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Abstract The Chicago River Beech Tower is a collaborative research effort with the goal of identifying challenges and opportunities associated with designing increasingly tall mass timber structures. This paper represents the team's findings to date on these topics, their implications for tall building design, and suggests possible pathways that may inform and engage the design community. A key objective of the project is to explore new design potential with timber buildings, rather than substituting timber in the familiar forms of conventional construction in steel and concrete. Refer also to Tall Buildings in Numbers on page 47.