Post-Disaster Observations of the Kahramanmaras Turkiye Earthquake Sequence — Part 1

Tallwood 1 at District 56 is a twelve-story mixed-use mass timber building located in Langford, British Columbia, Canada, designed by Design Build Services (DBS), Jack James Architecture, and Aspect Structural Engineers (Figure 1). Tall wood construction is a relatively new typology across North America, and this building is the first structure to be constructed under the British Columbia Building Code’s (BCBC) new Encapsulated Mass Timber Construction (EMTC) provisions, a typology that drastically reduces a building’s structural embodied carbon. EMTC is very similar in limitations and fire requirements to the 2021 IBC Type IV-B construction type. As appropriate to a novel system, the design and construction of this building presented some significant challenges and valuable lessons along the way, with one of the primary challenges being the building’s location: Langford is located in the Cascadia Subduction Zone, a region that is among the highest in seismic demand in all of Canada. Tallwood 1 was the tallest steel-timber hybrid structure in Canada when it was completed in 2021.

Portland International Airport, commonly known as PDX, has been consistently voted among America’s Best Airports by Travel and Leisure Magazine’s reader poll for nearly 20 years, earning the top spot nearly every year. More than that, it is beloved by the people of Oregon and SW Washington as a home base, evidenced by the adoption of the PDX airport code as a moniker for the city itself and by the popular tradition of sharing pictures of your shoes on the iconic carpet to announce you’ve touched down and are officially home from your latest adventure. However, a master planning effort led by the Port of Portland (project owner) in 2014 identified numerous needs to meet increasing passenger demand, which was forecast to double over the coming decades. Initial studies focused on squeezing additional security, ticketing, and baggage processing capacity into the existing terminal were found to be inadequate as a long-term solution, and building a second, separate terminal was undesirable due to the worsened passenger experience of multi-terminal airports, high cost, and duplication of systems and services required. Thus, as the centerpiece of their PDX Next suite of projects, the Port of Portland elected to expand and modernize the existing terminal via the roughly $2 Billion Terminal Core Redevelopment project (TCORE), which as of this writing, is past mid-way through six years of planned construction. 

Chicago’s iconic Wolf Point site, which has eluded development for several decades, is now the proud home of one of the largest technology companies in the world, Salesforce, Inc. The 60-story, 850-foot-tall, glass and steel office tower is the crown jewel of the three-structure development that delivers office and residential living to this vibrant area of downtown Chicago. 

Mass timber construction has gained momentum throughout North America over the past ten years. For example, Apex Plaza is an approximately 300,000 square foot, mixed-use office/retail/ residential high-rise building in Charlottesville, Virginia, with six stories of mass timber framing over a four-story concrete podium parking structure. At the time of its completion in April 2022, Apex Plaza became the largest mass timber-framed building on the east coast.