbotsford showroom at 16–28 Duke Street, KEEP invites Melbourne Design Week audiences to slow down and consider the value of the objects they choose to live with. The Design Week programme runs from today until 23 May, with the exhibition continuing for a further two weeks at Cult until 8 June 2026.

The show’s central premise — that an object’s worth lies in how long it can be kept — finds a thematic echo in the descriptor that Melbourne practice Kennedy Nolan uses for its own architectural work: creating enduring settings for life. For more on the exhibition and the species featured, visit americanhardwood.org or follow @ahec_anz.

The post Top Architects Make the Case for ‘Forever Furniture’ at Cult Melbourne appeared first on Wood Central.

A new 22-storey mass timber pod hotel could rise opposite Vancouver’s Law Courts, with local developer 1517856 B.C. Ltd. and Unison Architecture Ltd. filing a rezoning application for the 408-unit project at 948 Howe Street. That is according to the rezoning submission lodged with the City of Vancouver, which describes the proposal as a “high density lodging concept” combining “nano pods” and “nano rooms” on a 7.6-metre by 36.6-metre downtown site.

The development team is targeting budget-conscious urban travellers — specifically the 18- to 34-year-old demographic — who favour central location, digital connectivity and social experiences over conventional room size, although the submission stops short of disclosing potential room rates. Concrete, steel and mass timber make up the structural mix across the narrow Howe Street lot, with Unison Architecture targeting a late 2028 or early 2029 opening window.

Each nano pod provides a private sleeping capsule of roughly 3 square metres, fitted with a standard door, integrated lighting and ventilation, a secure lock, a reclining bed, and under-bed luggage storage. Pod guests share washroom and shower facilities on each floor, whilst the fully enclosed nano rooms stretch to roughly 10 square metres of climate-controlled space, with sound isolation, secure storage and digital amenities.

A sky reception area offering elevated city views sits alongside a sky bar open to the public, and guests will enter from Howe Street to complete app-based self-check-in and check-out. The design omits guest parking entirely, instead leaning on the Granville Entertainment District’s existing transit connections.

Royce Chwin, president and chief executive officer of Destination Vancouver, has written a letter of support for the application and urged faster approvals for additional pod hotels in the downtown core. “It aligns with broader goals to add new hotel capacity,” Chwin wrote, with the submission describing the development team’s intent as transforming an underutilised orphaned site through the nano-pod and nano-room format.

The application follows a May 2024 Vancouver City Council motion, moved by councillors Sarah Kirby-Yung and Lisa Dominato, encouraging the development of pod hotels as a response to the city’s hotel shortage. Council subsequently adopted a hotel policy in 2025 targeting approximately 10,000 new hotel rooms in Vancouver by 2050, with the broader goal of supporting the city’s tourism economy alongside its film, technology and life sciences sectors.

Whistler and Richmond already operate pod hotel concepts in British Columbia, drawing on a typology that has grown rapidly across Asia, Europe and parts of the United States. Destination Vancouver estimated in 2022 that the city needs an additional 10,000 hotel rooms between 2023 and 2050, and the development team argues the nano-pod and nano-room format addresses that gap on otherwise underutilised sites.

The public period on the 948 Howe Street rezoning application closes Tuesday, 19 May. A late 2028 or early 2029 opening hinges on Council approval of the 22-storey hybrid concrete, steel and mass timber pod tower.

The post 22-Storey Mass Timber Pod Hotel Targets Vancouver’s Howe Street appeared first on Wood Central.

Sweden’s White Arkitekter and the City of Lviv have signed a Memorandum of Understanding to deliver Ukraine’s first mass timber school, with the western Ukrainian project committed as a national demonstrator for sustainable reconstruction, regulatory testing and skills development — and the first built pilot under the Swedish-funded SustainTimber: Standards for Sustainable Transition initiative. That is according to Carl Bäckstrand, Deputy CEO and International Director at White Arkitekter, who confirmed the school will operate as a full-scale testbed for timber construction aligned with European standards and EU integration goals.

Funded by the Swedish Institute through the SI Ukraine Cooperation Programme, SustainTimber is led by White Arkitekter, with the Lviv-based practice Studio Zmist and the Swedish Institute for Standards (SIS), and is positioned within Ukraine’s National Recovery Plan as the country’s mass timber regulatory framework. Wood Central understands that the MoU carries the programme from the policy roadmap into its first built pilot, with the Lviv school selected to test materials, building methods, and regulatory frameworks ahead of nationwide replication.

In a statement, Bäckstrand said the Lviv pilot would demonstrate feasibility and support wider replication across Ukrainian cities, with the project shaped through months of dialogue with public authorities and industry stakeholders. “The collaboration marks an important step in translating shared knowledge into tangible initiatives,” Bäckstrand said.

Volodymyr Stasiv, Lead Specialist of the Department of Architecture and Spatial Development at the City of Lviv, said the school would give Ukrainian authorities a working model for modern timber construction whilst delivering high-quality social infrastructure for war-affected communities. “A valuable opportunity to implement modern timber construction technologies in Ukraine,” Stasiv said.

With more than 3,500 educational facilities damaged or destroyed across Ukraine since February 2022, Russian strikes have left nearly 400 schools completely destroyed and pushed 5.3 million children into disrupted learning, according to figures published by Ukraine’s Ministry of Education and UNICEF. Ukraine has lost one in every seven schools to drone, missile and artillery attack, with the impact falling hardest on regions east of the Dnipro and on cities under recurring aerial assault.

The MoU comes as Lviv has emerged as Ukraine’s mass timber civic testbed under Mayor Andriy Sadovyi, with the SustainTimber school joining Pritzker laureate Shigeru Ban’s cross-laminated timber extension to Ukraine’s largest hospital — announced by Sadovyi at the Lviv Urban Forum in June 2023 — as the city’s flagship international mass timber civic projects. Wood Central understands that the SustainTimber school is the first built pilot from the 2025 roadmap, delivered by White Arkitekter, Studio Zmist, and SIS, with Swedish and Ukrainian partners.

White Arkitekter — one of Scandinavia’s leading practices with around 500 staff across Sweden, the United Kingdom, Germany and Canada — has worked with Studio Zmist since 2022, when the Ukrainian firm sent a wide cooperation request to European architectural studios in the months after Russia’s full-scale invasion devastated Ukrainian cities. The Swedish practice is best known for the 30,000-square-metre Sara Cultural Centre in Skellefteå — a 75-metre, 20-storey CLT high-rise completed in 2021 and winner of MIPIM’s 2018 Best Future Project award.

Bäckstrand said the Lviv school would feed directly into White Arkitekter’s 2030 pledge for regenerative, climate-neutral architecture, with the SustainTimber roadmap identifying school-scale reference projects as the primary driver of EU-aligned mass timber rollout across Ukrainian municipalities — alignment Kyiv must complete ahead of the European Union Deforestation Regulation’s 30 December 2026 enforcement date for forest products entering the bloc.

The post Lviv to Build Ukraine’s First Timber School Ahead of National Rollout appeared first on Wood Central.

A 350-cubic-metre glulam diagrid, lifted from a European production line to St Kilda Road, now crowns Anzac Station, the only platform-to-platform train-tram interchange on Melbourne’s Metro Tunnel, and an underground station forecast to move 14,500 passengers during peak. That is according to Tyson Infanti, Director of Business Development Australia and New Zealand within HASSLACHER group, who confirmed the German specialist, HESS TIMBER (a member of HASSLACHER group), supplied the entire curved-glulam, cross-laminated timber and structural connection package for the 84-metre canopy HASSELL has called a first for Melbourne and possibly Australia: a major rail station with its main entry on the tram platform.

HESS TIMBER, the Kleinheubach-based specialist timber construction company, supplied more than 350 cubic metres of curved and straight glulam beams alongside structural CLT soffit panels and the structural connection systems holding the diagrid above one of Melbourne’s busiest road and tram corridors. “We are pleased to have been able to work with CYP Design and Construction on this project,” HESS TIMBER said in its project release, with the diagrid designed by HASSELL, Weston Williamson + Partners and Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners, structural engineering led by HESS TIMBER and Arup, and construction delivered by Cross Yarra Partnership for the Victorian Infrastructure Delivery Authority.

The 84-metre by 20-metre canopy, parametrically modelled in software package Rhinoceros, is built from 13 glulam cross beams, weighing up to 4,500 kilograms each. 164 diagonal glulam sections form the intersecting framework that gives the canopy its silhouette and 190 uniquely shaped CLT panels, produced at the group’s site at Stall im Mölltal, Austria (NORITEC Holzindustrie GmbH), lining the underside, with 12 skylights set along the central spine and the longest curved beams shipped as 20-metre segments.

Wood Central understands that the diagrid geometry replaces conventional repetitive framing with a structurally efficient form that doubles as the station’s defining architectural gesture, allowing the timber roof to sit clear of the underground concourse on circular steel columns rising from within the station box itself. The hybrid arrangement uses steel for the supporting columns, main spine beams and perimeter ring beam, with mass timber for the lightweight, low-carbon roof, and the exposed timber panels softening what would otherwise read as conventional engineered transport infrastructure.

A long road from Kleinheubach to St Kilda Road.

The HASSLACHER group’s European production base supplies some of Australia’s largest glulam timber sections. These massive beams are milled full-length at Kleinheubach, Germany (HASSLACHER Holzbauteile GmbH), or Hermagor, Austria (HASSLACHER Holzbausysteme GmbH), and shipped via special break-bulk cargo ships, known as RoRo vessels, before being delivered to the site on piloted truck transports. The Anzac Station’s timber canopy with curved glulam rafters, utilising this production and transportation capability, was craned over St Kilda Road from 2022 onwards and now rests on twelve green steel columns rising up to 16 metres above the underground concourse.

Anzac Station opened to passengers on 30 November 2025 alongside the wider Metro Tunnel, with more than 70,000 people moving through the network on opening day and around 13,000 passing through Anzac before full timetabled services launched on 1 February 2026 under the Big Switch branding. The station serves the Royal Botanic Gardens, the St Kilda Road office precinct and Melbourne Grammar School, with the Shrine of Remembrance directly opposite the canopy entrance, shaping the biophilic design behind the exposed timber soffit and 12-skylight central spine.

It comes as Wood Central reported that the Anzac Station canopy joins HESS TIMBER’s deepening Australian project pipeline, with the Adelaide Aquatic Centre carrying Australia’s largest timber beams by weight and volume, Boola Katitjin at Murdoch University running on more than 1,800 pieces of glulam and Tasmania’s tallest mass timber building at St Luke’s in Launceston all flowing from the same European production lines of the HASSLACHER group.

Anzac Station is the first Melbourne rail station built with a direct platform-to-platform interchange between trains and trams, easing pressure on what Public Transport Victoria has identified as the busiest tram corridor in the world, with HESS TIMBER’s 350 cubic metres of glulam and CLT now carrying the architectural identity of an underground station forecast to serve 14,500 commuters every peak.

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A decade after opening as a raw concrete shell once dismissed as a failed promise, the Cutaway at Barangaroo Reserve finally launched last Wednesday as a $100 million cultural venue anchored by 13 free-formed structural timber trees. Speaking at the unveiling, NSW Premier Chris Minns confirmed the venue will operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week, a new window secured only after Minister for Planning Paul Scully overrode opposition that had previously capped events at midnight.

The trees form the centrepiece of a fit-out delivered by Infrastructure NSW in partnership with FDC Construction & Fitout and architects fjcstudio, with First Nations designers Shannon Foster of Bangawarra and artist Jake Nash embedded in the design from its earliest stages. The Cutaway marks a second major Australian collaboration between HESS TIMBER and fjcstudio, following the free-form glulam canopy delivered at Bunjil Place in Narre Warren in 2017, completed under the practice’s former FJMT identity.

Wood Central understands that each tree is assembled from up to 115 precision-fabricated components supplied by HESS TIMBER, part of the HASSLACHER group, each weighing between 7 and 950 kilograms. The tallest tree stretches 17 metres from sandstone floor to vaulted canopy, its assembled form drawing on the curved geometry of the giba-gunya (sandstone rock shelter), a culturally significant natural reference woven into the architectural logic rather than applied as ornament.

“The design of the Cutaway maximises the potential of the space…transforming it into a globally attractive venue for arts and culture,” said Minister for the Arts John Graham.

More than 90 per cent of construction waste was diverted from landfill during the fit-out, whilst carbon emissions were more than 50 per cent below standard construction benchmarks, and all timber was sourced in compliance with Barangaroo Reserve’s sustainability principles.

Perforated plywood within each tree works in concert with two-layer glass enclosures over the venue’s open voids, an acoustic system rated for premium music and major events, whilst drawing natural light into the space.

“The Cutaway will be the beating heart of Barangaroo…” said Minister for Jobs and Tourism Steve Kamper.

It comes as Sydney consolidates its standing as one of the world’s most active cities for large-scale timber architecture, with Atlassian Central having surpassed Milwaukee’s Ascent to become the world’s tallest plyscraper, a structural milestone Wood Central reported earlier this month. The Cutaway’s 3,000-person capacity spans a main event hall, pre-function spaces, gallery and exhibition rooms, a commercial kitchen, green rooms, dressing rooms and a dedicated First Nations education centre, with step-free access running directly from Barangaroo Metro Station through the basement carpark and into the hall.

Securing the 24/7 operating approval was not straightforward, with the Millers Point Community Resident Action Group mounting sustained objections over noise, crowd control and residential amenity before earlier planning decisions capped events at midnight, a restriction Scully’s direct intervention ultimately overturned.

“We’ve set the Cutaway up to be a must-visit destination for locals and visitors…” Scully said, adding that the venue would open its first event within weeks.

The Cutaway opened to the public last weekend with a free programme of live music, gallery access and tours, before moving into a broader events programme.

“This extraordinary space is unlike anything else in Australia…” Minns said.

Please note: The photos for this story have been supplied exclusively to Wood Central by Kylan Low, the organiser of the Australian Timber Design Awards. To learn more about the awards, now in their 26th year, click here.

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Canfor has named the conflict in Iran as the single biggest risk to its second quarter, warning that petroleum-driven supply chain disruption will drag on lumber demand and lift costs for US homebuilders just as the housing recovery looks for traction. That is according to the Q1 2026 financial results released to the Toronto Stock Exchange on May 6, with President and Chief Executive Officer Susan Yurkovich telling shareholders the conflict is reshaping the demand outlook even as a tighter supply backdrop dragged Q1 results sharply off the CAD $415.9 million Q4 blowout.

Canfor reported an operating loss of CAD $72.5 million and a shareholder net loss of CAD $72.1 million for the quarter — a result delivered just six weeks after the company moved to acquire the remaining issued shares of Canfor Pulp Products on March 17 and consolidated the pulp arm under full ownership. Lumber drove a CAD $43.7 million operating loss; pulp and paper added another CAD $16.2 million.

“The first quarter of 2026 continued to reflect challenging market conditions across our global operations,” Yurkovich said, adding that improved results were a function of higher production volumes and a North American lumber price recovery driven by tighter supply, with late-quarter weather disruption across British Columbia and the US South pinching the market further.

It traces back to Hormuz.

Following the Iranian Revolutionary Guard action that closed the Strait of Hormuz on February 28, waterway traffic fell 80 per cent within 24 hours and has not recovered since. Industrial diesel prices across Asia have climbed 140 per cent since the closure, with crude pushed above US $110 per barrel and ocean freight surcharges of up to US $5,000 per container now baked into trade lanes that depend on Gulf transit.

For US homebuilders, the timing is brutal.

Full-year 2025 single-family housing starts fell 7 per cent to 943,000 units — the weakest annual result since the pandemic recovery — and NAHB Chair Buddy Hughes has previously appealed directly to US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer over the cumulative tariff impact on construction, with the body estimating combined tariffs and duties have added at least US$10,000 to the cost of a new dwelling. Section 232 lumber duties hold the effective burden at 34.83 per cent for most Canadian producers through August, with Canfor a mandatory respondent in that review, with a final determination due in August.

Total lumber shipments fell 6 per cent on the prior quarter to 1.26 billion board feet. Europe was off by 9 per cent due to cold-weather production impacts. North America fell 4 per cent due to British Columbia rail constraints and US South weather disruption. Production, however, lifted 2 per cent to 1.21 billion board feet as North American operating hours rebuilt following Q4’s seasonal holiday downtime.

Western SPF 2×4 #2&Btr averaged USD $463 per thousand board feet for the quarter, up 10 per cent on Q4 2025, whilst SYP East 2×4 #2 averaged USD $495 per thousand board feet — a 35 per cent jump. None of which made it through to Western SPF unit sales realisations, which were broadly flat: weaker offshore returns and a 2 per cent stronger Canadian dollar erased the benchmark lift before it hit the bottom line.

Whilst Asia was described as challenging, the China problem is structural. Official Chinese data shows real estate investment fell 11 per cent year on year across January and February 2026, with sales of newly built commercial housing by floor area down around 14 per cent over the same period. Japan softened too, on higher import volumes from Canada and Europe and a continued shift toward domestic wood use.

European demand stayed weak with slightly lower pricing quarter on quarter, though spruce showed late-quarter improvement after industry curtailments tightened supply. Elevated pine inventories continue to weigh on prices — particularly in the United Kingdom — with higher freight costs and the Iran conflict piling onto Canfor’s Vida sawmilling operations across southern Sweden.

Pulp and paper improved on the previous quarter, lifted by a modest US-dollar pricing uplift on global supply disruption and a 30 per cent rise in pulp shipments. Average NBSK list prices to China averaged USD $685 per tonne, up 2 per cent, while producer inventories closed February at 47 days of supply — the top end of Canfor’s stated balanced range.

Yurkovich said pulp headwinds had carried straight into the new quarter with producer inventories sitting well above trend. Canfor has scheduled a Q2 maintenance outage at its Intercontinental NBSK pulp mill, expected to strip around 20,000 tonnes of market pulp output, alongside a paper machine outage flagged to remove a further 5,000 tonnes.

For lumber, the company expects North American markets to soften later in Q2 as supply increases in response to recent price improvements, with macroeconomic uncertainty and heightened geopolitical risk continuing to constrain demand. The Iran conflict is flagged as a particular risk to new housing construction across the United States.

It comes as the wider North American sector continues to grind through what was a brutal 2025, with Canfor permanently closing its Estill and Darlington mills in South Carolina last year and stripping 350 million board feet of annual capacity from the market. West Fraser, Domtar, and Interfor have all curtailed, with capacity being released from the system faster than weak demand can absorb.

As of March 31, Canfor reported CAD $60.2 million in cash and equivalents on a consolidated basis, including Vida, against CAD $440.8 million drawn on operating loans, CAD $53.0 million reserved for standby letters of credit, and CAD $906.5 million in undrawn operating loan facilities. Canfor’s next test arrives in early August, with Q2 results due alongside the US Commerce Department’s final softwood determination and the conclusion of scheduled NBSK and paper machine outages that will strip 25,000 tonnes from the market.

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Cardboard Cathedral architect Shigeru Ban will next month be awarded the 2026 American Institute of Architects (AIA) Gold Medal at the AIA Conference on Architecture and Design in San Diego, capping more than four decades of work that has proven paper tubes, timber and bamboo can carry permanent civic, cultural and humanitarian architecture.

Ban, already a Pritzker Prize-winning architect, is the first non-American to be awarded the Gold Medal since the late Richard Rogers received it in 2019, and is the first Japanese architect to receive it since Fumihiko Maki in 2011. The award places Ban alongside recent recipients, including Deborah Berke, Carol Ross Barney and Lake Flato co-founders David Lake and Ted Flato, a roster reserved for individuals whose careers have left a lasting influence on theory and practice.

Citing what it called Ban’s pioneering use of humble, renewable materials, the AIA said his career “masterfully blends structural innovation, ecological sensitivity, and profound humanitarianism,” with the 2026 jury chaired by Angela Brooks of Brooks + Scarpa Architects. The Gold Medal was first awarded in 1907 and has been presented to more than 80 architects since 1947, including Frank Lloyd Wright, I.M. Pei and Renzo Piano.

Born in Tokyo in 1957, Ban opened his Tokyo practice in 1985, after training at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) and New York’s Cooper Union, where he studied under Ricardo Scofidio, Bernard Tschumi and John Hejduk. The paper tube began as an exhibition solution while Ban was working as a curator at Tokyo’s Axis Gallery in the mid-1980s, with the lightweight cardboard cylinders supporting his Alvar Aalto retrospective before he scaled them up into permanent civic structures.

After the 1995 Kobe earthquake killed more than 6,000 people, Ban founded the Voluntary Architects’ Network (VAN), the not-for-profit body that has since completed over 50 disaster-relief projects across 23 countries using paper, timber and bamboo. The most recognised work from this body of practice is the Cardboard Cathedral in Christchurch, New Zealand, assembled from 98 cardboard tubes, timber and polycarbonate panels for 700 worshippers after the 2011 earthquake destroyed the city’s Anglican cathedral.

The award follows Wood Central’s reporting on Ban’s CHF 45 million all-timber concert hall inserted within Switzerland’s protected Zeughaus armoury in Altdorf, alongside his ongoing cross-laminated timber expansion of Ukraine’s largest hospital in Lviv. It also caps a year in which Wood Central covered Ban’s bamboo-and-cardboard Blue Ocean Dome at Expo 2025 in Osaka and his mass-timber Kentucky Owl distillery in Bardstown.

Ban’s commercial and cultural portfolio also includes the Centre Pompidou-Metz in France, completed in 2010 with a timber gridshell roof inspired by a woven Chinese hat, and the Swatch Omega Campus in Biel, Switzerland, the largest mass timber building in the world at 240 metres of Swiss-sourced wood. Tod Williams, FAIA, co-founder of Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, said: “Shigeru is an extraordinary person and of great energy, conviction, and kindness.”

Ban previously won the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2014 and Japan’s Praemium Imperiale for Architecture in 2024, with the Japanese government naming him a Person of Cultural Merit earlier this year. For over 30 years, the Tokyo architect has taught at Harvard, Cornell, and Columbia, often involving students directly in VAN humanitarian deployments through workshops that link academic studio work to refugee camps and disaster zones.

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Milan’s mass timber Olympic Village is converting from athletes’ accommodation into Italy’s largest publicly supported student housing complex as part of a four-month works programme, with the Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM) design now offering future Olympic hosts a working template for purpose-built post-Games renewal. That is according to Marco Scalvini, director of fund and asset management at Italian real estate developer COIMA, who confirmed at a 7 April Community Value Urban Regeneration roundtable hosted by The European House of Ambrosetti (TEHA Group) that 65 per cent of the 1,700 beds across the six new mass timber residential blocks have been assigned through university agreements and direct web bookings.

Wood Central understands the Porta Romana scheme is the only one of the six athlete villages used during the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Games designed from the outset as a permanent urban neighbourhood, with the same buildings that hosted more than 1,000 athletes from over 40 delegations during the February event now converting under a brief that Italian trade press cites as significantly faster than the multi-year conversion timelines that have characterised most past Olympic athlete villages. “We expect it to open in August 2026 with a total of 1,700 beds,” Scalvini said.

The renewal follows Wood Central’s reporting that the village was delivered 30 days ahead of schedule using factory-made modular units built around mass timber elements, with Bocconi University now signing a three-year renewable agreement for 730 of the 1,700 beds and COIMA setting the cheapest of three tiered rents at €250 per month for 135 of the 450 subsidised beds under MUR Ministerial Decree 481/2024 PNRR funding.

The complex achieved Nearly Zero Energy Building (NZEB) standards and holds both Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Gold and WiredScore Platinum certifications, with heat pumps, a one megawatt photovoltaic system, stormwater reuse and electric vehicle charging built in across the six new mass timber blocks and the restored Squadra Rialzo locomotive workshop and Basilico warehouse. Mass timber construction and prefabricated facade panels cut embodied carbon during the €140 million build, with COIMA pre-installing final student-configuration furniture during the Games under a July 2025 agreement with Fondazione Milano Cortina 2026 — a design-for-conversion brief that skips the gut-and-rebuild cycle stretching most past Olympic conversions into multi-year timelines.

It comes as Wood Central reported on the broader mass timber programme across the Milano Cortina 2026 venue network, with Italian fabricator Rubner Holzbau supplying engineered timber across vertical extensions in Milan and PEFC-certified timber retrofits at the Fabio Canal Cross-Country Ski Stadium. “Purpose-built for one usage, and that then will transform for another permanent purpose,” SOM partner Colin Koop said.

The Scalo Romana masterplan will eventually add 320 affordable housing units across the wider 19-hectare former rail yard, with COIMA pricing the student rents to deliver long-term investors a five per cent return only marginally above the ten-year BTP yield. Olympic host cities have a long history of venues sitting idle after the Games close — with Milan’s mass timber renewal answering 6 per cent of the city’s 30,000-bed student housing gap on a four-month works programme, against an Italian national shortage of 500,000 beds and a purpose-built student accommodation market that has grown 186 per cent in five years.

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Browne Park reopened in Rockhampton last Saturday 2 May as Aurizon Stadium, with a 90-metre glulam roof comprising twelve 20-metre beams cantilevering 12 metres over the western grandstand, delivering Australia’s longest cantilevered timber structure and one of the first timber-roofed stadiums in Queensland ahead of the Brisbane 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games.

That is according to Stantec, the structural engineering firm behind the timber roof, working alongside Italian glulam fabricator Theca/Rubner Holzbau, architects Cox Architecture and Italian connection-design specialist Ergodomus Timber Engineering on the Queensland Government-backed scheme. Wood Central understands the glulam elements were sized to fit within shipping containers for transport from the European Union and assembled on-site under a 100 per cent Building Information Modelling workflow, with Stantec leading work across fourteen engineering disciplines.

It comes as Sport, Racing and Olympic and Paralympic Games Minister Tim Mander, who refereed the 2004 and 2005 NRL Grand Finals, confirmed the final $3.5 million tranche of the $63 million Queensland Government commitment in September 2025, adding broadcast-standard lighting, a video replay scoreboard and upgraded field drainage to bring the venue to NRL hosting standard. “Browne Park has been the spiritual home of rugby league in Central Queensland,” Mander said.

Stantec’s analysis of timber and steel solutions found timber carried a marginally higher capital cost but delivered a 400-tonne net CO2 saving against the steel-equivalent design, the annual equivalent of removing 40 cars from the road, with the local municipality and designers commissioning an in-scale wind tunnel analysis after Cyclone Marcia hit Rockhampton in 2015. “In Rockhampton, winds can be extraordinarily strong, posing significant challenges to structural integrity,” Ergodomus said in its project description.

The reopening follows Wood Central reporting on Cox Architecture’s design of Hobart’s $1.13 billion Macquarie Point stadium, set to carry the world’s largest timber roof under a 190-metre Tasmanian-glulam dome, alongside Queensland Government commitments to mass timber for Brisbane 2032 Olympic Athletes’ Villages and Brisbane’s QAS National Throws Centre, the southern hemisphere’s first net-zero elite sporting facility.

Backed by the Queensland Government with naming rights from rail freight operator Aurizon, the redevelopment delivered a three-level grandstand with 3,253 seats, up from the previous 564, alongside upgraded lighting, an enhanced playing surface, expanded media and broadcast facilities, four universally designed change rooms, a large video screen and additional spectator amenities. “Rockhampton is incredibly important to Aurizon,” Aurizon Managing Director and CEO Andrew Harding said.

Browne Park Inc Chairman Paul Hoolihan said the redevelopment opened a new chapter for the venue, which has hosted rugby football in Central Queensland since 1890 and was renamed Browne Park in 1958 to honour the late Rockhampton Rugby League president Jack Browne. “Aurizon has been part of the Central Queensland story for generations,” Hoolihan said.

The Central Queensland Capras returned to the redeveloped venue on Saturday with a Round 8 victory over defending Hostplus Cup champions the Burleigh Bears, ending two seasons in exile. The venue is booked to host up to 16 Queensland Rugby League fixtures each season, alongside local finals and community events, with broadcast infrastructure now in place for higher-profile fixtures, including potential NRL premiership matches.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This article has been retracted by Wood Central. It contained factually incorrect information about the materials used in Browne Park’s western grandstand roof. We apologise to readers and to the project team. For current information about the redevelopment, please refer to the Browne Park or Stantec project pages directly. Published: 6 May 2026 Retracted: 6 May 2026

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A 50-year-old Nagoya construction firm has reused decades of timber stockpiled across two of its own warehouses as the primary structure for a combined office and residence, with the available beam and brace lengths driving the building’s floor heights and plan dimensions rather than the other way around. The project, House & Office SH, was designed by Isuki Kamiya and Yui Goto of 1-1 Architects.

Wood Central understands the timber accumulated across the two warehouses over generations, with much of the stock drawn from bulk orders placed by the firm’s previous-generation founder — a working carpenter — as well as salvaged sections collected during demolition. The pieces varied in species, size and condition, leaving the stockpile difficult to standardise into conventional construction lengths.

1-1 Architects positioned the build as a response to a broader Japanese phenomenon, with construction companies and lumberyards across the country holding similar dormant timber stockpiles that are often cut only into finishing materials rather than reused as structural members. The studio approached the surplus “much like extracting rare metals from discarded electronic devices,” treating warehouse stock as an unused urban resource awaiting structural reactivation.

Rather than cutting the sections down to uniform members, Kamiya and Goto worked the existing dimensions directly into the structural model, with floor heights and plan dimensions adjusted as variables against the timber’s fixed lengths. Large diagonal members cut across rooms at unexpected angles, with the structural geometry shaped by the timber’s existing dimensions.

The diagonal bracing replaces opaque shear walls along the building’s short axis, allowing the interior to remain visible from the street while defining the boundary between commercial and residential zones. Each connection demanded a bespoke response, with custom metal fittings fabricated from the irregular pieces’ three-dimensional coordinates and final adjustments made on site to account for warping and decades-old material deviations.

The ground floor is held open and visible to the surrounding low-rise neighbourhood, where many of the small shopfronts and workshops that once activated the streetscape have closed in recent decades as customer traffic shifted to large shopping malls. House & Office SH is structured to reactivate that edge by distributing work, commerce and living functions across levels rather than separating them into discrete vertical zones.

It comes as Wood Central reported on University College London’s Circular Economy Lab and UK CLT demonstrating a CascadeUp modular CLT prototype built entirely from recycled demolition timber, with the Nagoya project applying the same reuse principle in traditional Japanese post-and-beam carpentry rather than engineered panels.

Komatsu Structural Design engineered the connections, with Hirata Construction, now in its 50th year, building the project to Kamiya and Goto’s design in Nagoya from timber its previous-generation founder had ordered as a carpenter and stockpiled across two of the firm’s warehouses.

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‘The Hale,’ a curved-gable mass timber civic pavilion built from cross-laminated timber and glulam, elevated above the tide line and clad with rainscreen façades and protected steel connections for sea-level rise, storm surges and salt exposure, has been pitched for Honolulu’s Kakaʻako Ma kai shoreline at the 2026 International Mass Timber Conference (IMTC) in Portland, Oregon.

That is according to the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa School of Architecture, where graduate students Edwin Sun, Jayden Uowolo and Dylan Martos developed the project in a first-semester graduate design studio under Dean Mo Zell and professors Ben Parker and Ho Kyung Lee.

Wood Central understands that ‘Hale’ is inspired by the traditional Hawaiian ‘place of shelter’ as a contemporary civic gathering space, with the design adding marine-grade coatings and cross-ventilation across the cladding to round out the tropical marine durability package. In addition, the design team also explored locally harvested softwoods to strengthen regional supply chains and cut transport-related carbon emissions across the timber value chain.

The studio brief asked how Pacific Island design traditions could inform modern public spaces in Honolulu, a question that ran through the team’s material specifications as much as its spatial planning across the Kakaʻako site.

Uowolo, who travelled to Portland with Sun and Martos to deliver the presentation, said the conference had pushed his thinking on how Pacific Island traditions could feed contemporary mass timber design.

“Traditional Pacific Island ideas can shape contemporary design,” Uowolo said.

Parker, who guided the studio with fellow professor Ho Kyung Lee, said industry-facing events of IMTC’s scale gave architecture students early career exposure that fed back into the school and the wider profession.

“They give them early exposure to the critical topics professional architects are discussing,” Parker said.

It comes as Wood Central reported a USDA-led study projecting a 25-to-40-fold lift in US mass timber demand to 2070, with the Port of Portland’s 40-acre Terminal 2 redevelopment now positioning Oregon as the United States’ domestic leader on mass timber housing innovation.

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Work has now started on the Port of Portland’s redevelopment of its 40-acre former Terminal 2 marine site on the Willamette River, with the new mass timber campus projected to support more than 360 jobs and up to $115 million in regional GDP at full operational scale.

ZAUGG Timber Solutions, the Swiss-based mass timber manufacturer, has set up shop on the site as one of the first Phase 1 tenants and is currently awaiting final permits before its Terminal 2 operation can move into full-scale production.

Wood Central understands the campus is the first US site of its kind dedicated to mass timber housing manufacture and research at scale, designed to compress the path from product development to occupied dwelling and give Oregon a domestic answer to a housing shortage that has become the state’s dominant policy challenge.

Rachel Thieme, Economic Development Manager at the Port of Portland, said the redevelopment had been designed to activate a stretch of waterfront that had drifted out of productive industrial use and put the full mass timber supply chain inside one operational footprint. “We’ll have manufacturers, builders, start-ups all in one place,” Thieme said.

ZAUGG is one of the first Phase 1 tenants but unlikely to be the last, with the Port continuing to court additional manufacturers, builders and start-ups across the mass timber and housing innovation supply chain.

Marcus Kaufmann, who works with the Oregon Department of Forestry and helps run the Oregon Mass Timber Coalition, said Oregon was now in a position to become the United States’ domestic leader in mass timber, with European companies arriving as a direct result of investment already on the ground. “That’s a huge win for the state. That’s a huge win for everyone,” Kaufmann said.

It comes as Wood Central reported Oregon’s new acoustic lab is structured to close a critical gap in mass timber testing, with multi-storey housing in particular dependent on certified sound-transmission data for building-code approvals at the state and municipal level. The campus’s wider context is the Port’s mass timber roof at Portland International Airport’s redeveloped main terminal, which Wood Central reported opened in 2024 as the largest mass timber project in the United States, with the visibility of the airport build accelerating the push to move mass timber from commercial product into residential housing.

With ZAUGG awaiting final permits, the University of Oregon’s acoustics and energy lab in development, and additional Phase 1 tenants still to be confirmed, the next 24 months will determine whether the 40-acre campus can deliver the 360 jobs and up to $115 million in regional GDP the Port of Portland has promised Oregon.

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