Buildings of roughly 10 stories are indeed practical when built of wood, and there are survivors from ancient times such as the Wooden Pagoda of Yingxian in China, nine stories and 220 feet tall. It was built from 54 different types of wood joints—not a single nail or screw.

The Bay State Mills in Lawrence, Mass., built about 1845, were long buildings 9 stories tall, buit of wood. The Claremont Hotel near Oakland, built 1906, has a tower reaching 10 stories. In the 1880s, several buildings in my own Chicago neighborhood of Printers Row reached eight stories with heavy timber construction, which came to be known as mill construction. But concerns about fire safety and development of more cost-effective structural steel and reinforced concrete framing relegated wood framing to inexpensive structures, typically limited by building codes to five stories. These, and ordinary houses, could use easily grown and milled dimensional lumber, while a highrise would need piers and beams of sizes not practical from natural forests. It now seems that concerns about fire safety, although obvious, may be misplaced: structural steel distorts and also fails in a fire, while timber beams naturally char only on the outside, maintaining structural integrity for some time. In any case, timber beams can be enclosed in gypsum board, terra cotta, or other fireproofing materials the same as structural steel.

The big change was technological: a combination of adhesives and pressure that allowed structural members to be created with wood’s fibrous strands oriented in different directions. Just as the development of plywood in the 1930s made possible new structural and formgiving uses, these modern manufactured structural members can be longer, of larger dimensions, and much stronger than beams milled directly from trees.