Intro Columbus topped out on 8 September, a year to the day after crews broke ground and roughly ten weeks ahead of the November target. At 13 stories and 158 feet, DLR Group’s project fact sheet calls it the tallest mass timber student housing building in the United States. That claim comes from the design team’s own fact sheet, with no independent registry cited, so treat it accordingly.
What 44 CLT panels a day buys you
The frame is glulam columns and beams with cross-laminated timber panels, and the erection numbers are the story. Elford Construction put up two and a half floors every two to three weeks, installing 44 CLT panels a day across a 242,000-square-foot building that will hold 186 units when it opens in 2027.
“The erection went about as smoothly as you could ask for,” said Elford superintendent Shane Warner. “We had a great team, a tight sequence, and a lot of people who knew exactly where they needed to be.”
That’s the whole mass timber argument in one sentence. The panels arrive cut, the sequence is fixed, and the trade that follows doesn’t wait for a cure. Because topping out landed early, crews have already started interior framing, MEP rough-in and exterior wall panel and window installation on the lower floors, which is time the schedule didn’t budget for.
The carbon number and where it comes from
DLR Group states the structure sequesters 1,128 metric tons of carbon relative to a steel-and-concrete design. That’s a designer-calculated comparison against an unspecified baseline, with no third-party life cycle assessment cited. The 10-weeks-early figure and the productivity rates are likewise self-reported by the project team. None of that makes them wrong; it makes them claims rather than findings.
The timber came from Alabama, supplied by SmartLam North America out of Dothan, which matters more than it sounds. Domestic sourcing on a domestic tariff schedule is currently the difference between a mass timber budget that holds and one that doesn’t.
Why this lands now
Timber is having a moment for unromantic reasons. Skanska executives said in a webinar last week that steel prices are up 25% year over year and steel lead times have more than doubled to 55 weeks, and that data center developers have started asking about timber as a way around it. We covered that shift in more detail here.
Columbus is the version of that argument with a completion date attached. Forefront Structural Engineers did the structure, Coastal Ridge will manage the building, and the whole thing sits at 9th and High, a few minutes’ walk from Ohio State. The next question is whether anyone repeats the schedule on a job where the timber doesn’t ship from 700 miles away.