After just seven months on site, work is nearly finished on a high-rise apartment building in Oakland, California that the developer calls the “tallest beamless mass plywood panel structure in the world”. The 19-storey tower in downtown Oakland will have 222 flats, a fifth of which will be affordable. The 1510 Webster Street project was developed and designed by Oakland-based oWOW, with assistance from Californian design firm DCI Engineers. oWOW is using what it calls “a unique mass-timber construction system” that allows it to “build high-quality housing in less time and at lower costs than our competitors”. It has already built three projects in the San Francisco Bay area, and has 600 more in construction or in the pipeline. The design began about a year-and-a-half ago, ground was broken in October 2022, and construction is expected to top out by the end of June.