Course catalog

Modern timber buildings typically include a combination of wood and other materials, with light wood framing, steel and concrete utilized where structurally efficient. However, successfully realizing a hybrid of mass timber and other materials requires an acute understanding of their differences,...

Interested in touring two spectacular mass timber office projects? Now you can. Join us for guided virtual tours of Catalyst, a five-story, 150,000-sf building in Spokane, Washington, and The Soto, a six-story, 140,600-sf project in San Antonio, Texas. Catalyst is the first office building in ...

Two of the nation’s first tall mass timber towers are currently under construction—INTRO, a nine-story mix of apartments and retail space in Cleveland, and Ascent, a 25-story residential/mixed-use building in Milwaukee. In this webinar, the structural engineers of both projects will take a deep ...

Part 1 of the series will address code requirements and relative stiffness issues associated with cantilever diaphragms in wood structures. Traditionally, wood-frame diaphragms are designed as flexible, meaning that shear forces are transferred to vertical-resisting systems based on tributary ...

Part 3 of this series will take an in-depth look at cantilever diaphragm design processes. Using calculation steps per ASCE 7 and the 2015 edition of the American Wood Council’s Special Design Provisions for Wind & Seismic (SDPWS), diaphragm force distribution will be used to illustrate diaphragm...

Wood-frame and mass timber projects, like all construction in the U.S., have long been hindered by a strong reliance on prescriptive building code limits and less willingness to use or accept performance-based fire protection engineering. However, over the past few years, a shift has occurred. ...

Lateral force resisting systems in in today's  structures are much more complex than they were several decades ago, incorporating multiple horizontal and vertical offsets in the diaphragms, multiple irregularities, and fewer lateral resisting elements. This two part presentation will provide a ...

For decades, it has been generally assumed that large industrial facilities consist of steel roof framing and tilt-up concrete walls or exterior metal panels. However, with increased awareness of the monetary and carbon costs associated with building systems and assemblies, some design and ...

The Aspen Art Museum, designed by architect Shigeru Ban, includes a long-span three-dimensional wood space-frame roof. Ban’s charge was to create a wood space frame with spans of more than 50 feet and cantilevers of 14 feet, in a structural depth of 3 feet. The space frame was to have two planes ...