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sorry for my careless reply to OP. I meant that e.g. a beam that would usually be 10x20" (totally made up numbers) without taking into consideration fire, would have to be 15x30" to have the required fire rating (say 1 hour or whatever it should be). Thus every structural element has to be larger than it would be when taking into consideration only earthquakes or wind/snow loads.


Regarding mass timber in a seismic area - http://nheri.ucsd.edu/projects/2017-development-validation-s... and http://nheritallwood.mines.edu

And the beam size gets into "don't design a concrete building and swap in mass timber". https://www.woodworks.org/resources/creating-efficient-struc...

Another aspect to the beams is that the structural elements are often left bare for aesthetics ( https://uploads.map-dynamics.com/0518_Structurlam-U.S.-Mass-... ).

Table 6 in https://www.structurlam.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Struc... gets into the snow loads and I don't know enough engineering to be able to do a comparison between mass timber and other building approaches.

The main thing to consider is this isn't a "it costs 2x" or "it uses 2x more materials" because they are different materials with different designs. If comparisons are to be done, they should be done at the building level ("it cost X to make a N story building with M square feet per floor" and "building A had a sustainability rating of P while building B was rated at Q with a difference in cost of Z%").




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