Mass Timber’s Rise in Construction
It seems counter intuitive to consider wood construction as up-and-coming.
As Global Specialists, Holmes has consulted on 130+ mass timber projects worldwide with 85+ in the US—including the largest mass timber building in North America at completion. We meet architectural and performance objectives from structural, fire, and life safety standpoints. We also design for fabrication and contribute to product development. Reach out to Eric McDonnell and Bevan Jones to learn more.
Mass timber modernizes one of the oldest-known materials for new ways to design and build. Covering a broad set of products, mass timber layers pieces of wood together for increased strength. Additional advantages include carbon reduction, biophilic design, offsite prefabrication, and speed of construction with a reduced workforce. Gaining traction in the US, mass timber’s applications span higher education, residential, community, and creative office spaces. Through international and local building code provisions, mass timber high-rises are growing stateside.
Parking structures are among the most common buildings we construct and among the most carbon-intensive. Their wide open interior spaces are, at the same time, both highly adaptable and very difficult to change.
This study begins with that tension and asks how parking might be built differently today. For decades, parking structures have been treated as background infrastructure–optimized for efficiency, built almost entirely of concrete, and rarely designed with a future beyond vehicle storage. How might these structures respond to climate and long-term adaptability while still meeting the demands of today?
Developed in collaboration with WRNS, Truebeck, Walker Consultants, and Stantec, this study imagines a mass timber parking structure–given today’s techniques, constraints, and market realities–and finds it a surprisingly viable alternative
Optimizer Tool Saves Money, Time, & Resources
Our mass timber optimizer yields an optimal structural grid for a building in record time. We built this proprietary software to identify a project’s best fit with emerging wood products. To optimize a realistic building, we layer on constraints. Inputs include pricing from the main suppliers, fire ratings, number of stories, floor-to-floor heights, depths of members, and more. The optimizer outputs framing options with wood volumes and relative structural costs, pointing us to the most economical solution. The lower the volume, the greater the financial and environmental savings.
Our timber building optimizer kicks out grids based on wood volume and cost. With this tool we iterate to the most logical solution—shortcutting decision making from weeks to hours.
Eric McDonnell,
Principal & Director of Mass Timber
Lowering a Building’s Carbon Footprint
Mass timber reduces a building’s carbon footprint relative to more conventional materials. To begin with, wood is a renewable resource that sequesters atmospheric carbon. These buildings are also lighter than other construction types, reducing seismic demand on the structure. Our engineers evaluate the entrained carbon in alternate structural systems and the results are clear: using wood as the primary structural system results in the lowest embodied carbon.
Designing buildings in wood is an art. There are a number of factors that we consider, from the in-service movement of the material to accommodating required tolerances and optimal exposure. When done well, the resulting systems are expressed in the architecture. The structure functions as the finish, further reducing material quantities.
Life Cycle Analyses show that a mass timber structure can reduce a building’s embodied carbon over a steel/concrete alternate by up to 70%!
Megan Stringer,
Associate Principal & Sustainability Lead
Streamlining Approvals with Reliable Fire Design
Our fire engineers study the performance of mass timber construction in potential fire scenarios. Given its compressed form and large surface area, mass timber performs well with predictable charring patterns. We help project teams identify applicable mass timber construction types in relation to building massing and local code requirements. Performance-based fire design offers an opportunity to increase the number of stories and amount of exposed wood. To build our case, we leverage fire modeling, research, testing, and improved fire-protection measures. We provide the necessary safety in design while challenging some of the industry’s preconceived notions of what is possible!
A comprehensive performance-based fire assessment for mass timber should consider realistic fire exposure. This accounts for the fire load, amount of exposed timber and ventilation, compartment properties, performance of connections, and impact of cooling and fire suppression systems.
Bevan Jones,
Principal & Dir. of Strategic Initiatives
Product Development Capabilities
Increasingly, we use our skills in structural and fire engineering to design and optimize mass timber with a productized approach. We develop kits of parts down to the connector details—informed by our knowledge of building codes and manufacturer constraints. When our clients seek to further innovate building products and systems, we introduce our friends at Holmes Solutions.
Holmes Solutions helps design, test, and develop new products, with an ever increasing portfolio of work in mass timber. We pinpoint time and material savings that add up over repeatable rollouts. These are solutions you can trust, de-risked through evidence-based design at New Zealand’s largest commercial testing lab. Global Specialists across the international Holmes Group have collaborated on mass timber products in the North American, European, and Asia-Pacific markets.
Select Work
42XX
Brentwood Public Library
The Kind Project
Microsoft Silicon Valley Campus
UC Santa Cruz – Kresge College
UW – Founders Hall
Westbank Campus
Additional Resources
Critical Mass: Builders Increasingly Opt for Engineered Timber Products
Performance-Based Engineering Provides Path to More Compelling Mass Timber Projects
More Perspectives
Specialist team of fire engineers provides advanced finite element analysis.
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