Skanska is wrapping up the $28 million Artificial Intelligence and Quantitative Biology building at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in Laurel Hollow, N.Y. — the firm's first mass timber laboratory project. The three-story structure features glulam columns and beams with CLT floor decks, including an 80-ft CLT span claimed to be one of the longest in a lab and office building on the East Coast. For developers, GCs, and capital partners evaluating mass timber's real execution profile, the AIQB project is a detailed case study in what the technology actually costs to get right.

Key Takeaways:

• The AIQB building is a $28 million component of a larger $248 million, 379,500-sq-ft first phase campus expansion; the full two-phase effort totals $500 million.
• The structure used 121 pieces of glulam (~5,000 cu ft), 75 pieces of CLT (~12,000 cu ft), and approximately 55,000 screws for structural connections.
• An 80-ft single CLT span is cited as one of the longest used in a lab and office building on the East Coast.
• Mass timber erection compressed a planned two-month schedule into roughly six weeks — but CMU-to-timber connection tolerances triggered a three-surveyor simultaneous verification process after the first embeds came in out of tolerance.
• Post-enclosure timber conditioning required humidity control to within half a degree and a moisture reduction rate capped at 1% per day, managed by a third-party sensor system.
• Cold Spring Harbor contracted the design and construction teams simultaneously in March 2021 — over two years before construction began in 2023 — enabling real-time cost estimating alongside each design iteration.
• Phase one completion is targeted for early 2027; phase two adds an 81,000-sq-ft research housing and conference center and a 56,000-sq-ft collaborative research center.

The AIQB project illustrates a pattern that will repeat as mass timber migrates into building types — labs, medical facilities, higher education — where teams have little prior experience. The knowledge transfer model Skanska used (leaning on its Pacific Northwest team's Portland International Airport experience) is a viable playbook, but only for organizations with that internal depth. Developers and GCs without it need to build equivalent expertise deliberately through fabricator relationships, peer networks, or consultant structures before contracts are executed. The CMU interface challenge and conditioning protocol are the two execution risks most likely to be underpriced on first-time mass timber projects.

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