From Forest to Frame: Building a Regionally-Sourced Southern Yellow Pine (SYP) Mass Timber Building in Georgia

619 Ponce, located in the historic Fourth Ward of Atlanta, Georgia, is a 114,000 square foot, four-story mass timber office and retail building currently under construction (will be complete in early 2024). The building is part of a larger master development that includes the historic Ponce City Market building, on what was formerly a surface parking lot. Since the parent company of the building’s developer is also an owner of Southern Yellow Pine (SYP) timberlands in Georgia, the opportunity to regionally source the timber to be used for the building presented itself. However, in comparison to the European mass timber industry, the Southeastern U.S. regional supply chain is much more fragmented. Typical for the region is a siloed series of steps between forest owners, managers, loggers, mills, mass timber fabricators, and finally, installers, without infrastructure in place to track specific timber through the various separate businesses that operate in each segment of the supply chain. This segmented supply chain drives up costs and complexity in comparison to vertically integrated mass timber markets in Canada and Europe. Due to the nature of the developer’s business model and ESG goals, there was interest in exploring the possibility of doing a regionally-sourced mass timber building. The embodied carbon reductions alongside supporting the economic growth of the local and regional mass timber industry were also major factors in the evaluation of the project’s feasibility. In 2021 via HB 355, the State of Georgia enacted an update to the 2004 GA Carbon Registry, expanding it to include building products and materials that can demonstrate carbon sequestration. Therefore, a market that previously relied on credits generated solely by land conservation, forestry, and agriculture now includes mass timber and carbon-infused concrete to generate new value.

https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.AIA.InterMaterialEco.23.27

Volume Editors
Caryn Brause & Chris Flint Chatto