Which One makes Sense?The Mass timber vs. stick-frame dilemma is a slam dunk. Check the two photos below! Our medieval Scandinavian ancestors left us a heirloom renewable building technique that could prevent and protect us from
climate change. Greedy developers (think Levittown) follow a short-lived, false-front technique that could lay waste to it. Mass Timber homes are the ones you run to, to escape the storm. Stick-frame developments require massive evacuations. MT is renewable material that cleans the air as it grows, vs SF toxic particle board, water-logged fiberglass, and sheetrock mush that go into our landfills, and eventually into our oceans. Talk about economy- your heirs would have to build and demolish 19 fuel-hungry stick-frame houses in the life of one solar mass timber home, more if they live in a coastal or flood prone area.
Mass Timber homes have sheltered humanity, successfully, for more than a thousand years. From heat and cold, earthquake, and vicious storms. New research has improved the energy-efficiency, the joinery, the hardware, and the speed of building. No skilled timber carpenters in your neighborhood? Not a problem, they are in our climate controlled factory working with precision power tools. Expect far more than a thousand years with the modern Mass Timber home.
Until recently, the hold-back has been- no one has heard of mass timber homes. Someone building a new house doesn’t even know that is an option in America. This is changing, as hundreds of mass timber buildings, some as tall as 85 stories, are in design. Search “mass timber” to read about them, and the excitement over this building method. Soon they will be common, and the stick frame house will be a thing of the past- quickly, due to violent weather and their inherent short life. When a house is going to last a thousand years certain things must be considered, that you don’t have to worry about in today’s “life-of-the-mortgage” homes. They must heat and cool themselves without fuel- there won’t be any. They will face more violent storms, hurricanes, tornadoes, and earthquakes, because we are talking about a much longer period-of-time. For that same thousand years, the holy-grail of architecture has been a house that heats and cools itself. Now we have it, made possible by a new form of energy; Enertia®- energy from a-shift-in-time. Only recently was “100% renewable materials” added to the grail. But that was always the case with MT. We have brought the relatively new sciences of Nanotechnology (phase-change) and Biomimicry (our internal atmosphere) to our advanced award-winning version of mass timber construction. The mass timber Enertia® home is the house of the future.