Dalston Lane is currently the world’s largest building constructed with Cross-laminated timber (CLT), the fancy new building material that is having its moment. There are so many reasons to love the stuff; it looks beautiful, it stores carbon, it is made from a renewable resource. Who would have thought that the reasons CLT pioneers Waugh Thistleton used the stuff was that it was cheap and fast. But it’s true; the first CLT tower, Murray Grove, only got approved by the developer when they could prove that it would cost less overall than a standard building. They buried the stuff in drywall because who would want to live in a wood tower? Anthony Thistleton, speaking in Toronto at the Wood Solutions Fair, explained that the reasons for using CLT are prosaic: it is a lot lighter.