Nashville Latest City to Get Good with Wood

Nashville has become the latest municipality to embrace the movement to build large mass timber structures. It’s music to the ears of the lumber industry.

Joining cities and states around the country, Nashville city government has approved the construction of high-rise timber buildings, up to 18 stories. Known as Music City, Nashville had previously limited such construction to six-story maximums but will now allow taller buildings. It joins other cities like Denver and states including California, Washington, and Oregon in permitting taller mass timber buildings. These follow guidelines from the 2021 International Building Code which laid out rules on such construction.

Advocates of mass timber buildings point out that they have a smaller carbon footprint than their concrete or steel framed counterparts and also will store carbon in their structures themselves over the course of their lifetimes.

Recent mass timber structures have been announced or are under construction in several cities in the U.S., including Atlanta and Portland, OR while Europe has been even further ahead in the movement with an entire neighborhood being built out of mass timber in a city in Sweden.

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