WholeTrees Brings Structural Round Timber to the Children’s Museum of Eau Claire

Mass and cross-laminated timber are all the rage in sustainable architecture. But generally wood building products are milled into precise blanks for use in construction. Amelia Baxter, CEO and cofounder of WholeTrees Structures, has a better idea.

“When you leave a tree unmilled and with the outer fibers intact, it is 50 percent stronger than sawed timber with the same cross-sectional properties,” says Baxter, who majored in environmental studies at the University of Chicago and founded WholeTrees with partner architect Roald Gundersen. After initially culling trees in Gundersen’s home state of Wisconsin, they have expanded their efforts to use forests nationwide. Baxter’s overall goal is “to create prosperity between humans and forests.”

But this is not Abe Lincoln log cabin technology. “We have a sophisticated process of working with foresters on what kind of tree we will buy,” she says. “We use a center line and gauge how much fiber is around that. We don’t buy trees whose wobble is too great.”

So far, WholeTrees has focused on commercial and institutional projects instead of residential ones. There are two examples they are especially proud of: the Children’s Museum of Eau Claire, Wisconsin, by Steinberg Hart; and the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Peacemaking Center in Dowagiac, Michigan, by Seven Generations Architecture and Engineering. In addition to having large trunk members for the main building support, the Eau Claire building has an elaborate system of whole tree trusses engineered in collaboration with WholeTrees.