BCT banner on Design Building features our graduate students

BCT banner on Design Building features our graduate students

The BCT banner, one of three "occupant" banners now up on the construction fence for the Design Building, features prominently PhD student Hamid Kaboli, M.Arch. student Albert Sanchez, and Associate Professor Peggi Clouston - all deeply engrossed in their work on a timber gridshell. You can also see a nice rendering that shows what the interior atrium will look like....
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Article in Hampshire Gazette features wood-concrete bench

Article in Hampshire Gazette features wood-concrete bench

An article in this Monday's Business section of the Daily Hampshire Gazette described the Design Building project at UMass. It also featured prominently our student-built floor mockup bench that now adorns Holdsworth Hall. You can read the complete article here: http://goo.gl/2h16Su...
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Building a Wood-Concrete Floor Mockup Bench

Building a Wood-Concrete Floor Mockup Bench

As part of their independent studies, two BCT students, Henry Braley and Loran Kaleci (with help from fellow student Rommel Cordova-Fiori and shop manager Dan Pepin), this semester built an 8 ft bench for Holdsworth Hall. This bench (while arguably extremely overdesigned) serves as a mockup of the wood-concrete composite floor construction that will be in the new (Integrated) Design Building. As shown in the diagram below, it consists of a three-layer cross-laminated timber (CLT) slab, which we generously received from Nordic EWP (thanks!). Above it is a 3/4 inch layer of rigid insulation and a 3 inch cast-in-place concrete topping. The concrete and the wood layers are connected rigidly with glued-in shear "HBV" connectors by TiComTec from Germany (thanks for those, too!), making both act as a single composite element. If you want to learn more about this technology, check out this research spotlight. BCT has been researching this technology for quite a while now and we are excited to see it in a real building on campus soon. The floors...
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Nic Clark of KLH Speaks About Cross-Laminated Timber Buildings

Nic Clark of KLH Speaks About Cross-Laminated Timber Buildings

Nic Clark, Managing Director of KLH UK joined BCT on October 15 to present KLH's many projects worldwide in which they successfully used a new wood-based product, cross-laminated timber (CLT). Examples ranged from lowrise schools to residential buildings up to ten stories high. This lecture was the second installment in this semester's impromptu BCT lecture series “Building with Wood”, following Robert Malczyk of Equilibrium Consulting. KLH is the worldwide market-leading manufacturer of large-format glued laminated timber elements, especially Cross-Laminated Timber (CLT) panel products. KLH and its subsidiary KLH UK has been involved in the construction of thousands of wood buildings, including the 8-story Stadthaus in London, UK and a recent 10-story apartment building in Melbourne, Australia. Links: KLH presentation KLH UK website KLH Austria website ...
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Robert Malczyk speaks about engineered wood buildings

Robert Malczyk speaks about engineered wood buildings

Robert Malczyk, principal engineer of Vancouver-based firm Equilibrium Consulting, visited BCT last week to give a guest lecture on "Engineered Solutions in Wood". His lecture was the second installment in this semester's impromptu BCT lecture series “Building with Wood”, following Cassie Phillips of Weyerhaeuser. Fifteen years of design excellence and over a thousand successful projects have established Equilibrium as a leader in wood engineering worldwide. Their unique ability to take on complex structural challenges and find elegant, innovative, yet efficient solutions is exemplified in projects like the Frank Gehry-designed Art Gallery of Toronto, the Raleigh-Durham Airport roof structure, and the forthcoming IDB building at UMass Amherst, which will arguably be the most advanced modern wood structure in the eastern US. In reflecting upon the span of his own career, Robert not only gave career advice to the many students in attendance but also illustrated his firm's work in a detail-rich, visually stunning, and often very humorous manner. To learn more about Equilibrium's projects, follow the link at the...
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