Here’s How
MAKING MASS-TIMBER CONSTRUCTION A MAINSTREAM OPTION
ADVANCED TIMBER DELIVERY (ATD)
FIRE SEPARATION
SPEEDS CONSTRUCTION
ACOUSTIC PERFORMANCE
Mass timber has colossal potential to reduce embodied carbon in the built environment. We have the experience to use it with confidence. Lighter and far more sustainable than concrete or steel, mass-timber construction is gaining ground as a primary structural material. Our engineers have experience designing mass-timber buildings and components in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom.
How can we help you? We offer solutions for an ever-widening range of services and sectors.
Paul Becker , P.E.
MassTimber
Construction
Senior Principal
PBecker@ThorntonTomasetti.com 14 York St., Suite 201 Portland, ME 04101 +1.207.879.1838
John Peronto , S.E., P.E., CEng, EUR ING, FIStructE, FICE, F.ASCE, LEED AP Senior Principal & Chicago Co-Office Director
REDUCED BEAM COUNT
INTEGRATED MEP
JPeronto@ThorntonTomasetti.com 330 N. Wabash Ave., Suite 1500 Chicago, IL 60611-7622 +1.312.596.2022
Eddie Jump
Technical Director
EJump@ThorntonTomasetti.com
LONGER SPANS
BIOPHILIC DESIGN
Background image: courtesy KORB + Associates Architects
Exmouth House, Third Floor, 3-11 Pine St. London. EC1R 0JH. United Kingdom +44.020.7014.4400
Offices Worldwide
ThorntonTomasetti.com
Timber Composite Hybrid
Courtesy Jack Carter Architects
Glulam Beam
A Solution for the Future
CLT Slab Glulam Column
CLT Span RC Core
Ascent Milwaukee, Wisconsin Ascent is the world’s tallest mass-timber building. The 493,000-square-foot, mixed-use building brings together the aesthetic, structural and sustainability benefits of mass timber. We are leading the mass-timber design program, including providing inspections of the mass-timber system and working with the USDA Forest Products Laboratory to complete the world’s first threehour fire-testing program for glulam columns.
To devise a new, low-carbon building material, we collaborated with industry partners who shared our vision and could provide market intuition and internal R&D, and who could provide Environmental Product Declarations for their materials to support our joint findings. Together, we developed a 15-by-9-meter grid using a 300-millimeter-thick slab comprising 200 millimeters of CLT with a 100-millimeter-thick topping. Our primary innovation was replacement of the screed that would ordinarily perform damping and acoustic functions with a lowstrength, high-cement replacement concrete of equivalent embodied carbon. This, coupled with development of connection details between the topping and the CLT, allowed us to extend the spans. We then developed computational methods to benefit from the topping being composite with the steelwork and, by removing primary beams, reduced the tonnage necessary for a bay of this size.
“ Our system provides the aesthetic
and embodied-carbon benefits of a timber-and-steel hybrid while enabling longer-span spaces, without increasing costs.”
Santander Bank Contact Hub & Operations Centre Bootle, United Kingdom Thornton Tomasetti is part of the competition-winning team to develop a new 240,000-foot contact center and operations hub for Santander Bank. The state-of-the-art campus will replace the existing center and continue to employ more than 2,500 people.
– Eddie Jump, Technical Director
The result is extraordinarily lean, requiring only half the tonnage of steelwork per square meter of a concrete-and-steel composite for the same bay size. We achieved this while stretching the timber spans from 4.5 meters to 9 meters. In doing so, we enlarged the coffer to the timber by up to 430 percent over the hybrid projects we have benchmarked, dramatically expanding the apparent headroom while delivering a negative carbon product after sequestration is accounted for.
Using CLT requires an eye for details, and Thornton Tomasetti resolved this by supporting the façade on rails running parallel to the floor panels. This enabled façade support to avoid combustible materials while it enabled the floor beams to be pulled back from the façade, aiding light penetration.