Southwest Library

Designers of this new public library used mass timber to create a unique building mass and distinctive interior space. Constructed in the middle of a playground park, the building’s unusual form is capped with a roofline inspired by the bold mid-century shapes found in the surrounding neighborhood, with folded plates made from DLT panels supported by glulam and steel beams to form the crinkled roof. While this type of roof design isn’t new, the use of DLT in a folded plate structure is, so the design team ran complex non-linear finite element analyses to predict stresses and structural behavior of the folded plates. The second-floor features DLT panels resting on top of glulam beams and columns, and the mass timber elements were left exposed to the interior. The library earned LEED Platinum Certification. 20,785 sf / Type V-B construction