I can smell the fragrance of forest. In this case it?s emanating from some planks of softwood attached to a lobby ceiling at T3, an office building in downtown Minneapolis. A few steps further in, a stair made of edge-laminated veneer lumber rises into the corner, past a photographic mural of a coniferous forest.
Its developer?Houston, Texas-based Hines?has named it T3, for ?timber, transit and technology,? and all of this woodiness, real and symbolic, indicates the building?s raison d?être. Its main distinction is the mass timber framework that supports the bulk of its 220,000 square feet. For its designer, Michael Green Architecture (MGA) of Vancouver  together with architect-of-record DLR Group of Minneapolis, T3 represents the future of engineered wood. A post on Dezeen claimed that Michael Green ?has pushed the limits of the material with his latest project.? The building is actually hybrid; the exterior facades of the building are clad in weathering steel, and the first floor is conventional concrete, as is the core of the seven-storey building. There is no structural timber to see until you enter the tenant floors above, and even the particular technologies employed there?nail laminated timber (NLT) and glue-laminated timber?are not new. So the building doesn?t live up to that breathless Dezeen billing, which, like much of the current discourse on wood, overhypes the material?s current possibilities.
T3. Photo by Ema Peter
Yet T3 is an important building?not becaus...