Skanska has finished the structural work on its first laboratory project built with mass timber, a three story research building at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) on Long Island, New York, that the construction manager says pushed glulam and cross-laminated timber (CLT) into territory the material had mostly avoided. The project, reported in detail by Engineering News-Record on October 6, 2026, matters to the mass timber industry for a reason that has nothing to do with height or headline square footage. Laboratories carry vibration limits, mechanical loads, and connection tolerances that are harder to satisfy in wood than the offices, multifamily buildings, and campus halls that have made up most of the material’s track record so far. A major national contractor clearing that bar on a live biotech campus is a different kind of proof point than another timber office tower.

A lab building, not another office box

The building is the Artificial Intelligence and Quantitative Biology (AIQB) facility, the first structure in CSHL’s $248 million, 379,500 square foot Foundations for the Future campus expansion in Laurel Hollow, New York. Designed by Centerbrook Architects, the three story, $28 million building uses glulam columns and beams with CLT floor decks, all fabricated from timber sourced in the southeastern United States. The frame includes 121 glulam pieces, roughly 5,000 cubic feet of material, and 75 CLT pieces totaling about 12,000 cubic feet, tied together with an estimated 55,000 screws across timber to timber and timber to steel connections. One clear span reaches 80 feet, which the project team described to ENR as among the longest single CLT spans used in an East Coast laboratory or office building. The program packed into that frame includes four labs, 15 principal investigator offices, 96 postdoctoral workstations, and seven research administration offices. CSHL expects the full first phase of the expansion to reach substantial completion in early 2027.

Moisture control became the main construction risk

Jonathan Walsh, Skanska’s project director on the job, told ENR that his Northeast team leaned heavily on colleagues from the company’s Pacific Northwest mass timber group, who have more experience with the material from projects including the Portland International Airport’s mass timber roof. “I picked their brains for a good two months straight,” Walsh said. The biggest lesson was moisture management. Once the structure was enclosed, the team dried the timber slowly under close monitoring rather than letting conditions swing. “You have to condition it so delicately, you pretty much treat it like a piece of millwork,” Walsh said, adding that drying it too fast risked warping and cracking just as it would with finish carpentry. He also pointed to the unforgiving nature of the connections between wood and masonry. Tying the timber frame into concrete masonry unit shear walls required what Walsh called “dead perfect” tolerances, and early surveying mismatches forced the team into repeated rework. “That just turned into a surveying circus,” he said. Despite those complications, the mass timber erection itself, originally planned to take two months, finished in about six weeks. Steve Monez, CSHL’s vice president and chief facilities officer, credited early and continuous cost estimating with keeping the design team’s decisions grounded. “Every single time the design team put pen to paper, we had an estimate coming out right behind it,” Monez told ENR.

Why labs have been slow to go timber

Laboratory and life-science buildings have lagged offices and housing in mass timber adoption for reasons the industry has acknowledged for several years. WoodWorks, the wood construction advocacy group, has identified floor vibration sensitivity, large clear-span requirements, and persistent misperceptions about timber’s structural capacity as the main barriers, and it points designers to the U.S. Mass Timber Floor Vibration Design Guide to manage the first of those. A 2024 feasibility study from architecture firm SGA, developed with Thornton Tomasetti, Consigli Construction, BR+A Consulting Engineers, and Code Red Consultants, proposed a floor assembly combining five-ply CLT panels, a half-inch acoustical mat, and three inches of concrete topping to hit a lab-grade vibration criterion while keeping most of the structure in wood. That design work remains conceptual, but a handful of built projects back it up. Biotech firm Adimab’s 28,000 square foot laboratory in Lebanon, New Hampshire, completed in 2024 with glulam, CLT, and light-frame wood walls, is the clearest built precedent before CSHL, and Michigan State University’s STEM Teaching and Learning Facility is another example WoodWorks cites. The CSHL building is larger and more mechanically complex than either, which is why Skanska and CSHL are treating its completion as a milestone rather than routine news.

What it means for specifiers and the supply chain

For engineers and contractors who have hesitated to put mass timber in front of a lab client, CSHL’s experience offers a specific, documented answer rather than a marketing claim. The construction risks were real and concentrated in moisture sequencing and connection tolerance, not in the material’s inherent fire performance, which met code requirements for the project without added fire-resistant treatments. That distinction matters for cost estimating. A mass timber lab does not need the fire-protection premium some specifiers still assume, but it does need a general contractor willing to budget extra survey time and a sequencing plan that treats the frame like high-value finish material during enclosure, not structural steel. For CLT and glulam suppliers, a validated life-science reference project is commercially useful in a way that another multifamily building is not. Laboratory and life-science construction is a higher-margin, longer-lead segment than market-rate housing, and owners in that space tend to follow peer institutions’ track records closely. CSHL’s willingness to publicize the construction details, down to screw counts and drying schedules, gives other research institutions and their insurers a concrete basis for their own risk assessments instead of relying on extrapolation from office projects.

What to watch

Specifiers evaluating a lab, vivarium, or other vibration-sensitive building in wood should request the project team’s moisture-monitoring protocol and connection-tolerance plan before bid, not after award, given how much of CSHL’s risk showed up in exactly those two areas. General contractors without in-house mass timber experience should treat Skanska’s cross-regional knowledge transfer as the model, not an afterthought, since a Northeast team with no prior timber experience still cut six weeks off a two-month erection schedule once that transfer happened. Watch for CSHL’s broader Foundations for the Future campaign to reach substantial completion in early 2027, which will put the AIQB building through a full occupancy cycle and should generate follow-up data on vibration performance and HVAC integration. And watch whether other life-science developers and academic medical centers reference this project in their own feasibility studies over the next two quarters, which would be the clearest sign that mass timber is moving from a lab-building curiosity to a standard option on the table.