I live in a ballon-framed house built in 1926. Coming up on 100 years and with reasonable maintenance there is no reason it won't last another 100. There are some terribly built wooden houses that will just rot away, but it's not that hard to do it right.
Wood as a building material when used properly can be incredibly resilient, especially with modern mass timber solutions rather than raw wood.
Agree. My first house was a wood-frame bungalow built near the prior turn of the century. As long as you don't get termites, and maintain the roof and siding so you don't have water leaking in, wood houses will last basically forever, or at least on the order of 100 years.
Modern mass timber more than corrects that problem. It does a fantastic job using fast growing, new growth lumber to produce highly precise parts that are factory produced exactly to spec to nearly eliminate waste.
Highly precise lumber parts sounds like an oxymoron. The standard assumption for wood is that it's only straight while it's being cut. If they've invented fix for that, it's not gonna be the wood that they're using that does it, but some extra processing to make like a particle board or something
Modern mass timber has advanced a long way beyond cheap particle board. Read up on cross laminated timber. Manufactured and cut exactly to size and often requires no cutting on site.
Laminated strand is certainly under the heading of mass timber, but I’m referring more to cross laminated timber (CLT). It still uses resin, but with much more wood it doesn’t suffer from the sort of rot and de-laminating problems OSB has, but it’s still highly engineered and highly precise like LSL.
Laminated veneer lumber (LVL) has become common in North America for beams and joists. CLT uses even larger components and is even more flexible. It’s just starting to be used but you can build everything from a house to 20 storey buildings.
Wood as a building material when used properly can be incredibly resilient, especially with modern mass timber solutions rather than raw wood.