Mass Timber and Foundation Reuse: What India's Sustainable Architecture Must Learn Now

Swiss architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron has delivered one of the most instructive sustainable construction case studies of 2025 — and its lessons are urgently relevant to India's rapidly urbanising built environment. At Amherst College in Massachusetts, the firm completed the new Student Center & Dining Commons by retaining the concrete foundation skeleton of the demolished Merrill Science Center, a brutalist brick structure that once defined the campus edge, and erecting a mass-timber superstructure on top. By reusing the existing foundation rather than excavating and pouring fresh concrete, the project avoided an estimated several hundred tonnes of embodied carbon — the CO₂ locked inside building materials before a structure ever switches on a single light. For India, where the construction sector accounts for roughly 22 percent of total CO₂ emissions and where an estimated 70 percent of the buildings that will exist in 2050 have not yet been built, the timing of this global precedent could not be more pointed. As Indian cities from Pune to Hyderabad greenfield entire districts, the choice of structural strategy — demolish-and-rebuild versus adapt-and-elevate — carries enormous climate consequence.

Why Reusing Foundations Cuts Embodied Carbon Dramatically

Concrete production is responsible for approximately 8 percent of global CO₂ emissions, and foundation work — involving deep excavation, reinforcement steel, and high-volume concrete pours — is among the most carbon-intensive phases of any construction project. By retaining the Merrill Science Center's existing concrete substructure, Herzog & de Meuron effectively zeroed out the embodied carbon cost of that entire phase for the new Amherst building. The decision required detailed structural assessment to confirm the old foundation could bear the loads of a new multi-storey mass-timber frame, but the engineering payoff was substantial: no new concrete excavation, no demolition rubble requiring landfill disposal, and a drastically reduced construction timeline for the below-grade work. Mass timber — engineered wood products such as cross-laminated timber (CLT) and glued-laminated timber (glulam) — then replaced conventional steel or concrete for the upper structure. These materials sequester carbon during the trees' growth phase and release far less CO₂ during manufacturing than steel or reinforced concrete, making the combination of foundation reuse plus mass-timber superstructure one of the lowest-embodied-carbon structural strategies currently available to the profession.

The project signals a maturing of the adaptive reuse philosophy beyond mere façade retention or interior reprogramming. Here, the reuse operates at the most fundamental structural level — the foundation — which has historically been treated as a demolition liability rather than a reusable asset. For architects and developers globally, including those working in India's tier-one and tier-two cities, this reframes the economic and environmental calculus around older building stock that might otherwise be written off as beyond retrofit value.

Can Mass Timber Construction Take Root in India?

India does not yet have a robust mass-timber construction industry, but the groundwork for one is forming faster than most observers acknowledge. The Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) updated its structural timber codes under IS 883 and allied standards in recent years, and the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA) has begun engaging with green building certification bodies including the Indian Green Building Council (IGBC) and GRIHA on low-carbon material frameworks. Meanwhile, India's northeast and Himalayan states — Assam, Meghalaya, Himachal Pradesh — have centuries-old traditions of structural timber construction, and states like Kerala continue to build in wood at scale for residential projects. What is missing is the engineered timber supply chain: CLT and glulam panels are not yet manufactured domestically at commercial scale, meaning any Indian architect specifying mass timber today must import from Austria, Canada, or increasingly from emerging producers in Southeast Asia, adding cost and, ironically, transport-related carbon. Several Indian architecture firms, including Studio Lotus and Hundredhands, have already begun exploring CLT in pilot projects, and if MNRE or MoHUA were to create a procurement or production incentive — analogous to the production-linked incentive (PLI) schemes used for solar modules — a domestic mass-timber industry could emerge within a decade.

The fire-resistance concern that often surfaces in Indian regulatory discussions around timber structures is increasingly addressed by the inherent char-layer behaviour of thick mass-timber elements, which perform better in standard fire tests than unprotected steel. India's National Building Code (NBC) 2016 provides a framework that, with targeted amendments, could accommodate mass-timber structures up to eight or ten storeys — the height range most relevant for urban institutional and commercial buildings.

What This Means for India's Energy Transition

India's 500 GW renewable energy target by 2030 rightly dominates the clean energy conversation, but decarbonising the power grid addresses only part of the country's emissions profile. The built environment — its construction, operation, and demolition — sits alongside power generation as a major emissions source that India's climate commitments under the Paris Agreement and its Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) must eventually tackle head-on. The Herzog & de Meuron Amherst project demonstrates that structural innovation, not just solar panels and efficient HVAC, is a legitimate and powerful lever. If Indian institutions — universities, hospitals, government buildings, IT campuses — began specifying foundation reuse assessments and mass-timber superstructures as a standard design consideration, the aggregate embodied carbon savings across the construction pipeline projected for 2026–2035 would be enormous. GRIHA, IGBC, and the nascent India Green Building market, projected to reach USD 35–40 billion by 2025 according to CII-IGBC estimates, have the platform to make this a mainstream evaluation criterion rather than an exception.

Watch for MoHUA's upcoming revisions to green building norms under the Smart Cities Mission and AMRUT 2.0 — these are the policy moments where mass-timber guidance and foundation-reuse credits could be formally embedded into India's construction regulatory landscape. The Amherst precedent shows the world what is possible; India's institutions and policymakers now need to create the conditions to replicate it at scale.