Engineers specializing in cross-laminated timber (CLT) see its future less in boutique prototype towers, requiring case-by-case demonstrations for approval, than in a meat-and-potatoes mid-rise market. While, according to Colorado State University’s John van de Lindt, “some of those pioneering early CLT buildings are really almost like a partial R&D project in disguise,” he and colleagues predict that the field’s maturation depends on the incorporation of research-driven CLT standards into building codes. … “But if you want to go taller, especially [if] you want to go above 85 feet— that is currently IBC [International Building Code] for Type IV, heavy timber—then you have to do something else…a lot of testing to try to convince the local building-code officials.” He views CLT beyond about 20 stories skeptically, on economic grounds: “In my projects, I say it’s tall wood; it’s not high-rise wood.”