“This studio gave us the opportunity to bring to cross-laminated timber (CLT) what steel and concrete already benefit from: boundlessness.” A good write-up of a spring 2020 Harvard GSD studio: “Mass Timber and the Scandinavian Effect,” exploring CLT within “questions of cultural instigation and identity alongside the material’s physical properties.” For me, not quite enough cultural questioning here—not least the appropriation of ‘Scandinavia’, where most building remains concrete and steel—but this is a lovely studio nonetheless. The future city is timber, after all.

With Mass Timber and the Scandinavian Effect, Jennifer Bonner and Hanif Kara speculate how wood…