Arkansas foresters, architects, sawmill operators, contractors and developers are looking to the skies -- and skyscrapers -- as a market for the state's 18 million acres of timberland.
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Peter MacKeith, dean of the University of Arkansas Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design, has been talking up nature's skyscrapers -- trees -- as the potential building block of tall, wood buildings almost from the day he arrived on the Fayetteville campus two years ago.
"One question I pose to myself, my students, my faculty and to anybody who will listen is, 'How can we be of value to an entire state?'" MacKeith said. "I want my students to study all the resources of a state, the geology of a state. Arkansas is 60 percent forestland. What does it mean to a school of architecture and design to be in a state that is 60 percent covered in forests?"
MacKeith's question comes at a time when the Arkansas timber industry that suffered during the 2007-2009 recession and collapse of the homebuilding industry has yet to fully rebound.
Philip Tappe, dean of the University of Arkansas at Monticello's School of Forestry, said Arkansas has "an abundance of timber ... certainly growing more each year than we are cutting, and we've been doing that for several years. We've got to have new markets."
Since 1978, the state has developed a surplus of 360 million tons of standing timber, a glut that is growing by nearly 10 million tons a year, said Matthew Pelkki, a UAM forestry professor. With supply high, timber prices are low and forests largely go uncut.
Along with being unrealized income for landowners and loggers, the maturing trees are a threat.
"Forests and trees are like people," Tappe said. "You and I get older, we see more health problems so we'll get a doctor. Our forests need a kind of doctor who will manage them effectively. If we're not utilizing our forests, they will increase in density and become more susceptible to infestations like the southern pine beetle. They will be more threatened by storms and fires."
MacKeith is preaching the economic and environmental virtues of mass timber construction and cross laminated timber. He studied in Finland, on a Fulbright scholarship in 1990, and there he saw the use of mass timber construction and how a country of 5 million people that is 70 percent forested uses its resources.
Cross laminated timber, or CLT, involves gluing together layers of boards, such as two-by-fours, at 90-degree angles and pressing them into one large panel of wood of up to 10 feet by 40 feet and up to a foot thick. Openings for doorways and windows are cut into panels as called for in the design plan. Panels also become sections of interior and exterior walls, ceilings, roofs and floors. They're transported to the building site, hoisted into place by cranes and secured by metal brackets, bolts and long screws, one floor after another.
MacKeith not long ago got the ear of Gov. Asa Hutchinson. The governor responded by releasing $10,000 from the state emergency fund to pay for an invitation-only cross laminated timber conference, set for Friday at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. "I asked the governor for two things: a date on his calendar and to let the school be an ecumenical broker with architects, loggers, developers, conservationists, contractors, designers," MacKeith said. About 50 people representing those trades and professions are expected to attend.
"It's not about ideology," MacKeith said. "It's about what could be good for the state. This could produce jobs. It could revitalize entire communities. It could reduce the surplus of timber that right now is so susceptible to environmental and natural hazards like fire and insects. It's an opportunity to take advantage of, or it's an accident waiting to happen."
Cross laminated timber and mass timber construction have been major components of buildings four stories and taller in Europe for more than 20 years, but the concept is relatively new in the United States.
One obstacle is building codes. Think Great Chicago Fire, 1871, when the Windy City was trying to outbuild New York, with wood as the predominant building material.
Supporters of cross laminated timber say it's safe and difficult to burn. Panels and columns will char on the outside but then serve as insulation for the rest of the wood. MacKeith noted the presence of tall, wooden buildings in London and proposed ones in New York. "Surely, New York City has an interest in fire safety," he said.
MacKeith's architecture school recently won a $249,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to study the potential for dormitories being made of cross laminated timber. "We'll build models of dormitories, and students, being students, will enjoy twisting them and banging on them to see if they will break," MacKeith said.
Other USDA grants have been used by researchers of cross laminated timber to test the material's tolerance of fire, earthquakes and noise.
Architects needed
Another obstacle could be opposition from the steel and concrete industries, long the beneficiaries of a century of constructing tall buildings.
"There's value in all resources, and certainly concrete and steel have theirs," MacKeith said. "I always want my students to consider all tools available to them. I do see a return of timber and wood to the tool kits of architects and designers, but it's nothing to the point held now by reinforced concrete and steel." He said any Arkansas cross laminated timber projects almost certainly will be hybrids, involving steel or concrete or both.
MacKeith and other proponents say wood buildings have a low carbon footprint. Trees remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through photosynthesis. After those trees are harvested, that carbon remains trapped in the wood panel, columns and beams of a cross laminated timber project. And, presumably, the harvester will replace the harvested trees with new plantings, continuing the cycle. Trees as little as 4 inches in diameter -- "junk" trees to loggers, unworthy of being harvested -- can be used for cross laminated timber.
Another obstacle: there's only one certified cross laminated timber manufacturing plant in the United States, at the D.R. Johnson lumber mill in Riddle, Ore. There are only two in Canada. The Oregon plant, which had already been producing glue-laminated beams, or glulam, was converted to produce laminated timber fairly easily, its owner has said. MacKeith said that conversion came about because of cooperation among state officials, loggers, the mill's owner and Oregon State University.
MacKeith said the best case would be to have a cross laminated timber manufacturer in Arkansas. It would defeat the environmental and economic benefits of the concept if the timber, after being cut here, had to be hauled hundreds of miles away to be processed, and then hauled back to the project site.
The biggest obstacle? The lack of a market.
"It's all in the eyes of the beholder in terms of how many millions of dollars you want to invest to make a product when you're not yet sure where the market for that product is," said Aubra Anthony, president and chief executive officer of Anthony Forest Products in El Dorado.
His company makes laminated wood products, but it would take a lot of money to convert his operations into a cross laminated timber plant, he said. "It's a great opportunity, it's great new technology, but until there's a market, who's going to bite off the capital investment necessary?" Anthony said.
The wood basket
He said he appreciated MacKeith for his efforts.
"I'm not trying to rain out a parade," Anthony said. "There's a challenging process we're going through, and Peter MacKeith is putting the intellectual leadership of the design community out front and center. Arkansas is a wood basket and we'll have a competitive and strategic advantage if we can figure out what to do with it."
MacKeith said he understands the uncertainty. "We are very early in the process, but I think we owe it to the people of this state to put the idea out there and let us all talk about it," he said.
For a couple of years, David Butler, a lawyer from Magnolia, was one of several owners of Arkansas Laminating, which specialized in constructing and marketing laminated arches, beams, columns and trusses, mostly of southern pine so prevalent in Arkansas forests.
Formerly known as Unit Structures, the company had been operating in Magnolia for decades. Butler and his fellow investors bought the company in 2012. It closed last September, never recovering from the 2007-2009 recession, Butler said. About 50 people lost their jobs. "That crash hit the laminating business across the country, and there was only a handful of us in it anyway," he said.
Butler said the firm's best work included some of the long, twisting, wooden laminated beams that are a key part of the architecture of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville. "That was one of my last memories, seeing those beams hauled out," Butler, now the prosecuting attorney for the state's 13th Judicial Circuit, said.
While Butler was largely unfamiliar with cross laminated timber technology, he said he had no doubt that he, his business partners and his employees, with an update in machinery, could have done the work. He said he hopes Arkansas is able to capitalize on the idea.
"We live in a pine forest and have more pine trees than can be marketed right now," Butler said. "For our economy's sake, we've got to be able to use our resources. Down here, our resources are our trees."
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