MAINE MONITOR • January 15, 2023
It is estimated that the “built environment” — heating and lighting our homes, manufacturing the materials to build them — generates 40% of annual global CO2 emissions. Rethinking the way we build will be vital to slowing carbon emissions and staving off the most catastrophic effects of a warmer world. LEVER Architecture, the firm that won a $100 million bid to design a campus expansion for the Portland Museum of Art, is proposing to construct a soaring new wing primarily from mass timber, short for “massive timber.” Mass timber offers an attractive alternative for developers of large buildings, because rather than generating greenhouse gases during its production (like steel and concrete), trees store carbon while they’re growing and after they’ve been cut down. The timber panels are also faster to assemble and can also be cut precisely to size, which means less construction site waste. It’s also renewable.