On May 9, a 10-story tower was deliberately shaken with forces equal to a magnitude 6.7 earthquake, followed, minutes later, by the equivalent of a 7.7 quake. Designed by Portland, Oregon– and Los Angeles–based LEVER Architecture, in collaboration with several university and industry partners, the structure swayed and rattled under the severe stress—but then it instantly sprang back to its original vertical position, apparently unscathed. The building—which had been constructed, at a cost between $3 and $4 million, specifically to test and demonstrate the seismic resiliency of mass timber—is the centerpiece of the TallWood Project of the Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure (NHERI). After these long-anticipated simulations, each preceded by a countdown that evoked a rocket launch, participants cheered and hugged one another, celebrating the success.

The test structure, which took about nine months to build, will remain standing for nearly a year on the “shake table” at the University of California San Diego’s Englekirk Structural Engineering Center, where it was erected. This large earthquake simulator—with a 25-by-40-foot, 3-foot-thick platen, or plate, onto which the building was bolted—was upgraded in 2022, with six axes of movement, enabling it to reproduce the entire range of 3D motion possible in a seismic event. The tower incorporates different types and applications of mass timber, the multi-layered engineered-wood products whose benefits include structural strength, sustainability, and earthquake-withstanding properties. This is the tallest full-scale primarily mass-timber structure ever to undergo this type of testing.