Conceptual Honorable Mention

I’m happy to share that my design for a Seattle Mass Timber Tower was recognized with a Conceptual Honorable Mention at the 2017 AIA Seattle Honor Awards for Washington Architecture gala earlier this week.

The 40-story, 128m residential tower features exposed mass timber floors, walls and beams, shop-coated steel columns and an in-situ concrete core. Shear wall outriggers are composed of carbon fiber hexagonal nets. The materiality of wooden floors, ceilings and walls, and the scale and design of the expressive carbon net induce a design vernacular that is derived from traditional timber frame houses in Germany.

Consistent with the prefabricated nature of the primary structure, the residential unit modules for kitchen and powder rooms are prefabricated and lifted in-place on site. This reduces the cost of skilled local labor and increases the quality of the final units in both design and execution. Faster construction might be possible contingent to crane time and schedules.

Some jurisdictional hurdles remain to be solved before tall mass timber buildings will be permitted in Washington state, however advances in material science, fire safety, manufacturing and procurement have contributed to cost competitiveness over traditional, non-renewable building materials over the recent years.

Credits: I was the design lead for Seattle Mass Timber Tower while working at my previous firm, CallisonRTKL. Photo credit: CallisonRTKL. For the complete design study go to:

https://cdn.crtkl.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/1/2016/12/CallisonRTKL-Mass-Timber-Tower.pdf