How would Gehry do it? What we forget when we talk about “Tall Timber”

Frank Gehry embraced the messiness of humanity and spoke of architecture as a statement about people. Amidst a mass-timber arms race, we should focus on building community, not performance metrics.

We are in a mass-timber arms race. If we’re not careful, we reduce our architecture—and every other timber project—to a structural stunt plus a carbon statistic. Most architects are stuck in this dilemma, fixated on statistics and performance-related acronyms and equations while forgetting to tell the story of a building’s true purpose: the people. We n…