An Stubborn Approach to Mass Timber Design

This building has helped WA confirm early design assumptions and address challenges along the way. “It’s a really tight envelope, with a tilt-up system with panels that go from the foundation to the roof with no horizontal breaks in the wall, so there’s no air leakage,” Waechter says. “There’s a concern with having systems so fully integrated into the body of a building. Because the power, data, and mechanical systems are going to fail at some point.” This reality led them to rethink future iterations more like “primitive vessels” that, through their rational simplicity, allow maximum spatial and systems flexibility.

Another exciting breakthrough was in fire protection. Coordinating with Code Unlimited as a code and fire protection consultant, WA created new fire protection details to avoid the mandatory hybrid system requirements as fire retardants, creating new opportunities to expand local construction codes. “This was not just for this project but for future mass timber projects,” says Waechter. WA and Codes Unlimited together proved that the mass timber and wood-on-wood alone were enough to limit the spread of fire and that joints met construction criteria. “I think Waechter took a uniquely stubborn stance of what wood can do, and even with pressure put on code and structure to achieve that aesthetic experience, it turned out it was doable,” Will Smith, a project lead at WA.

Learning Architecture from a Singular Material Research

The studio’s research-based design approach also helped it develop an all-timber structural components taxonomy. Divided into standard scenarios, the classification system is further defined by three main categories: the exterior structure at the envelope of the building, the inner structure throughout the floor plate, and the horizontal structure that supports the floor plate. WA took this exercise and translated it into an architecture studio at the University of Oregon, inviting its students to develop a project by choosing a single system. “In many of our projects, we aim to avoid hybrid systems in general. So, not having columns and then walls and then cores, but picking an approach for the architectural production of a building benefits the understanding of design as an integrated architectural system,” says Smith.

Now WA is developing a series of speculative design exercises to incorporate these structural and mechanical system taxonomies in all-wood projects. The hope is to create a multitude of typologies to demonstrate the material’s versatility within different constraints and to expand the notion of primitive specificity in architectural design by truly understanding the wide range of possibilities of all-wood architecture. As Waechter puts it, “The ambition or the idea is that there could be a world where we perfect what the building is made out of. Where what changes from project to project is really form and composition, that it’s a result of just trying to create experientially clear spaces that have a heft even though we’re building out of framing material.”