WoodWorks at the AIA Conference on Architecture 2023

Type III Construction for Multifamily: Best Practices and Detailing for Success

Jon Hall | GGLO
Bruce Lindsey | WoodWorks

As demand for multi-family housing grows, there is pressure on building designers to increase the unit density of projects while maintaining affordability. There may also be the need to integrate seamlessly into neighborhoods comprised predominantly of low- and mid-rise buildings. Type III construction provides a code path to maximize the height and area of light-frame wood projects, allowing up to five stories for residential occupancies—either stand-alone or over a single or multi-level podium. This session will explore the nuances of Type III multi-family projects, including their advantages, design and detailing best practices, construction requirements, and forthcoming code language that clarifies the acceptable approach to wall/floor intersections.

Using Wood to Achieve Embodied Carbon Reductions in the Built Environment

Ashley Cagle | WoodWorks
Erin Kinder | WoodWorks

Green building practices have historically focused on operational energy efficiency – but as building operations become more efficient, efforts have expanded to include embodied carbon and our choice of building materials. With low manufacturing emissions and the added benefit of long-term biogenic carbon storage, many designers are turning to wood products to reduce the carbon impact of their building designs. This presentation will highlight the ways wood contributes to lower embodied carbon, explain biogenic carbon storage, and provide clarity on the carbon accounting methods outlined in international standard ISO 21930. Differences in LCA tools – and how they align with or deviate from the ISO standard – will also be discussed. Finally, this presentation will address specific items for consideration when evaluating different structural systems using comparative LCAs.

Concealed Spaces in Wood-Frame and Mass Timber Construction: Dropped Ceilings, Sprinklers, Fireblocking and Draftstopping

Jeff Peters | WoodWorks
Bruce Lindsey | WoodWorks

Concealed spaces, such as dropped ceilings or soffits, are common in light wood-frame and mass timber buildings. However, misunderstandings about what requirements exist for fire protection are equally common. Do all concealed spaces with combustible materials require sprinkler protection, fireblocking, compartmentalization, or other means of protection? What are the impacts of construction type and building occupancy? How are concealed spaces with heavy and mass timber elements treated differently than cavities in light-wood frame construction? Adding to the perplexity is that some requirements come from the International Building Code (IBC) while others come from the NFPA 13 sprinkler standard. This session will address these questions and provide practical solutions and details for the protection of concealed spaces in multi-family and commercial wood construction.

Mass Timber: Making the Case to Developers and Owners for Mid-rise and Tall Wood

Chelsea Drenick | WoodWorks
Jordan Komp | Thorton Tomasetti

Would you like to pitch sustainable mass timber to a client? If so, attend this session to learn how to complete the value proposition for developers and owners. The aesthetic differentiation and biophilic benefits of mass timber have broad appeal to a wide range of stakeholders, from end users to ESG-investors. Architects hoping to influence decisions to use mass timber will learn how this appeal can translate to return on investment in an overview of initial findings from WoodWorks’ Mass Timber Business Case Study series, written for the developer/ owner/ investor audience. Then we’ll take a deep dive on Ascent, the world’s tallest timber tower, and discuss the challenges, lessons learned, and successes the team experienced taking timber innovations to a new height in the US. Leading engineers, Thornton Tomasetti will share some insight from their explorations of mass timber and tall wood.

Early Design Decisions: Priming Mass Timber Projects for Success

Mike Romanowski | WoodWorks

Mass timber is a unique, non-commodity building material and, to lay the groundwork for success, certain critical decisions must be made as early as possible. These decisions can have a big impact on cost and can either increase or limit opportunities later in design. There are many cases of project teams that want to realize the full benefits of mass timber, but, because they base their designs on traditional building practices instead of optimizing them for mass timber, end up with avoidable price premiums. This presentation will walk through early project decisions and design steps, focusing on how to optimize projects for mass timber and how one early decision can influence others. Topics will include construction types, fire ratings, column grids and beam/panel spans, acoustics, and MEP integration. Completed mass timber projects will be used to illustrate the variety of viable options when navigating these key decisions.

Modular Architecture: Thinking Inside the Box for Great Design

Ken Lowney | Lowney Architecture
Mark Donahue | Lowney Architecture

Modular construction is economical, makes efficient use of labor, reduces waste, and offers the quality control associated with prefabrication. As such, it solves many of the challenges facing project teams today. Some architects worry about the creative limits of this approach. In fact, there is a great deal of flexibility in modular design using light-frame wood construction—if architects understand the nuances of these projects.

In this session, modular experts from Lowney Architecture will use completed multifamily and hospitality projects to demonstrate how to successfully design and construct complex modular buildings in urban environments. Join us to discover how to achieve great design by thinking “inside the box.”

Sonrisa Downtown: Mass Timber Affordable Housing in Sacramento

Renee Funston | Capitol Area Development Authority
Chris Cormier | Tricorp Group

Sonrisa is the first project under Governor Newsom’s Executive Order N-06-19 for Affordable Housing Development, which directs the development of affordable housing on excess State-owned sites and the pursuit of sustainable, innovative, and cost-effective construction methods. Sonrisa is a five-story Type IIIB building with 58 LIHTC-regulated affordable apartments, a majority of which are 270 square foot microunits. A key goal with Sonrisa was creating a high quality, affordable, compact living environment. Sonrisa used cross-laminated timber (CLT) for the horizontal components (i.e. floor and roof panels). Part of the design aesthetic involved taking advantage of the exposed CLT floor/ceiling and going with a “guts out” approach of showing the organized conduits and pipes. While there were many cost increases for implementing the novel CLT system, the immeasurable benefits of environmental sustainability paired with the exposed warm wood and significantly higher ceiling height made it an easy choice. Sonrisa is the first ground-up CLT project in Sacramento and was developed through a public-private partnership between the Capitol Area Community Development Corporation (CACDC) and CFY Development. CACDC is the nonprofit arm of the Capitol Area Development Authority (CADA), a joint powers authority between the City of Sacramento and State of California.

Mass Timber Shafts and Shaft Wall Solutions for Mass Timber Buildings

Chelsea Drenick | WoodWorks
Matt Harwood | Holmes

The rapid growth of mass timber construction in the U.S. has led to a variety of solutions for shaft wall framing. Mass timber buildings can have mass timber shaft walls, light-frame wood shaft walls, or shaft walls constructed of a different building material altogether. The prefabricated nature of mass timber shaft walls also makes them a good solution in light-frame projects. This presentation will cover material and detailing options for shaft walls within mass timber buildings as well as mass timber shaft walls in other building types. Specific emphasis will be on meeting structural demands and fire-resistance rating requirements for various construction types and building heights as demonstrated through case studies of real projects.