CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- International Beams has announced plans to build the largest Cross Laminated Timber (CLT) manufacturing operation in the United States. Biesse’s Uniteam series was selected as the official CNC equipment supplier to the new 227,000 square foot manufacturing facility near Dothan, Alabama. The new plant is expected to open early this year.

International Beams, a manufacturer of pre-fabricated I-joists, will produce two new products at its Alabama facility: CLT panels and glue-laminated beams (Glu-Lam).

The use of CLT panel had previously been reserved for commercial construction but is now increasingly being used by residential builders. Biesse/Uniteam has also responded to the change in market demands with equipment designed for log home manufacturing: E-Mix, UT, CK and EBM-3.  

Uniteam’s range of machines and systems includes the E-Mix, which has the multi-functional capacity to machine not only CLT panels, but also laminated beams and curved laminated beams. The E-Mix is intended for small to medium sized companies. E-Mix can also be built with twin loading stations that allow for pendular machining to further increase the level of productivity.

Uniteam’s UT series features technology for the machining of very large beams or elements with more complex shapes. The CK series is intended for medium to large industries requiring flexibility in order to handle standard woodworking cuts. The EBM-3 series offers the largest platform for CNC machining of beams and CLT panels. See http://www.biesseamerica.com.

ROSEMONT, Ill. - WoodWorks, which promotes commercial and residential mass wood construction, drew more than 200 attendees to Chicago for its latest conference and exposition. 

Architect James Giebelhausen of Perkins+Will Chicago detailed a concept project for a skyscraper that would be built on the teamed up with Autodesk BUILDSpace in Boston to fabricate two full scale nodes of the proposed River Beech Tower.  The wood, concrete and steel hybrid constructions were assembled at Pepper Construction’s warehouse in Chicago and are currently on display in the Chicago office of Perkins+Will.  The proposed 80-story wood tower design was produced in partnership with Thornton Tomasetti and Cambridge University and would be located in downtown Chicago.

QUEBEC CITY, Que. -- Conception R.P. has obtained the largest contract in its history, at $ 6.7 million CAD.

The company announced the contract for a U.S. customer. It was too early, however, to disclose the name of the company and the city where it will occur. The project will last a little over a year and will involve the hiring of 10 to 15 people for the company, which currently has about 30 employees.

Conception R.P. designs and manufactures fingerjointing equipment.

“We are a small company in Quebec City, but our competition is global giants in the equipment industry. We are very proud of what we accomplished,” says Louis-André Landry Levesque, business development manager.

Discussions between the two companies began more than 20 months ago in a major trade fair in Germany. “We met them there the first time, then we went to meet them at their plant, they came to meet us here, we brought them to Sweden to see a factory we designed over there. Finally, we finalized the contract on May 16,” said Landry Levesque

 “We use fingerjointing cutters to shape wood pieces to the appropriate fingerjointing configuration, then we apply glue, we finger joint them and we finally press the final finger jointed products. It is a technology that applies to many products, such as mouldings,” said Landry Levesque.

The machinery designed can be used for example in the furniture or door and window industries. “It can also apply for structural products, such as studs or I-beam flanges. The American customer is in the cross-laminated timber industry.

“Countervailing duties in Canada at this time are of great benefit to forest producers in the United States. That’s why they are looking to invest in equipment and increase their production capabilities “says Mr. Landry Levesque.

The machinery will be built in Quebec before being sent to the United States when each section will be ready in the equivalent of 18 trucks.

“It is a turning point in our growth. It puts us on a better position regarding the cross laminated wood market.” Conception R.P. has carried out projects all over the world (Canada, United States, Chile, China, Australia and in many European countries). We are now looking forward to develop the Brazilian market, which is a huge timber remanufacturing industry.

“Since we have customers all over the world, our people have many opportunities to travel. It’s really exciting,” said Landry Levesque. With the shortage of manpower, hiring for this new contract may be a challenge. We are looking for engineers, designers, welders, electro technicians and assemblers.

The company is a member of a group that consists of Automatisation JRT and Calibrateck, which deal respectively with the electrical component (control cabinets) and maintenance.

See www.conceptionrp.com

Seattle, Washington –  The Lakeview Office Building in Kirkland, Washington in Kirkland, Wash., is the first large-scale mass timber office development in Kirkland and has been designed to be a sustainable office building “in dialogue with Kirkland’s waterfront, commercial district, and the adjacent residential neighborhood,” according to LMN Architects. 

The 46,000-sq.-ft. building features large, prefabricated wood elements acted that were connected on site. The SPF Dowel Laminated Timber (DLT) ceilings contrast with the Douglas Fir Glulam beams and pay tribute to the forests of the region. 

The building is a model of sustainable design, using carbon-sequestering mass timber with raw materials sourced from the forests of the Pacific Northwest. The structural floor and roof panels are prefabricated DLT panels. The panels were manufactured with hardwood dowels instead of glue, and their all-wood composition makes them sustainable and ideal for improved air quality and comfort. 

Gerald Epp Jr., Business Development Engineer, StructureCraft, comments: “All of the mass timber components were engineered and fabricated offsite as a kit-of-parts. This not only promoted safety and quality with most of the work being done in a controlled shop environment, but also facilitated rapid erection on site. The warm aesthetic and biophilic environment of exposed timber construction is inspiring developers and building owners in Washington and across North America to use it in their next commercial development.”

John Chau, Partner, LMN Architects, comments: “The Lakeview Office Building demonstrates our commitment to innovation, research and sustainability. The design of the building was informed by the contemporary demands of a sustainable modern office building, the nature around the site, and our curiosity for construction innovation. Collaborating with HEWITT on the living roof, and with Sierra Construction, StructureCraft and Coughlin Porter Lundeen on the mass timber structure has been rewarding and we are very proud of what we have accomplished together with Cascade Management.”

ST. THOMAS, Ont. -- Mass Timber Construction is a sustainable way to build taller and larger buildings from wood. This video shows examples of careers in the mass timber industry which includes mass timber engineering, manufacturing and construction.

Interviewees discuss their roles and why wood construction is seeing a resurgence as a modern building material.

Seth, a wood specialist with Element5 who spoke in the interview described Element5's CLT facility in St. Thomas, Ontario. “There's a lot of new integrated technology and automation. As a wood specialist, I deal a lot with looking at the quality of the wood in terms of its moisture content, in terms of the quality of the actual lumber itself and ensuring that we make a quality product for our customers,” he said.

“So, the key thing is that at the design phase, that we’re including every single detail that there is to be at the final product. Once the design process is finalized, it is passed on to the manufacturing team," he said.

At that point, it is machined into a panel. Each layer of panel is cross laminated to each other. A longitudinal layer is followed by a perpendicular layer and so forth.

"You can have anywhere between three, five, seven, nine and eleven layers. We're able to make panels of up to 16 meters. Typically, you will see them in a wall or in a flooring system," said Seth.

Another worker, Nick, said, “And then our state-of-the-art C.N.C. machine cuts out all those openings and penetrations that we made in our three-dimensional model.” “What we're doing that's different is we are manufacturing large scale mass timber elements like entire wall panels that we can deliver and drop in on site,” he said.

WINONA, Minn – Fastenal, distributor of wide-ranging industrial and construction products, opened the doors to its new 97,600-square-foot corporate office. 

Designed by The Kubala Washatko Architects (TKWA), the mass timber frame building reflects an environmentally conscious design, including locally sourced Winona stone and mixed media building materials, the company said. 

In addition to the timber frame, the building also features cross-Laminated Timber (CLT) flooring and locally sourced stone materials.

Intended to look like a hundred-year-old building from afar, the building blends into Winona's historic landscape. Up close, modern features tout Fastenal's manufacturing and supply capabilities. From exposed X-bracing right down to every single nut and bolt, Fastenal products can be seen incorporated into the building.

C.D. Smith Construction of La Crosse, Wis. managed the 16-month construction project. The original building concept consisted of a steel frame core. With a growing focus on building sustainability and advancing occupants' health and well-being, the project team at C.D. Smith and TKWA proposed an alternative mass timber frame.

Intrigued by the concept and benefits it would provide, Fastenal moved forward with the mass timber design. "It's fascinating to learn about biophilia in architecture," Johnson shares. "The wood gives our new building energy and a vibe of its own. People want to stay longer because the environment is appealing. It has also promoted bigger thinking and innovation. So much so that we are now looking at how to incorporate things we've learned on this project into our other locations." 
 

PORTLAND, Ore. – Can a multi-story, mass-timber building stand up to earthquakes and other natural disasters? This summer, researchers are preparing to launch a simulated earthquake to see how a 10-story mass-timber construction building withstand earthquake-like tremors.

A quake date has not been released. 

The Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure (NHERI) TallWood project began in 2016. After performing numerous shake table tests including a two-story mass timber building structure by the University of California San Diego to see how it fared when faced with earthquake-like tremors, researchers plan to subject a full-scale 10-story, mass timber building to an earthquake simulation.

The goal of the NHERI Tallwood project, a long-term, multi-disciplinary research effort, is to show that tall buildings constructed of wood can be designed to achieve resilient goals in the face of earthquakes. 
In the summer of 2022, the Tallwood team will demonstrate and attempt to validate their design methodology using a full-scale, 10-story mass-timber building on the newly upgraded LHPOST6 shake table at NHERI at UC San Diego.

The Tallwood specimen will be the world’s tallest full-scale building ever tested. Tallwood also will be the first major test on the NHERI at the UC San Diego shake table, now capable of 6DOF ground motions.

According to researchers, the structural system of the tall wood building is expected to be damage free after being subjected to multiple design-level earthquakes. The structure, constructed with a mass-timber gravity frame and rocking walls, will also incorporate non-structural elements and contents that are designed to minimize earthquake damage. The test building represents a marketable wood-building archetype.

Freres Lumber Co., a Lyons, Oregon-based lumber company is providing wood materials to a large-scale university research project that aims to prove tall timber buildings can be resilient to earthquakes. The company manufactures its own mass timber product, called Mass Ply Panels. 

Freres’ column and beam line is currently APA certified up to a 12-inch width with a 72-inch depth, but can cut product up to 24-in. thick. And, although the beam and column line is capable of running product up to 60 feet in length, Freres’ current press is limited to 48 feet. Freres will be seeking certification for products in those larger widths and depths in the coming months.

Tyler Freres, vice president of sales, said they’re the only company in the world that’s making this particular product right now and it will be used in the NHERI TallWood project for the building’s vertical walls. 
Researchers include Shiling Pei from Colorado School of Mines, John van de Lindt from Colorado State University, Jeffrey Berman from the University of Washington, Keri Ryan from the University of Nevada Reno, and James Dolan from Washington State University.

The shake test the NHERI TallWood team has access to the world’s largest outdoor shake table, which is where they carry out their earthquake tests, according to the TallWood team’s website. 

“The shake table is basically a huge steel block foundation driven by hydraulic pistons that are controlled using computers,” said professor Shiling Pei. It can even replicate past earthquakes using seismic recordings. For instance, the team already carried out a test on a two-story mass timber building by simulating shaking from the Northridge Earthquake, a magnitude 6.7 earthquake that struck Los Angeles in 1994. The next shake test on the table involves a much bigger construction: a ten-story building. 

“This test will validate the resilience of our design methodology, and will also be an important opportunity to educate the public,” he said. “It will demonstrate the potential benefits of constructing tall buildings out of wood and, with any luck, will also inspire the next generation of engineers and scientists.”

The Danish architectural firm, Schmidt Hammer Lassen (SHL) has designed a 100-meter-tall, or more than 30-story tall housing block in Switzerland that will be the world's tallest cross-laminated timber building when it is completed. The projected second tallest is still under construction.

The Rocket&Tigerli, a terracotta-clad building is set to be built on a former industrial site in the city of Winterthur, near Zurich.

It will be comprised of four building sections of different heights rising to 100 meters tall making it the world's tallest building with a load-bearing timber structure, according to the UrbanMilwaukee.com website.

Named the Rocket&Tigerli tower after the locomotives that were produced at the previous industrial site, the project utilized a construction system developed by the Swiss company Implenia and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology of Zürich, ETH, according to a company statement.

According to Implenia, the concrete core has been replaced with wood, resulting in the individual beam coming in at a lower weight. This makes it possible to build taller constructions while, at the same time, ensuring that the entire building process achieves a lower amount of embedded carbon, the Zurich-based company said.
The building surpasses the construction of the Ascent, which is a 25-story apartment tower under construction in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Workers from general contractor CD Smith linked large pieces of lumber together like they were building a LEGO toy, as described by the Urbanmilwaukee.com website. Truckloads of mass timber, provided by two different European suppliers, dropped off cargo loads of individual pieces of the engineered wood that has been designed for specific locations in the building. If piping, such as plumbing or electrical conduit, needs to go through a floor or wall, the corresponding hole was precut into the beam in Europe.

Each column has corresponding male and female metal joints to connect with the adjoining pieces. The width of the load-bearing pieces shrinks as the building climbs higher, reflecting the decreasing weight they need to support.

When finished, the 25-story building will rise 283 feet. It was expected to be the world’s largest mass-timber building, pushing the previous world leader, the Mjos Tower in Norway, out of the world’s tallest by three feet. 

That is, until the Rocket&Tigerli building is completed.

SPOKANE VALLEY, Wash. -- Mercer Mass Timber LLC., a subsidiary of the Vancouver, British Columbia-based Mercer International Inc., a global producer of market pulp and solid wood products with mills in Canada, Germany, and Australia, plans to invest $50 million over the next two years in capital projects at its Spokane Valley mass timber manufacturing facility.

Potential capital projects include expanding the facility, adding new equipment lines, and the addition of a new product line, including glue-laminated structural components, or “glulam.”

Mercer acquired the 253,000-square-foot facility—one of the largest CLT production facilities in North America—last summer for $50 million from Katerra Inc., which filed for bankruptcy in June and laid off 63 employees in Spokane Valley.

According to Jason Herman, plant manager for Mercer Mass Timber, the company has hired 80% of former Katerra employees at the site since its opening last fall. Starting in July, the plant, which currently has 50 employees, will hire approximately 30 people and start a second shift.

Todd Beyreuther, director of product for Mercer Mass Timber, said of the investment, “We’re really excited that this landed in the right place. It would have been sad to see it go down.”

Beyreuther and Herman both were involved in the original planning and launch of the facility under Katerra, which began production in 2018. In total, the facility cost $180 million to build, says Herman.