PJ Dick Innovation Fund Project Grant: (de)Mass(ing) Timber

(de)Mass(ing) Timber: Geometric and Tectonic Strategies for Material Resource Reduction in Timber Construction
Matthew Huber, Special Faculty, Carnegie Mellon Architecture

In collaboration with: Juney Lee, T. David Fitz-Gibbon Assistant Professor of Architecture, Carnegie Mellon Architecture; Azadeh O. Sawyer, Assistant Professor in Building Technology, Carnegie Mellon Architecture

Mass timber, boosted by industry marketing, is heralded as the construction industry’s emerging savior from climate catastrophe. Yet little is understood about the implications of widespread adoption: are Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) tools accurately accounting for logging industry emissions and the sequestration potential of forests in carbon calculations? What is the impact of forest fires and climate fluctuations on the timber industry's capacity? How will increases in production impact ecologies and land use? The World Resources Institute identifies growing timber demand as a critical pressure on land use and global carbon, challenging the optimism projected by mass timber manufacturers. Answering these questions is not within the scope of this proposal, but they inform a desire to critique mass timber in favor of lighter weight solutions.

Emerging from the work of Frie Otto and others, and greatly increasing with the advent of widely available digital tools, computational structural design and optimization have become a rich field of study in architecture schools. However, the vast majority of these studies look at techniques such as gridshells or other three-dimensional systems suitable for pavilions or roofs that aren’t applicable to typical floors in multi-story construction, the target use for mass timber. We propose studying a typical structural bay as a use case for lightweight timber assemblies using form-finding techniques to critically reform mass timber assemblies with reduced resource intensiveness as a way of mitigating impacts on climate and ecology. We see this proposal as a seed grant to identify three pathways of tectonic/geometric strategies that can be further elaborated at full scale with future funding and industry partnerships. Emerging technologies, such as AI-driven generative design and optimization, AR enhanced construction, and other computational processes will be essential to developing the work. 

Image: J230124 U.S. Copyright Office. Stereo copyrighted by Keystone View Co. (No. 5006) Library of Congress, Reproduction Number: LC-USZ62-62098