Kengo Kuma, who in 2021 was named by Time Magazine the world’s most influential architect, has headlined the second day of the International Mass Timber Conference in Portland, Oregon — his first appearance at the world’s largest mass timber event. Wood Central understands Kuma’s address drew on a career spent redefining the relationship between architecture, nature, and built form — placing timber at the centre of some of the world’s most significant construction projects across three continents.
Kuma’s work rests on the argument that natural materials — timber chief among them — carry a weight that concrete and steel cannot replicate. His designs, described by critics as buildings that breathe, draw on Japan’s centuries-old woodworking traditions and apply them at scales ranging from small cultural pavilions to Olympic stadiums.
Responsible for designing the 68,000-seat Tokyo National Stadium — the first major Olympic stadium in decades built with timber as a structural material — Kuma’s work saw more than 20,000 cubic metres of timber sourced from all 47 of Japan’s prefectures used in the stadium, including the roof, which alone consumed more than 7,000 square metres of glulam. His studio has since extended its timber work, securing the Grand Prize in the Tokyo Metropolitan Government’s Wood City Tokyo Model Architecture Awards for the AEAJ Green Terrace — a three-storey hybrid building clad in SGEC- and PEFC-certified cedar and cypress from Japan’s southern forests.
Now in its tenth year, the conference has drawn more than 3,000 delegates and more than 200 exhibitors to Portland — a record for the event. Among those attending is Peter Blair, director of Sydney-based timber engineering consultancy Structured Project Management, who is on the conference floor showcasing a Loggo demonstration purpose-built for the US market — one of more than a dozen Australians in Portland for the four-day event.
Kuma’s appearance anchors a multi-pronged keynote program that will see executives from Amazon and Meta close the conference with a presentation addressing the role of mass timber in building the next generation of data centres. Wood Central understands both will will detail how their long-term climate commitments and sustainable materials strategies are reshaping timber demand across their global facilities, campuses, and supply chains.
That session follows Wood Central’s reporting on mass timber’s growing foothold in hyperscale construction — including the prefabricated turnkey systems detailed in Faster, Lighter, Greener: Timber’s Turnkey Solution for Data Centres — and the accelerating shift by big tech towards wood-based facilities, as covered in Meta to Build its Data Centres using Timber as Strong as Steel.
- For more coverage from the conference, click here for Wood Central’s wrap-up from the first day of the conference.
