Stop Waiting for Better Building Products w/ Zenon Radewych of WZMH Architects

Somewhere between the era of steamboats and the world wide web, the industry lost the muscle memory to build with heavy timber. We were putting up NLT and glulam buildings before 1950. But then, everything switched to steel and concrete, and the expertise walked out the door with it. So when an architect brings an ambitious timber concept to the table, too often they hear  “Not feasible. Too expensive. Switch that part to steel. Nobody can build it.”

Dave Savard and Geneviève Constancis, ing.f./for.eng. of Art Massif | Wood Structure spend their days proving those answers wrong. In this piece, Dave and Geneviève walk through Aspen Pure, their new structural glulam made from quaking aspen, the free-form theater canopy they just delivered for Hudson Valley Shakespeare, and why so many timber designs get talked down before anyone checks what's actually possible.

This article is just one part of the newsletter where we cover who and what’s shaping the mass timber industry.

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A Structural Product From a Tree Nobody Wanted - Aspen Pure

"It really started from the forest," Geneviève says.

One of Art Massif's four partners, the company's production director, was harvesting quaking aspen on his own land and couldn't get past how white the wood was. It was just too beautiful to waste on the usual fate. Because that's what quaking aspen has been, one of the least valued trees in North America. It goes to pulp for paper. It goes to shipping pallets. Almost no value-added products, and almost no economic return for the communities that harvest it.

So they started testing it. With the right moisture content, the right drying, and the right sanding, it now has a home in the structural glulam market.

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What came out is a different architectural language for glulam. Lighter, brighter, more uniform, with fewer knots and less character than Douglas Fir, southern yellow pine, or spruce. Nothing wrong with the traditional species in the right setting. But Aspen Pure gives architects and designers a modern look they've been asking for and couldn't get.

The performance is there too. From Art Massif's testing, the design values are equivalent or superior to spruce. Part of that comes from selection: they sort and grade the fiber themselves with their own equipment, so only the best material makes it into the structural product. Right now Aspen Pure runs as the equivalent of a 20f-EX layup, and they believe a more detailed process could push the values higher.

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None of it was plug and play. Every species has its own character. Aspen can't be graded the way other species are graded, and it can't be kiln dried the same way either, so Art Massif developed its own drying methods to protect the fiber properties. Sourcing had to be built from scratch too, because structural-grade aspen supply didn't exist in the market.

They launched Aspen Pure in Spring 2026, and the reception from architects and designers has been strong.

But, you might have seen something else in the mass timber world challenging assumptions on what’s possible. And Art Massif played a role there too.

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The Theater That Had to Grow From Its Site

Hudson Valley Shakespeare's new permanent home, the Samuel H. Scripps Theater Center, opened with a ribbon cutting this spring.

The site sits in the middle of a valley with a mountain behind it, and the architect's intent was a building that belongs to that scenery, almost like it had grown from the site itself. That meant curves in every axis and every angle. It also meant a nonprofit client with a real budget ceiling and zero appetite for compromising the design.

The path between those two things was a comprehensive design assist phase. Months of it, with the architect, the engineer of record, the construction manager, and Art Massif's team working through hundreds of small challenges to make the structure constructible. Dave's description of the team: “no egos, nobody fighting for a bigger piece of the pie, everybody solving problems.”

Three moves from that phase stand out.

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Straighten what nobody will notice.

The most important members stayed fully curved in both axes. But some elements, like certain purlins, could be straightened without changing the overall look. You can't spot it in the finished structure. Curves cost time and money, so they saved them for where the design needed them. That kept the project on budget and on schedule.

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Borrow strength from what's already there.

A theater needs a steel catwalk regardless. The team put it to work as a compression ring, pulling load off the wood structure. Smaller connections, smaller members, lower overall cost, from a piece of steel the building was getting anyway.

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Prove it out.

The original design had the roof in another material, because the team had doubts the timber decking couldn't follow a roof curved in all angles. Art Massif was convinced it could. So they built a full-size mock-up in their shop. Nobody asked for it, and nobody was paying for it. But the mock-up proved it was possible, and it showed the team how committed Art Massif was to the timber succeeding.

"This is where our dream thrives," Dave says of that phase. It's where their engineers and project managers find their value, working shoulder to shoulder with the architect and EOR until the ambitious version of the building is the buildable version.

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Every one of those solutions existed because someone kept asking what was possible. Geneviève's concern is how rarely that happens.

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Why Architects Stopped Asking

Art Massif has a phrase they repeat to designers: architects are allowed to ask for what they want.

That phrase shouldn't need to exist. Of course an architect asks for what they want. Except in mass timber, they often don't, and Geneviève traces it back to that lost expertise. Wood is an old structural material with a young workforce. When construction switched to steel and concrete, the knowledge of how to design and engineer with timber faded across every stakeholder group. Few schools in North America teach it. Architects are excited about the material, but if the engineers, builders, and reviewers around them aren't educated on it, the whole thing feels risky.

And risk gets answered with myths. It's not feasible. Change that part to steel, wood will be too expensive. Nobody can manufacture it. The design shrinks a little at every meeting until the ambition is gone.

Geneviève's answer is simple. Ask for it, and ask the right person for it. The manufacturers doing this work at a high level exist, and the capabilities go further than most of the industry realizes.

Asking is half the equation. The other half is a partner built to say yes.

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Built to Say Yes

There's no machine you can buy off a shelf that makes 3D curved glulam. That's the first thing to understand about how Art Massif works. Their production team runs on the same everything's-possible mindset as the front office, so when a project calls for something no equipment exists for, they adjust their machines or build new ones.

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How a 3D Curve Gets Made

For a tight-radius member curved in both axes, it's a three-step process. First the member gets curved in one axis in the standard press. Then it's resawn into lamellas. Then those get curved in the second axis on a custom press Art Massif built specifically for 3D work. It takes real time and energy, and as Dave puts it, "it's not a cheap cubic meter." Which is exactly why they simplify shapes anywhere it won't change the design intent.

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The equipment is one piece of a bigger structure: Art Massif can own nearly everything on a project when the project requires it. Design build or design assist from a blank page, backed by a large in-house engineering team. CNC fabrication on a high-end Swiss machine they acquired in 2021, precise enough that complex members in all angles fit perfectly on site. Finishing, fabrication, and installation with their own crews. And something rare in the industry: connection design and steel fabrication in-house.

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The reason is de-risking. Every additional interface on a complex project is another chance for miscommunication, delays, or budget problems. Art Massif partners with others the majority of the time, and gladly. But where the right expertise didn't exist externally, they built it internally. For the client, that means one conversation and one accountability structure.

Where does all that capability aim? Geneviève's shorthand is quality or complexity. The 100,000 square foot, ten-story square box with huge volume is not their type of  project. Theirs is the 15,000 square foot luxury home, the 30,000 to 40,000 square foot museum or arts center, the condo amenity space. Right now they're in construction on the 12th story of a condominium building, a penthouse level with a gym, pool, and spa in high-quality glulam.

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All of it circles back to the advice they'd give any architect starting a first timber project.

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Talk to Someone Who Knows

Geneviève's day-one checklist is short. Think about your grid. Think about efficient radii and repetition. But her bigger point sits above all of that: talk with someone who has real experience before you lock in your design. Timber is a different material from steel and concrete, and it changes how you take the very first step. Maybe in 20 years every school will teach it and this conversation won't be necessary. Right now, the shortcut is borrowed expertise.

Dave's version: involve your producer. Art Massif keeps a full pre-construction team ready to pick up the phone at any stage of a project, and they'd rather invest time educating a design team early than watch anyone rework plans mid-project against a budget and schedule.

And when the doubts start arriving in meetings, remember the phrase. Architects are allowed to ask for what they want.

If you're exploring mass timber for your own projects, your going to need the team, knowledge and connections to make it successful.

👉 Come meet the Art Massif team and many of North America's leading architects, engineers, builders and manufacturers at the Mass Timber Group Summit.

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Hybrid mass timber is often the smarter structural choice. But it comes with a trade-off most teams just accept. The exposed steel beam. The run of ductwork overhead. A finished building that doesn't quite look like the one in the renderings. You wanted all wood. You got wood plus everything you had to leave showing.

Mike Lipke has spent over a decade making sure you don't have to accept that. He's the president and owner of TorZo Surfaces, the only U.S. manufacturer of Thin CLT panels. Thin sheets of cross laminated timber, available in almost any species, made from new material or remanufactured scrap. He's been making them since 2011, well before most people in the U.S. had heard of CLT.

In this piece Mike breaks down what Thin CLT actually is, the problems it solves on a jobsite, how it gets made from both new wood and salvaged material, and what the demand for it says about where mass timber is headed.

This article is just one part of the newsletter where we cover who and what’s shaping the mass timber industry.

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What Thin CLT Is and What It Solves

Thin CLT is a 4x8’ cross laminated timber panel ¾” thick (standard, they can make custom sizes too). It's designed that way to be familiar with crews used to working in standard plywood and OSB dimensions.

Most of the time, the job is cladding. In a mass timber building, that usually means covering up something that isn't wood. A steel beam. Concrete. Mechanical and HVAC ducting. You wrap it in a panel so it looks like mass timber. Most commonly, Mike sees it used as a beam wrap.

A lot of mass timber buildings put a steel beam in here and there, and the team wants it gone. Covered. Looking like the rest of the wood. Normally, that means using a different wood product (and mismatched look), or a full-sized mass timber piece that comes with a bigger price tag. But, with Thin CLT, you don't need the full-sized panel to maintain the consistent aesthetic.

On a big field nobody sees the edge of a panel in the middle of that wall, nor is it carrying any sizable load. There's no reason to pay for the structurally sized members there.

Instead, Mike laminates the exact same species, grade and finished material onto a cheaper backer, getting the exact same look, and saving the money. The whole wall looks like the same CLT construction as the main structure, even when most of it isn't.

How It's Made: New Wood and Salvaged Scrap

The new-wood process starts with standard dimension lumber. Two by fours, two by sixes, any species. Torzo re-saws it into thin layers, glues the strips into sheets, then laminates the sheets together in a normal 3-layer CLT pattern to make the panel.

You might be thinking, why not just use a single layer of the face material? In a perfect world, or with a perfect material, that would work. The problem is that wood isn’t perfect.

It moves. It drys. Bends. Warps. And twists. And then, no 2 pieces are alike. They do all that in different ways, times, and cycles. Using just the face material in a single layer would give you a very unstable material. Using multiple layers and putting the more “spirited” pieces in the middle stabilizes and distributes all that action across the panel and keeps it stable.

So when you want a “clear” panel look (no knots, checks, decolorization)  you can get a perfectly clear face while the knottier material goes inside (the middle) where nobody sees it. The face (and/or the back) match what the customer wants. And nothing gets wasted.

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Office buildings in major U.S. metros are sitting at roughly 20% vacancy. Data centers? Less than 1%. Right now, the U.S. is building data centers at a pace the construction industry has never seen, and no other commercial real estate category is close.

For the mass timber world, that's a real opportunity. The carbon math is there. Mass timber runs roughly 35 to 40% less embodied carbon than steel and up to 60 to 70% less than concrete. The buildings themselves run 500,000 to a million-plus square feet apiece. And the speed advantage of prefabricated mass timber lines up with one of the things data center owners need most: a lot of square footage built fast.

Erik Barth, AIA is one of the people figuring out what doing this well actually looks like. He's a Senior Associate at Gensler in Boston and leads the firm's Mass Timber Collaborative, a team that's been working on mass timber projects for roughly seven years. In this piece, Erik walks through where mass timber fits in the data center boom, why Type III construction has become the sweet spot, and how to design a building today that doesn't end up half-empty in 2040 for the same reasons a lot of office towers are now.

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Where Mass Timber Fits in the Data Center Boom

The demand picture for data centers is unlike anything else in commercial real estate. Computing power keeps growing, and that power needs a physical home. Storage and processing have to live somewhere, and they have to be close enough to power infrastructure and fiber to actually work.

That's why data center location is so constrained. Three factors have to overlap: serious power infrastructure, access to fiber cable, and affordable land. Where all three line up, you get a viable site. Most of the time that's outside major urban cores, which is why data center clusters form in specific regions rather than spreading evenly across the country.

Most of these buildings are one story, sometimes two.

Can the Structure Handle It?

One question that comes up with mass timber and data centers is whether the structure can handle the weight of high-density equipment. Erik's experience is that GPU and CPU loads are the defining structural driver, not the cooling system. His team solved for that with a five-ply CLT panel on a steel primary system, with a topping slab. That assembly handled the load comfortably for the projects they've worked on.

A single-story building is structurally simpler. You're basically putting a roof on a slab-on-grade. Two stories adds efficiency by stacking colos (colocations, the server rack groupings) but raises the structural complexity. Either configuration works for mass timber, depending on the site and the program.

The pitch for mass timber inside that program comes down to two things. First, the sustainability and biophilia story is real. Lower embodied carbon than steel or concrete, a positive economic impact for rural forestry communities, and a natural material that the operations staff inside the building actually get to be around. People don't always think about data center occupants because the buildings exist to house equipment. But these facilities need staff to monitor that equipment around the clock. You don't turn a data center off. The people working in them benefit from being around wood, especially over long shifts.

Second is speed. Mass timber gets prefabricated off-site and assembled on-site with smaller crews and shorter timelines than steel or concrete. For a building type that has to come online fast, that's a structural advantage in two senses of the word. The construction itself is also faster, lighter, and quieter, which makes mass timber a better neighbor in the communities where these buildings go up.

The case for mass timber in data centers is clear. The harder question is how to actually permit one.

The Code Path: Why Type III, Not Type IV

Code is where data centers get complicated. The scale alone is a challenge. You're talking about 500,000 to a million-plus square feet under one roof, with massive air handling, heavy equipment, and high power loads. Historically, data centers have been built as Type II construction.

When Erik's team started looking at mass timber for data centers, the obvious first instinct might have been the new Type IV subtypes that were written specifically for mass timber. In practice, Type IV created more problems than it solved.

The reason is air cooling. Most data centers running today use air-cooled systems, which require open plenum space for return air. Type IV doesn't allow a concealed plenum without fireproofing, which eliminates much of the efficiency that makes mass timber worth specifying in the first place. So Type IV and air-cooled data centers don't play well together.

Type III turned out to be the sweet spot. The primary structure doesn't need to be fire rated, which creates efficiency for connections, member sizing, and overall cost. The plenum space stays open. And the team was able to get the necessary square footage through a code variance.

Staying Ahead of a Moving Target

Data center technology is changing fast, and code is changing with it. Air cooling is the norm today, but liquid cooling is coming. Battery storage layouts are evolving, with some buildings centralizing battery rooms and others distributing them across the facility. Every one of those shifts has code implications for ratings, separations, and structural approach.

Erik's advice: stay involved in the discussions happening at the International Code Council (ICC). Don't get caught off-guard by updates. A static code strategy isn't going to hold up across a technology cycle this short.

The code path gets the building built. The next question is whether it still works ten years from now.

Designing for What Comes Next

There's a popular intuition that data centers are a temporary problem. The thinking goes: equipment keeps getting more efficient, so the buildings should eventually shrink or disappear. Moore's Law and all that.

Erik isn't seeing that on the ground. Yes, individual chips are getting more efficient per unit of volume. But the demand for both storage and processing keeps outrunning the efficiency gains, especially with AI. The support equipment around the racks isn't shrinking. So even as the technology itself gets better, the buildings aren't going away. They're just packing more capability into the same footprint.

That changes what future-proofing looks like. The primary job is designing the building to keep working as a data center as the equipment inside it evolves. Beyond that, there's a secondary benefit: a well-designed mass timber shell gives you optionality you don't get with other materials.

Mass timber helps with that in two ways. The first is end-of-life. Mass timber can be disassembled in ways that steel and concrete can't, which means materials can be reused if the building eventually does come down. The second is the building shell itself. A large structural grid and tall ceilings give you a clean, open shelf. Even within the strong design constraints of a data center program, that shell can support a wide range of future uses if the technology eventually shifts to something the building wasn't originally designed for.

Designing for the unknown takes discipline. The other half of getting this right is committing to mass timber from the start.

Commit Early or Don’t Commit

Erik's advice for owners and developers considering a mass timber data center comes back to one thing.

"It's important to commit to it up front. The sooner you can fully commit to a mass timber building and not look back, the more successful it's going to be and the more you'll be able to realize the efficiency that's inherent to the material."

Parallel costing and structural comparisons have their place. But the projects Erik has seen succeed have a team that picked the material, locked it in, and stopped re-evaluating it. The efficiency mass timber offers, in speed, in carbon, in build quality, only shows up when the team designs around the material from day one.

The early data center projects being built in mass timber today are proving the structural and operational case. The next phase is normalizing it. As more of these buildings come online, the precedent gets stronger, and the question shifts from “can mass timber work for a data center” to “why wouldn’t you build one this way.”

If you're exploring mass timber for your own projects, one of the first questions is often: who actually makes the materials?

To help with that, we created a Mass Timber Producer Map featuring 39 North American producers and fabricators. You can explore manufacturers near your project, see the products they produce, visit their websites, and connect directly with them.

👉  Get access to the Mass Timber Producer Map by joining our newsletter!

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Most project teams don't know how to have the mass timber conversation with a skeptical fire department. And even when they do, it usually goes wrong, because by the time the meeting happens, it's too late to matter.

Erich Roden, retired Deputy Chief of the Milwaukee Fire Department and founder of Murphy Roden Group, took a meeting with the project team behind the Ascent (world’s tallest mass timber building) and has spent the years since walking other departments through that process.

Mason Brandt, P.E., President and Principal Engineer of WoodCore Engineering joins to bring the designers perspective to the table. He explains where, why and how to put mass timbers together to meet fire code AND give confidence to fire departments.

Between them, they cover where fire service skepticism comes from, what mass timber actually has to do at the connection and member level, what the Ascent project taught everyone involved, and what fire departments in unfamiliar markets need to see before they sign off.

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Where the Distrust Comes From

The fire service's caution around wood construction isn't abstract. It traces to specific fires, specific deaths, and specific lessons that got passed across generations of departments. On August 2, 1978, 6 firefighters died at the Waldbaum's Supermarket fire in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, when a bowstring wood truss roof collapsed during a renovation fire. Twelve firefighters fell through the roof when the center section gave way; 6 made it out. A decade later, on July 1, 1988, 5 firefighters died at the Hackensack Ford fire in New Jersey when another bowstring truss roof collapsed. The adage that grew out of those fires, "don't trust the truss," is still being repeated in the fire service today.

That caution expanded as the residential industry shifted in the 1970s to light frame wood products. Departments started losing firefighters to floors that collapsed faster than expected. The wood industry, in the fire service's view, had a track record. Mass timber arrived carrying that legacy, even though the materials, the engineering, and the testing behind it look nothing like what came before.

Erich points to a parallel that gets missed. Type IV buildings, the post-industrial heavy timber type common in cities like Milwaukee, do not collapse in fires. The standard refrain from firefighters after a five-alarm fire in one of those buildings is some version of "I can't believe what a shellacking that building took, and it's still standing." The dimensional size of the lumber is doing the work. Those stories don't make the textbooks or the peer-reviewed journals, so the lesson never gets institutionalized inside the fire service.

Most firefighters working today inherited the distrust from older generations and are weighing mass timber against the lightweight construction era, not the heavy timber one.

Closing that gap means showing fire departments what mass timber actually does under fire conditions, starting with how the system holds itself together.

How Firefighters Look at Buildings

Mason brings up a common misconception. Concrete and steel don't burn, but that's not the same as "concrete and steel buildings don't fail in fires."

The three primary structural materials behave differently in a fire. Steel loses strength as it heats, elongating at high temperatures, which pushes outward on connections and walls and destabilizes the structure from the inside. Concrete spalls when superheated water inside the slab boils, exposing the rebar, which then heats and elongates the same way. Wood does neither. It loses section at a predictable rate (roughly 1 inch per hour), doesn't push walls outward, and starts extinguishing itself once the apartment contents are out.

What gives a fire department confidence to keep crews inside a mass timber structure comes down to a few things. Concrete stairwells give fire service teams confidence because it’s the beachhead they launch operations from. Sprinkler systems doing the lion's share of the work before crews even arrive. Connections without exposed steel, where openings and gaps in steel hardware are sealed up and protected from direct fire attack. And firefighting tactics that don't have to change.

When a fire department arrives at a fire, they don't think in material categories. They think in failure modes. What’s the building going to do as the fire burns? Where can my crew safely operate? What’s the sequence I'm watching for that tells me to pull out?

That’s the lens a fire department evaluates a structure through. It’s also the lens designers need to design through if they want a fire department's confidence.

For designers, the takeaway runs through every detail. Build for predictability. Detail connections that behave the way the rating says they will. Don't put exposed steel where it becomes the failure point. Provide cast-in-place stairwells where firefighters need them. The fire department's job is to understand the building as it burns. The design team's job is to make the building easy to read.

The performance is one thing. The Ascent project showed what it takes to get a fire department comfortable enough to approve it.

The Ascent Strategy

Erich calls it a Cinderella story. He was a battalion chief at the time. The fire chief's secretary asked him to come downtown. A local developer, New Land Enterprises, was proposing a 23-story wood building on one of Milwaukee's busiest avenues. The chief had questions and wanted Erich to handle them.

The first surprise came at the initial project meeting in the fall of 2018. The room had New Land, the architect (Jason Korb of Korb Architects), the structural engineering team (Thornton Tomasetti), and the rest of the design and approvals teams. The fire department had been pulled in, but not to sign off on a finished package. Partway through the meeting, Erich realized the building wasn't permitted yet. The team wasn't there to walk the fire department through a project that was already approved. They were there to hear the fire department's concerns before they got started.

That was the opposite of how those meetings normally go. The standard pattern is the fire department comes in at the end. New Land Enterprises flipped that. They wanted to know what the fire department was worried about, what they wanted to see during construction, and what they wanted in the final building. Erich raised the structure-during-construction concerns: sealing the building four floors below the active level, no debris, no smoking or grilling on site. New Land Enterprises agreed to all of it.

The second surprise was the testing. The developer needed variances to exceed the 2015 IBC, which Milwaukee was operating under at the time. The Ascent's design exceeded the code by a wide margin, so performance-based testing was the path. The Forest Products Lab in Madison ran the test. The team put one of the mass timber slated for the project into a furnace and ran it at 3,000°F for three hours. When they pulled it out and chipped away the char layer, the timber retained its structural integrity. Erich watched through the sight glass.

The trade New Land Enterprises offered to get the variance package signed was straightforward. Gypcrete in the public hallways, which firefighters use as a beachhead during operations. In return, two more stories. The building landed at 25.

The third surprise was construction. The Developer and the contractor (C.D. Smith) offered the fire department unlimited site visits. By the time the project finished, most of the firefighters in the city's 36 firehouses had been through it.

The result Erich points back to most often isn't the building itself. It's the conversion. The standard line from his crews after a tour was some version of "Hey chief, you know how much fire it would take to burn this amount of wood down?"

That sound bite, repeated across firehouses, did more for the fire service's view of mass timber in Milwaukee than any peer-reviewed paper could have.

What worked at Ascent is starting to translate to other markets, but the conversation looks different in cities that don't have a project like the Ascent yet.

Going East

Mason and his team are seeing roughly two to three times the project pipeline on the East Coast as on the West Coast. States with deep timber histories like Maine, New York, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Virginia are showing serious project interest, along with Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota in the Great Lakes region.

The fire service in those markets is moving too. Erich points to FDNY as the bellwether. A few years ago, when he gave a lecture with the head of buildings for New York City, the fire department's posture was a flat no. Not in my backyard. The concern wasn't ignorance about the material though. It was the institutional risk of being the official who signed off on a tall mass timber building in midtown Manhattan or downtown Brooklyn. The answer was no.

That’s changed. The most recent issue of WNYF, the FDNY's trade magazine, ran a mass timber piece that walks through what the buildings are, where the code is heading, and why the city is now involved in the research and code-writing for it. Erich's view is that as FDNY goes, the rest of the fire service follows. With the largest fire service in the country putting eyes on mass timber and engaging with the industry, the institutional posture downstream of that decision tends to follow.

For developers and design teams entering markets where the local fire department hasn't seen a mass timber project before, the strategy is pretty straightforward.

Bring the fire department in early, in the concept phase. Share the test data. Tell them which municipalities have approved similar buildings and offer to put them in touch. Walk through the firefighting operations and confirm that nothing about how their crews fight a fire in a tall mass timber high-rise is different from how they fight one in a Type IA building.  And invite the fire department onto the site during construction so their members get more comfortable with the system and products.

Mason adds the practical framing for why early engagement matters from a project standpoint. A developer who builds and flips moves on. The architect and engineer move on. The fire department is left with whatever has been built for the next 30 to 50 years. When fire departments get pulled in at the end, the relationship is adversarial by default. The dollars are committed and the design done. Bringing them in at concept gives them a chance to alleviate concerns before the project is shaped, which gets them to a productive role on the team rather than a defensive one.

The whole approach hinges on a single line Erich keeps coming back to.

What Fire Departments Need

The fire service's job isn't to stand in the way of economic development. It's to make sure the codes are enforced, the buildings are understood, and the firefighters who'll respond to the next call have what they need to do their work safely. Mass timber clears that bar. The buildings that have been built, the testing that's been run, and the projects like Ascent that pulled the fire department in early are the proof.

The instructions for any developer or design team stepping into a new market are short. Bring the fire department in early. Show them the data. Walk them through the building. Ask what they want to see. Let them ask their questions. The conversation goes faster than most people expect.

Erich's framing for the whole thing is one line.

"We're not gatekeepers. We can be convinced that these buildings are safe. Just show us and we'll understand."

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