material research and innovative construction techniques
The collective work of WT/GO Architecture is rooted in ongoing material research and technical investigation, spanning over two decades of practice and substantiated in a record of innovative buildings and structures as well as educational curricula and technical publications. Through experimentation and analysis conducted in our own fabrication workshop, in the university studio, classroom and lab, and in the manufacturing facilities of our collaborators in the building products industry, we have embraced research in material and technology, an intensive process of “thinking through making,” as fundamental to our design methods.
As architects committed to design excellence, we always seek to push the more familiar conceptual boundaries of space-making, form-finding, problem-solving, and cost benefit, but we also work to tease apart the systems and conventions that typically define and often stultify building economies, cultures, and behaviors. We recognize that material matters and building solutions are most effectively examined when understood from a context that lies beyond the reach of conventional design ideation, beyond the extents of a digital model or even the capacities of the best-equipped workshop.
Our research reaches back along the chain of building material supply and consumption to examine material formation, and projects forward to the end of a building’s life where the potential reuse of building materials can supplement circular economic sources of second- and third- use material for industry and manufacture. This expanded field of inquiry offers fertile ground for research and innovation and informs our approach to the design and production of a truly sustainable built environment. At this dire moment in our climate history, when building sector activity is recognized to be responsible for a predominant share of global material consumption, waste generation, and the attendant emission of greenhouse gases, WT/GO Architecture seeks systemic solutions that can reduce our ecological impact, that are measurable in their effectiveness, and that we can readily enact while meeting our professional and ethical obligations to create durable, safe, and convivial architecture.
We embrace the inherently trans-scalar nature of these explorations. We consider building materials and systems not simply as commercial products, but as aggregations of physical matter formed over varying timespan through geo-chemistry or photosynthesis and additional inputs of industrial energy and steps in manufacturing technology. We recognize that this deep background endows each material with inherent structural properties, specific physical characteristics and associated vulnerabilities. These are the keys to innovation in material and building technology with enormous ramifications for the means and methods of building, the technical performance and human experience of the built environment, and the preservation or restoration of natural landscapes.
As global leaders in the design of mass timber buildings and structures, WT/GO Architecture partners have innovated across a range of scales and building programs. Early explorations in our workshop with adhesive and mechanical lamination of solid-wood lamellae and veneer found obvious applications in furniture and smaller building elements such as specialty stairs and guards as well as in structural frames for houses and other more modest building applications. In Firehouse 12 Studio in New Haven, CT, WT/GO partners Elizabeth Gray and Alan Organschi explored the acoustical properties of plywood sheets, combining digital modeling with physical testing to produce varying sound absorptive and reflective surfaces for the nuanced and often conflicting requirements of music recording and performance.
Over the course of our collective practices, we have continued to expand the scale and reach of those experiments with our clients and industrial partners in timber manufacturing, applying them to more challenging programs such as educational facilities, factories, pedestrian and vehicular bridges, and mid-rise urban housing and office buildings.
Partners Andrew Waugh and Anthony Thistleton pioneered the use of cross laminated timber (CLT) as a structural solution for high rise buildings in 2009, with their project at Murray Grove. The nine-story building is constructed entirely from pre-fabricated engineered timber used as load bearing walls, floor slabs, stairs and elevator cores. While CLT had been conceived to deliver single family dwellings and schools where the speed of construction was advantageous, Murray Grove demonstrates the capabilities of the material far exceed original expectations. The world’s first urban housing project constructed entirely from pre-fabricated engineered timber, Murray Grove proved that CLT could work in urban applications and at larger scale, and has kick-started a global movement in the use of engineered timber as a viable alternative to concrete and steel.
Gray and Organschi were first recognized for their innovative use of glulam in the US with a series of treated wood lamella bridges conceived initially as simple, industrially fabricated structures designed for durability, economy, heavy use and weather performance. Those initial experiments have continued most recently in the design for a sequence of pedestrian/vehicular timber bridges and elevated trails along the Hudson Highland Fjord Trail on the Hudson River in NY. In their Common Ground High School, a public charter school in New Haven, CT, they were one of the earliest adopters of CLT in the US, using it in hybrid applications with glulam and other engineered wood products as part of the building’s prefabricated assembly of fully insulated and airtight structural enclosure panels. The school’s interiors expose and express mass timber to offer students the air quality benefits as well as the visual experience of wood-lined classrooms and assembly spaces.
Innovations in mass timber continue in our collective practice on both sides of the Atlantic. Vitsoe, the first building in the UK to be structured entirely in beech laminated veneer lumber (LVL) demonstrates the elegance and capacity of this emerging high-performance engineered hardwood product. MultiPly, a carbon neutral engineered timber pavilion designed to provoke debate around how environmental challenges can be addressed through innovative and affordable construction, demonstrates how engineered timber structures can be reconfigured, reused, re-purposed and ultimately recycled. The Ecological Living Module (ELM) produced for the UN General Assembly’s High Level Sustainability Summit, exhibited to the international community the integration of thin-ply CLT panels as the enclosure system for fully self-sustaining peri-urban housing in resource-starved global cities.
WT/GO partners continue to explore the integration of mass timber with more traditional materials and in the reuse of existing, under-utilized structures. Bushey Cemetery answers the challenges of integrating trabeated glulam framing elements with compression structures of rammed earth walls. The Firehouse 12 Hostel, Acme Lofts Apartments in New Haven and the 2 Hamilton Apartments, a six story adaptive reuse and addition in New Rochelle, NY, demonstrate the potential of mass timber structural enclosures to simultaneously stiffen and expand unreinforced masonry structure while also adding density, height, and much needed housing to existing 19th century cityscapes.
ADVANCED TIMBER TECHNOLOGIES USED AS BOTH STRUCTURAL AND ENVELOPE SYSTEMS
Over the past two decades, the design team at WT/GO Architecture has been at the forefront of a global revolution in the construction industry, shifting building practices away from mineral-based construction materials in favor of advanced, biogenic material systems. Recognized as international leaders in timber design, we have designed a wide range of buildings and structures that incorporate established and emergent timber technologies, including mechanically- and glue-laminated timber components, stressed-skin composite systems, and structurally insulated panels. The ever-increasing array of rapidly-renewable, carbon-storing timber products offers numerous environmental benefits as compared to steel or concrete structures, particularly when deployed throughout an entire building, from the primary structure and enclosure to insulation layers and interior finishes.
WT/GO Architecture has an extensive history of developing and designing advanced timber technologies that serve as both structural and envelope systems in a wide array of building scales, typologies, and morphologies. Recent experience with advanced timber buildings ranges from the design and construction of the Ecological Living Module—a prefabricated, off-grid micro-housing prototype for the United Nations—to designing the Dalston Works apartment building in London—a 10-story, 121 unit structure built entirely of CLT panels. In addition to our portfolio of timber buildings, we have developed a diverse array of applied research partnerships to further advance the science and technology of timber construction: a collaboration with the Yale School of Public Health and Epidemiology to study the health implications of exposed timber surfaces; an academic partnership between Yale and Aalto University—funded by the SITRA Finnish Innovation Fund—to incorporate timber technologies into the global circular economy; an ongoing research effort with the US Forest Service and the Northern Forest Center to develop new models of regional timber manufacturing in New England; and an EU-funded consortium of European companies and organizations tasked with removing barriers to timber construction by developing standard, industrialized timber building systems.
On a continent as rich in timber as North America—and the Southeast woodshed in particular—the increased incorporation of wood fiber into durable, urban building systems heralds a new age in architecture and construction, in which mid-rise timber construction can simultaneously increase urban density, establish new benchmarks for building environmental performance, and catalyze new, regional timber fabrication and construction industries. The relatively recent emergence of advanced timber building systems is thanks in large part to the development of manufacturing processes that overcome wood’s inherent natural limitations: its natural heterogeneity, the unpredictable defects of the raw material, and the variation in its properties, processing requirements, and species-specific performance characteristics that have been timber’s greatest disadvantage in a construction marketplace demanding predictability and uniformity of high-strength structural products.
As the forest products industry continues to expand timber’s capacity for mid-rise construction, leveraging the inherent material properties of advanced timber systems to create efficient and effective structural and envelope systems will require an increasingly deep engagement with the entire building industry supply chain, from material science, forestry and harvesting techniques, manufacturing and construction processes, and climate-responsive building practices.
As a research-centered practice dedicated to exploring materiality and developing innovative construction techniques, WT/GO Architecture relies upon advanced timber technologies and designs buildings and places of the highest architectural quality that acknowledge their impact on the environment. This approach to design requires a constant expansion of architecture’s traditional design boundaries to address issues ranging from material science and product development to global urbanization patterns and atmospheric carbon accounting. At the heart of our architectural philosophy is a firmly held desire to develop building practices that reduce our collective impact on the environment, primarily through the application of timber technologies at a variety of scales: materials, assemblies, and buildings.
As construction industries continue to incorporate wood fiber into building structures and enclosures, the market for advanced, structural timber technologies is developing quickly, expanding the diversity of wood species available for timber components. In recent projects, we’ve pioneered the incorporation of typically underutilized wood species into advanced timber structures, including American tulipwood cross-laminated timber panels in the Multiply pavilion and high-performance engineered hardwood beech LVL for the Vitsoe Headquarters. In addition to structural timber materials, we have worked with a number of manufacturers and suppliers to develop surface treatment and detailing protocols that improve traction, durability, and weathering—as utilized in pedestrian bridges at Common Ground High School, Steep Rock Preserve, and the Hudson Highland Fjord Trail—or to prevent moisture damage to CLT panels during the construction of Dalston Works.
Recent advances in timber industrial engineering have enabled manufacturers to economically and reliably produce structural panels of a scale and spanning capacity competitive with existing mid-rise construction systems. The relatively rapid adoption of these prefabricated, panelized timber components by the North American and European construction industry has largely outpaced building code revisions, resulting in misalignments between commercially available building technologies and building regulations. With support from the US Forest Service, we have worked with ARUP to develop a series of 2-hour fire rated Type 3 exterior wall assemblies that feature an exposed CLT structural panel as the interior surface, which we are preparing for NFPA 285 testing. Additionally, we are collaborating with Autodesk to develop a range of composite timber spanning assemblies in compliance with the forthcoming IBC 2021 Type 4 timber construction class, addressing a wide range of code issues, including fire-resistance, structural capacity, acoustic performance, and MEP integration. In infrastructure projects—such as the Henry David Thoreau Footbridge—we’ve developed structure to exploit the structural economy of glue-lamination and the durability of large treated timbers joined monolithically to avoid the moment connections and vulnerability of timber lattice structures
By utilizing timber systems as both structure and enclosure in a variety of projects, WT/GO Architecture has demonstrated that timber’s inherent material and industrial properties offer myriad benefits, including reduced on-site assembly time, highly-precise prefabrication tolerances, and dramatically improved construction quality. Building on the success of Murray Grove, we designed Dalston Works as an entirely CLT building that dramatically reduces construction weight, time, and complexity as compared to traditional concrete construction. We have also developed a series of hybrid timber structure and enclosure assemblies, including a composite glulam, CLT, and steel system for the Mill River Carousel Pavilion and a prefabricated, stressed-skin roof panel for Common Ground High School.