Latin America’s largest mass timber structure went up in seven months, and it is not a tower or a terminal but a shopping mall, built from more than 1,300 cubic metres of cross-laminated timber and glulam in the interior of São Paulo state. That is according to Urbem, the Brazilian manufacturer that supplied nearly 700 cubic metres of CLT and more than 600 cubic metres of glulam for the Open Mall Praça Pitiguari at Atibaia, 64 kilometres from the São Paulo capital.
Every panel, beam and column came off the production line, cut to size from certified plantation pinus, craned into place by Timbau Estruturas without a structural concrete pour. The timber is up to five times lighter than concrete, shrinking the foundations under the 7,000 square metre structure, which sits on a 46,000 square metre site beside Itapetinga State Park.
“It was possible to eliminate more than 900 tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere,” said Ana Belizário, Urbem’s commercial director, who called the project an inspiring model for a property market chasing net zero. The figure counts both the emissions avoided by displacing concrete and steel and the carbon stored in the structure for the life of the building.
São Paulo practice Todescan & Siciliano designed the precinct as an open plaza rather than a sealed box, with long, clear spans, cross-ventilation, and daylight standing in for mechanical systems. “We designed Praça Pitiguari to be a space where architecture and nature dialogue,” said architect Marcelo Todescan, whose exposed timber frame shares the site with a dancing fountain show billed as Brazil’s largest.
The mall caps a run of Urbem projects that now stretches from a mass timber McDonald’s near Avenida Paulista to the Dengo chocolate flagship, Brazil’s first timber high-rise, and São Paulo’s first public buildings in engineered timber at Parque do Carmo and Parque Morumbi Sul. Contracts now run across São Paulo, Minas Gerais, Paraná, Rio Grande do Sul and Bahia, with the company’s first projects underway in Paraguay.
Capacity is not the constraint; Urbem’s plant at Almirante Tamandaré opened in late 2022 to produce 100,000 cubic metres of CLT and glulam a year, yet turned out 4,000 cubic metres in 2024. Praça Pitiguari alone swallowed one-third of a year’s national output, whilst Brazil’s 9.5 million hectares of plantation forest, heavy with slash and loblolly pine within trucking distance of the Paraná plant, wait on the demand side to catch up.
Belizário told the AJ Climate Champions podcast in December that Brazil’s mass timber movement is burgeoning and increasingly confident, a shift Wood Central covered in its Global South feature, and Yale School of the Environment research finds CLT and glulam could cut up to 39 gigatonnes of carbon from urban buildings by 2100 if adoption reaches 30 to 60 per cent of new construction. Urbem grew production 50 per cent in 2024 and plans to double it again, a bet that developers will read Atibaia the way retail reads everything: seven months to trading is the fastest structure money can buy, and this one grew on a plantation.
