[chrishacken]

"A bigger concern to me is the wood rotting from exposure to water or chemicals. Although reinforced concrete also "rots", but in different ways. Wood at least tends to sag before failing from rotting, unlike concrete."

This. We just moved our office into a 100+ year old wood building. We're doing the renovating ourselves. Most of the wood in the building is rotting or uneven. I've spent a week so far leveling the floors. Every old (70+ years old) building I've ever been in is like this; some worse than others.

We have our datacenter in a stone/concrete building that was built in 1912. While it has also deteriorated, it's not nearly as bad as the wooden buildings. The floors have cracks in them, but they're still level for the most part, or easily repairable. The building will easily be standing for another 200+ years. I can't say the same for the wood building.

[flavor8]

That is not a modern wooden building, however, i.e. not an apples to apples comparison to the subject of tfa. Cross laminated timber has a high resin (plastic?) content, which makes it a very different material from construction lumber in terms of how it interacts with moisture.

[peterwwillis]

You really don't know that about concrete buildings without inspection, and possibly core sampling of the concrete. You don't know what the true grade of the concrete is or whether it's thick enough depending on loading. And you need to look for signs of common failure modes such as carbonation, chloride penetration, freeze/thaw cycles, alkali-aggregate reactions, etc. Most concrete failures can penetrate the entire slab before showing outward signs. And concrete slabs have 'exploded' from as little as 200C of heat due to trapped water vapor. This assumes it's earthquake-code concrete construction.

A mostly-stone building will be perfectly fine, though :)