Transforming a Neighborhood with Mass Timber Construction

The burgeoning Inner East District of Portland, Oregon, has experienced a transformation within the past ten years and, with it, a surge of new multi-family and office construction. Within this activity lay a small 9,000-square-foot bermed site, an artifact of a newly completed roadway realignment to connect westbound traffic to the Burnside Bridge – a primary link over the Willamette River into downtown. While useful as a staging and lay-down area to facilitate new building construction around it, project partners Key Development, Andersen Construction, and Skylab Architecture saw potential in the small hemmed-in site and recognized its prominent location and importance as a gateway to the newly created neighborhood. Through 17 months of planning and design and another 14 months of construction, the result of that vision is Sideyard – a nearly 25,000-square-foot office and retail building that serves as a showcase of Oregon-sourced mass timber construction (Figure 1). …

Designing a drive-through canopy may not sound very exciting to most engineers. Finding out it is a drive-through for business jets at a high-altitude airport with hurricane-force wind speeds can quickly change that first impression. The 132-foot clear span arched trusses supporting the 40-foot-high aircraft canopy were the most prominent part of this unique project but far from the only design challenge. …

Situated on the shores of Lake Hartwell, the Andy Quattlebaum Outdoor Education Center serves as the new 16,500-square-foot home of the Clemson Outdoor Recreation and Education program (Figure 1). The building is the first facility east of the Mississippi River and second in the country to use cross-laminated timber (CLT) made from southern pine (SP). It is part of the growing wave of interest in mass timber construction. …

Can a building’s structure enhance the human interactions that occur within and communicate its raison d’être to those outside its walls? These are the ideas that shaped the design of Building 201 at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, the nation’s largest University Affiliated Research Center. The result is an innovative structure that promotes collaboration and embraces the sense of the unknown inherent to revolutionary scientific research. …

The Nicoll Highway excavation shoring construction collapse occurred in Singapore on April 20, 2004, around 3:30 pm. The accident deeply impacted Singapore’s local construction industry. Many regulations were tightened up through this incident, such as appointing qualified geotechnical engineers for deep excavation works and requiring authority submissions for temporary construction. The collapse resulted in four people killed and three injured. Several project parties were charged in court, and project completion was delayed.

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The Structural Key to Outstanding Performances

A balance between the structural, acoustic, and architectural designs resulted in a world-class music facility right on the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s campus. Little does the musician or event-goer know that, to achieve acoustic perfection, three separate buildings were designed – and that these three separate buildings had to fit within a whole other, larger structure. …

The National Council of Structural Engineers Associations (NCSEA) is pleased to publish the winners of the 2020 Excellence in Structural Engineering Awards. The awards were announced during NCSEA’s 28th annual Structural Engineering Summit, which was held virtually this year. A video of the presentation can be found on the NCSEA website. Given annually since 1998, each year the entries highlight work from the best and brightest in our profession. …

Formerly the Madison Street Jail, constructed in 1985, the 225 W. Madison project in Phoenix provided an opportunity to resurrect a decommissioned jail facility and re-purpose it through adaptive re-use as a Class A office building. Maricopa County, the facility owner, chose to re-use and adapt the existing building, resulting in approximately $70M in savings. The 278,775-square-foot building project completely transformed the jail into an open workspace. This was accomplished by enhancing the structural integrity of the original cast-in-place concrete structure, which also serves as the exterior skin. DLR Group provided planning, architecture, structural engineering, MEP engineering, interiors, and construction administration services. …

The October 2020 STRUCTURE article, Coating Preparations Reduce the Strength of Bridges, presents information and opinions on potential problems with the fatigue resistance of steel bridges prepared for coatings using grit blast cleaning methods. Some of the information in this article is misleading with unsubstantiated claims regarding the safety of existing and future steel bridges. These topics are addressed below. …

121 Seaport Boulevard

Innovation is evident in the Boston skyline. A talented group of architects and engineers have designed the structures built in the last 30 years in Beantown. These creative firms continue to incorporate new design concepts that meet their client’s needs. Clients get a great, sustainable structure that utilizes the best materials and the most economical design. The public – well, they get to look at and utilize the buildings. One engineering firm has done its share of design in Boston: McNamara·Salvia Structural Engineers. …