Fernando Yévenes U., as a member of the AICE board, I had the opportunity to attend the 8th Sustainable Housing Seminar, organized by CENAMAD UC, MINVU and CORFO, with the support of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). This year, the focus was very clear: how timber and industrialization can transform social housing in Chile into a sustainable, scalable and high-quality solution.
It has now been ten years of technological collaboration between MINVU (through DITEC) and CIMUC, during which standards, research, manuals and tools have been developed that today allow us to design sustainable timber housing with solid technical and regulatory backing.
Some key takeaways:
- The city as a “second forest”: timber buildings store biogenic carbon and can become a key piece of climate infrastructure if we scale their use in housing and mid-rise buildings. Tools such as the Diseña Madera platform (with more than 200 timber construction solutions that comply with OGUC) and the new trilogy of CLT Handbooks are part of this design-support ecosystem.
- The current construction model is exhausted: high waste generation, low productivity, high accident rates, housing prices beyond what households can afford, and very low levels of innovation. Continuing to “do more of the same” will not solve either the housing deficit or the climate crisis.
- Modern Methods of Construction (MMC) and industrialized timber: timber prefabrication is emerging as one of the clearest pathways to improve quality, safety, schedules and cost control, while reducing both operational and embodied carbon.
- Public policy and green finance: the National Program to Promote Timber Construction and the development of a Sovereign Sustainable Bond for timber housing show that this is no longer just a technical issue, but also a fiscal and financial one: standards, climate taxonomies, social safeguards and lifecycle environmental performance tracking.
For the AICE community, this is also a call to:
- Lead seismic design, structural robustness and adaptability of timber solutions;
- Integrate BIM, prefabrication and lifecycle assessment into our day-to-day practice;
- Engage more actively with academia, the public sector and development programs.
Industrialized timber construction is no longer just an alternative; it is a strategic lever to tackle the housing deficit, decarbonization and the productive transformation of the construction sector at the same time. As structural engineers, we have a great deal to contribute to this shift.
What are the main challenges for Structural Engineers as we support the shift toward sustainable, industrialized timber solutions?
Some interesting links:
- Association of Civil Structural Engineers of Chile (AICE): https://aice.cl/
- CIM UC: Centro UC de Innovación en Madera - Inicio
- CENAMAD UC: Cenamad - Centro Nacional de Excelencia para la Industria de la Madera
- Diseña Madera: https://www.disenamadera.cl
- Ministry of Housing and Urbanism of Chile (MINVU): Minvu - Ministerio de Vivienda y Urbanismo
FYU engineering