SMALL MASS TIMBER/RESIDENTIAL PROJECTS

DAY 1 – SESSION 3: SMALL MASS TIMBER/RESIDENTIAL PROJECTS

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ETON ACCESSORY BUILDING, BIG IDEA-TINY PROJECT:

Tracey will review the design and construction of the Eton Accessory building – a 15’x22’ combined garage and studio space that she designed and constructed with her partner Kelvin. Born out of a unique collaboration with Bernhard Gafner of Aspect Engineering and John Boys of Nicola Logworks, this 100% wood structure is a testament that no project is too small for prefabrication, its design born out of a strong desire to work with cross laminated timber – to better understand its properties as well as the efficiencies of its assembly on a project of a very small scale. Designed as a kit of parts, the structure is entirely made of 3 ply CLT – erected by a truck crane in 1 ½ days. Tracey will highlight some of the unique details, her learning from the process and her thoughts on the future of mass timber for small and medium scale projects.

LIVING BUILDING CHALLENGE, SINGLE FAMILY PROJECT:

This project is a single family home to aim at achieving full Living Certification of the Living Building Challenge (LBC) administered by the International Living Future Institute. The Living Building Challenge is a philosophy, certification, and advocacy tool for projects to move beyond merely being less bad and to become truly regenerative. The Living Building Challenge is the most rigorous benchmark of sustainability in the built environment. It is the gold standard against which all others are measured. This home is about 5400 sq.ft. in six “split-levels” in Vancouver. Apart from aiming at Living Certification, the home also asks for very high standard in design and finishing.

CLT was used as the flooring structure of the house. The reasons of selecting CLT are:

LBC requires that all lumber to be used in the project must be FSC certified or recycling material. After exploring the supply market, we were hardly to find a supplier who can provide us engineering lumber (PSL, LVL, TJI etc.) made from FSC material.
Under the LBC requirement, the project is also required to generate “zero” waste. As we all known that stick framing on site always produces tons of cut waste. Hence, pre-fab off site is the approach that we have to work with. All the walls are hence pre-fabricated. However, pre-fabricated floor using traditional beams/joists-plus-floor-sheathing panel is challenging from both structural and transport/installation. Therefore, CLT is a perfect solution.

Because of the ‘split-levels” layout, the structure of the house asks for heavy structural steel members as the main vertical and horizontal supports. The CLT floors and pre-fab walls have to be fixed accurately with these steel members. Hence, the main contractor has to work and coordinate closely with the structural steel supplier, the CLT supplier and pre-fab wall supplier to make sure their design are working together. 3-D modelling was used as a key tool in the design coordination. Installation on site was also asked for tight coordination too. The whole installation on site including structural steel, CLT and pre-fab wall was completed within four weeks and without major conflict.