Lucas Epp

Mass timber construction in America has been reborn with T3 Minneapolis (timber, transit, technology) – at 220,000 sqft and 7 stories, T3 is the largest modern mass timber building in North America. As a spec office building it is designed to attract the modern tenant, embracing green construction techniques and creating a warm interior environment with the timber superstructure. T3’s rustic core-ten façade resembles its historic neighbours while its interior highlights simplicity, modernity… Show more

Mass timber construction in America has been reborn with T3 Minneapolis (timber, transit, technology) – at 220,000 sqft and 7 stories, T3 is the largest modern mass timber building in North America. As a spec office building it is designed to attract the modern tenant, embracing green construction techniques and creating a warm interior environment with the timber superstructure. T3’s rustic core-ten façade resembles its historic neighbours while its interior highlights simplicity, modernity and elegance through exposed engineered wood products and connections. Over 1000 CNC’d glulam beams and columns and over 1100 2x8 NLT panels were prefabricated offsite and sequentially delivered to site for just in time delivery. The T3 timber superstructure was erected in 9.5 weeks. The T3 success story began with a convinced developer and design team, and carried through with exceptional team communication, collaboration, and pre-planning and eventually delivery from StructureCraft. Every detail was carefully discussed and realized with the intent that T3 represent a successful and competitive model for future mass timber buildings in North America. Show less

Set over the Bow River in the mountain setting of Banff is a slender 113m long timber bridge both serving pedestrian traffic and providing a sensitive sanitary crossing replacement. Its minimal form was designed to blend into the natural beauty of Canada’s first national park.

The 80m clear span is one of the longest for a timber bridge. Key to success of the project was careful attention to detailing, mitigation of dynamic behaviour, and a high degree of pre-fabrication.

In this paper we present a parametrically enabled design tool which provides a unified approach
to the structural scheme design of floor plates. The tool created allows the evaluation of a design’s
performance in real time as different design parameters are varied, both increasing process
efficiency and enabling a much more robust exploration of design space in the early stages of a
project. An optimising process takes a given topology defined parametrically, and starting from… Show more

In this paper we present a parametrically enabled design tool which provides a unified approach
to the structural scheme design of floor plates. The tool created allows the evaluation of a design’s
performance in real time as different design parameters are varied, both increasing process
efficiency and enabling a much more robust exploration of design space in the early stages of a
project. An optimising process takes a given topology defined parametrically, and starting from a
default beam size progressively iterates in near real-time towards a structure which satisfies both
serviceability, dynamic, and ultimate limit state considerations. Significantly, real-time dynamic
analysis enabled the evaluation of acceleration criteria at each iteration step and thus an accurate
and transparent appraisal of the dynamic performance of the structure.
The work presented in this paper was done thanks to the cooperation with Buro Happold as part
of the final year students’ dissertation and was directly related to real construction projects. Show less

The Exhibition Centre at the new Cairo Expo City development comprises a curved roof structure sweeping over four internal exhibition halls and covering over 180 000m2 of plan area. This project has been driven by the design team’s desire for complete integration of structure and architecture while efficiently realising a complex free-form shape. This paper presents the technical and logistical development of the roof structure, integration with architecture, operation and servicing, and the… Show more

The Exhibition Centre at the new Cairo Expo City development comprises a curved roof structure sweeping over four internal exhibition halls and covering over 180 000m2 of plan area. This project has been driven by the design team’s desire for complete integration of structure and architecture while efficiently realising a complex free-form shape. This paper presents the technical and logistical development of the roof structure, integration with architecture, operation and servicing, and the structural design and optimisation of the spatial roof truss. Show less

The Richmond Speed Skating Oval roof has a clear span of over 100m, creating a building footprint of 25,000m2. The all-wood roof utilises dimensional lumber to create 'WoodWave' panels, each spanning up to 13.1m between the fifteen parallel primary arches. Variation in module design was captured using parametric models, and linked to a computer-controlled manufacturing system, creating a full-cycle digital fabrication process which this paper describes.