Hangar 3 at Moffett Field was built in 1943 to house airships, one of the largest freestanding timber structures of its time, with around three million board feet of Douglas fir in its frame. When engineers ruled that the failing structure could not be saved, most people assumed the wood was lost with it. In a white paper published in June 2026, Google documents what happened instead: 119,000 board feet, 178 tonnes, selectively salvaged, tested, and partly returned to load-bearing service in new mass timber assemblies. The interesting part for us is not the salvage. It is what the project had to do to make the wood usable again.
Reuse does not fail on the wood, it fails on the record
Adaptive reuse of whole buildings is common. Reuse of the primary structure, member by member, is close to non-existent, and the reasons are administrative rather than physical. Historic timber carries no contemporary grade stamp. Its load history is unknown. Whether it was ever treated with fire retardants, and with what, is often unrecorded. Building codes offer no prescriptive route for returning used dimensional lumber to structural service, so salvaged wood is treated as a regulatory and financial risk and ends up as cladding, furniture, mulch or landfill.
At Hangar 3 that record had to be rebuilt from scratch. Historical research established the species and the likely provenance. Contaminant testing decided which members could be touched at all, and much of the frame was too damaged or too contaminated to qualify. Wood scientists at Washington State University and Oregon State University then tested what remained to bound the variability of its structural performance, and the team negotiated a performance-based approval path with the authority having jurisdiction, because no prescriptive one exists.
The answer is conditional but affirmative: yes.
Google, on whether reclaimed lumber can return to structural service at scale
The same data, gathered forty years earlier
Everything that had to be reconstructed in a laboratory in 2026 exists as a record on the day a timber building is designed and built: species, volumes, dimensions, supplier, treatment, and the position of each element in the structure. We collect that record because carbon accounting requires it. Quantifying the carbon locked into a load-bearing structure and having the removal verified under internationally recognised standards means knowing precisely what wood is where, and being able to show it years later.
That record was built for one purpose and turns out to serve a second. A building documented this way enters its next cycle with its material history intact, which is the condition the Hangar 3 team had to manufacture at considerable cost.
What this does and does not mean
It does not mean a material passport, and it does not mean reuse is solved. Regrading, code approval and the economics of disassembly are open questions, and the Google paper is careful to say that its roadmap does not apply to every structure. What it does mean is that the argument for documenting a timber building is longer than one carbon crediting cycle. Carbon in a load-bearing structure stays locked for as long as the structure serves, and reuse extends that service life rather than ending it.
For anyone commissioning a timber building today, that is a practical reason to insist on a proper material record from the design phase, whether or not reuse is on the agenda yet.
Google & Planetary Ventures, «Reclaiming Structural Wood at Scale: From Airship Hangar to Portfolio Reuse», June 2026, 32 pages. Prepared with around thirty partners including DLR Group, Mercer Mass Timber, Washington State University and Oregon State University.
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Written by
Samara Scheidegger
Marketing & Communication
