In Missoula, a Museum Grows from Timber and Memory

Museums are inherently didactic places, but at a new museum in the Mountain West, the walls, ceilings, details, and exhibitions are all made up of educational moments. The National Conservation Legacy Center of the National Museum of Forest Service History, when it opens this summer, will be the public-facing hub for the eponymous organization. The cultural venue—located in the wilderness-ringed city of Missoula, Montana—represents a literal convergence of medium and message, telling the United States Forest Service’s century-plus-old story, and much more, through its most prized material.

Museums are inherently didactic places, but at a new museum in the Mountain West, the walls, ceilings, details, and exhibitions are all made up of educational moments. The National Conservation Legacy Center of the National Museum of Forest Service History, when it opens this summer, will be the public-facing hub for the eponymous organization. The cultural venue—located in the wilderness-ringed city of Missoula, Montana—represents a literal convergence of medium and message, telling the United States Forest Service’s century-plus-old story, and much more, through its most prized material.

“The clients were personally vested; this is their passion project,” says Tom Chung, principal at Leers Weinzapfel Associates (LWA), the Boston-based architects tapped for the project. Given the tight relationship between the building’s clients, materiality, and function, the organization’s board exercised an uncommon degree of engagement with the design and construction. Much of the wood material used and wood products created were procured via donation or discount from suppliers and fabricators in the organization’s extensive network, and several members offered their own experience with hands-on construction, morphing LWA’s role into one of “coordinating different players,” he adds. The Western location—near what Chung calls “the hotbed of mass timber in the U.S.”—also enabled easy collaboration and coordination with suppliers and fabricators, a closeness of geography, expertise, and logistics that formed a unique aspect of the project’s background and process.

Naturally, the center is a showcase of wood’s applications, with materiality and curated exhibitions that trace the United States Forest Service’s history up through projects like its Forest Products Lab and Wood Innovations Grant Program, as well as the industry’s forward-thinking experimentation and innovation of timber construction. 

“It was important that it serves as an encyclopedia of wood products and technologies,” Chung says. No fewer than 13 species (for the treelike columns) of trees are used to this end, representing the geographical and taxonomical breadth of the country’s forests: sugar maple from the Northeast, bald cypress from the South, Alaskan yellow cedar, Douglas fir from the Pacific Northwest, and American chestnut from the Midwest. Their timber is used in all imaginable preparations and applications rolled out throughout the project: The main body of the building is constructed of cross-laminated timber (CLT), with mass plywood panel flooring, laminated veneer lumber used for the structural walls in the black box digital gallery, and western red cedar siding (hand-painted by volunteers) on the exterior.  

Keeping the public-facing functions in mind, the design team conceived solid heavy timber columns that resemble abstracted tree forms to support the folded canopy roof and comprise the signature element and requested “wow factor.” The treelike members dot both the lobby area and the south-facing porch, conferring “the effect that you’re in a forest,” Chung says. LWA created the shop drawings for the columns in-house, part of a process Chung calls “delegated design engineering”—based on digital models, shop drawings, and 3D-printed models that were created and sent to timber fabricators, who created the columns by hand—without CNC milling machines. (One fabricator, naturally, was also a friend of the client.) In the columns’ upper areas, the branches are held up by concealed steel-frame joints. Again, the designers avoided an overly technical display that wouldn’t appeal to a varied audience, leaning instead on the “rhythm and lyrical quality” of the roofscape, with variously folded panels and asymmetrical tree columns that support it. “Like in a tree,” Chung says.

The building also came together on a shoestring budget, and LWA and the clients had to work together to find ways to reduce cost. Instead of pricier CLT for the ceiling, the team made use of free mass plywood panels from a supplier. The ceiling is also a slightly streamlined version of the original design: Instead of each column-supported bay being folded, the overall folded appearance is achieved by the individually angled bays. The building itself was also shrunk slightly, from about 35,000 to 20,000 square feet. “We had to make some alterations,” Chung says. What could not be compromised was the focus on using and celebrating wood of multiple origins, preparations, and applications, and the clients’ reverence for the material seems to transcend the technical, resulting in a building that bridges the earthly and ethereal qualities of wood. The columns, for example, are inspired in part by the columns of Gothic design, Chung offers. “It is kind of a cathedral.”

Would you like to comment on this article? Send your thoughts to: [email protected]

• Cultural

• Akiva Blander
• Construction Materials
• museum
• structural design
• Timber
• Timber Architecture