We just moved into our new office space in what is supposedly the largest timber office building in the US [0]. In the interior, nearly all the wood is exposed and it looks really cool.

The outside of the building is sheathed in some sort of metal, I presume to protect the wood, but they even did a good job of making the metal look cool too.

[0]: http://www.t3northloop.com/

Very cool!

Do you have any pictures to share? I saw a bunch of them on the site but they all look like professionally photographed glamour shots.

What does it actually look like?

As a person replacing a 130 year old sill plate, cover up structural wood. Termites and water can destroy it.

If it's covered, how can you tell when there's damage?

We recently had seismic plywood shear walls installed in our soft story garage, holding up our 2 stories of living space. A previous owner actually had shear walls installed in 1992, after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. But the '92 retrofit used the wrong grade of plywood, and used screws instead of nails. Screws have poor shear strength. The panels were basically useless for seismic safety and had to be replaced.

The 90-year-old redwood studs looked surprisingly pristine. But one of the studs had some kind of termite or fungal damage. The entire stud, top to bottom, basically disintegrated in your hands; but everything else was in perfect shape, including the sills. There were no outward signs of this at all--neither on the stud itself, on adjacent studs, nor the top or bottom sill plates. It was bizarre. And it would have gone totally unnoticed and maybe even spread, completely undetected, had the old panels not been removed.

The shear walls weren't the only things improperly installed. The 1992 foundation bolts didn't use adequately sized washers, so with enough movement the bolt heads would have ripped through the sill plate. Again, this was hidden behind the wall panels.

I grew up in Florida trailer parks. To me anything covered is hiding something--cockroaches, termites, substandard construction. Were there no need for the shear walls, I'd much prefer to have exposed studs and a completely exposed sill plate, at least in the garage.

Within a building envelope, if you have water or termite ingress you're already hosed and a layer of paint or gypsum isn't going to save you.

The cross-laminated timbers aren't going to be the first thing to rot. In a traditional wood framed building you're looking at the sill plates, the sheathing, perhaps the end of the joists. The high-rise construction shown in the article seems to avoid most of that - the SIPs don't appear to use much wood except the facade.