Tours

A) adidas North American Headquarters

Location: Portland, Oregon
Scale: 460,000 sf
Completion: 2021

Photo © Jeremy Bittermann

UPDATE: Adidas just informed us that, although we are still allowed to visit their campus, we are no longer allowed to tour inside their mass timber buildings as planned. They cited concerns with COVID-19 as a primary reason. Instead, adidas will show some presentations and take attendees on a tour of the exterior of the buildings. Lunch will also be served on campus.

Following a national design competition, adidas selected the team of LEVER Architecture, Studio O+A, and GGN to realize a major expansion of their North American Headquarters. The target LEED v4 Gold project enhances adidas’ Portland, Oregon, campus with a new arrival sequence and two signature buildings. The overall material palette for both buildings is raw, authentic, and appropriate to the task: exposed concrete and wood, as well as metal panels that are woven across the façade. Leveraging the firm’s expertise with timber innovation, the design for the Gold Building deploys a unique hybrid structural system made from pre-cast concrete columns and girders with glulam beams and cross-laminated timber (CLT) panels. The Performance Zone Building’s all mass timber design includes glulam columns and beams with CLT panels. Located over an existing parking garage, the design takes advantage of the lightness of wood to create a larger structure. Mass timber’s warm character, technical innovation, and connection to the regional forestry culture make it an ideal material for a cutting-edge brand with roots in the Northwest.

Project Team

Owner: adidas
Architect: LEVER Architecture
General Contractor: Turner Construction Company
Mass Timber: DR Johnson Wood Innovations
Structural Engineering: KPFF Consulting Engineers
Civil Engineering: KPFF Consulting Engineers
MEP/FP Engineering: Interface Engineering
Building Enclosure Consulting: RDH Building Science
Acoustical Engineering: Stantec
Interior Designs: Studio O+A

B) Portland International Airport: Roof

Location: Portland, Oregon
Scale: 9-Acres
Completion: 2022

Photo © Mike Brewington of BREWSPHOTO LLC

Be one of the first to see the new mass timber roof for the Portland International Airport main terminal expansion and renovation. Part of PDX NEXT — a $2 billion investment to transform the airport — the roof will be the grand highlight of the new main terminal, slated for completion in 2025.

Featuring 3.3 million board feet of regionally- and sustainably-sourced Douglas fir, the 9-acre, seismically-isolated curved timber roof is awe-inspiring. Constructed offsite adjacent to the PDX airfield, the roof will be installed over the existing terminal over several nights in 2022. The roof incorporates over 2,000 glulam beams, including 272 single-span glulams reaching a massive 80 feet in length. In addition, 182 beams have arches reaching nearly 16 feet high, a size never before done with glulam of this shape as a single piece. In addition, more than a thousand 2-inch mass plywood panels are used extensively across the roof to make its intricate, curved design possible. Fastened to the underside of the glulam beams are more than 30,000 custom cut pieces of 3×6 lattice.

Project Team

Owner: Port of Portland
Architect: ZGF
General Contractor: Hoffman Skanska
Mass Timber: Zip-O Laminators, Freres Lumber Co. MPP, Calvert Co.
Structural Engineer: KPFF
Mass Timber Trade Partner: Swinerton
Mass Timber Consultant/Fabricator: Timberlab

C) Timberlab

Location: Portland, Oregon
Completion: 2021

Photo © Timberlab

Join Timberlab for an exciting in-depth tour of their Portland fabrication facility. Officially opened in 2021, Timberlab endeavors to do something never before done on each project.

On this tour, visitors will witness Timberlab’s fabrication capabilities by seeing a demonstration of their state-of-the-art, large-format beam saws. Guests will also learn more about the BIM for fabrication required by the Virtual Design and Construction team in setting up projects for fabrication. In coordination with the Portland International Airport Terminal Core Redevelopment project tour (above), visitors will also see pieces in the fabrication process for that project before they head out to the job site.

Timberlab is excited to showcase our facility as an essential part of the developing mass timber market. Comprised of in-house experts, Timberlab makes projects pencil through coordination and mastery of the mass timber supply chain. The team is excited to see mass timber grow in new markets, and is committed to advancing mass timber’s adoption in the United States commercial construction market for the benefit of the people and the planet.

D) First CLT Subdivision in the U.S.

Location: Portland, Oregon
Scale: 50,000 sf (via 14 homes)
Completion: 2022

Tour attendees will get an insider’s look at the nation’s first cross-laminated timber (CLT) subdivision, just finishing construction in Portland’s quintessential “Northwest” neighborhood. Developer Noel Johnson has translated lessons learned from his mass timber office projects into a family-focused housing project that delivers verifiable ESG features amid a walkable, urban setting. Architect of Record Tuan Luu (who Noel collaborated with on Portland’s 120 Clay mass timber office project) utilized the IRC code path for these fee-simple (detached) homes designed in a traditional row home architectural pattern language.

The result: an impressive 40 homes per acre density with all the function and charming form desired by today’s busy families. Technical approaches include the use of DR Johnson Wood Innovations’ five-ply CLT panels—made from fire-salvaged timber—that sit upon traditional pre-fab’d offsite wall panels. This allows for fast erection to get the MEPS trades going and a “core & shell” structure to better enable future homebuyer customizations. The project’s goal is to demonstrate a replicable, scalable way to use CLT as our industry responds to what Millennial homeowners want.

Project Team

Developer: ROH, LLC (Noel Johnson)
Architect of Record: Mildren Design Group (Tuan Luu)
General Contractor: I&E Construction (Cory Riedel)
Design: Potestio Studio (Rick Potestio)
Mass Timber: DR Johnson Wood Innovations
Structural Engineering: DCI Engineers (Adam Jongeward)
Marketing: Z Real Estate (Sean Becker)

E) MODS Factory Tour

Location: Portland, Oregon

This tour is an in-depth look at MODS PDX, a volumetric modular builder servicing the housing industry in Portland. In addition to mass timber, the light wood frame offsite construction and volumetric modular construction industry is rapidly expanding and evolving to meet the growing demand for housing in the US.

MODS PDX will take attendees on a tour of the factory floor to explain their process and some of their projects in Portland for single family, multi-family, and transitional/affordable housing. MODS PDX focuses on energy performance and factory tight envelopes. Guests will come away understanding this growing industry and how mass timber value-add modular may be realized soon in Oregon and beyond.

Cutting-Edge Research in Action at the TallWood Design Institute

Location: Corvallis, Oregon

Join TallWood Design Institute (TDI) at their new, state-of-the-art A.A. “Red” Emmerson Advanced Wood Products Laboratory at Oregon State University to learn more about — and see firsthand — cutting-edge mass timber research and workforce development. Participants will rotate through five stations hosted by research focusing on mass timber research and fabrication/construction techniques, and will end the day with a tour of the Peavy Forest Science Center — a CLT and glulam building. Stations will include…

Structural Testing

Structural and seismic research are critical to the development of engineering design values and working models for structural systems at the material, connection and full-system scales. Join TDI’s Structural Testing Coordinator, Byrne Miyamoto, to learn about our structural and seismic research program and facilities, and to see large scale research projects currently happening at the lab.

Computer Numerical Control (CNC) Fabrication

Come see our Biesse Uniteam UT 9 beam and panel processing center in action, and learn about how new computer aided design and manufacturing technologies (CAD/CAM) are revolutionizing conventional design and construction practices in the mass timber arena.

Ponderosa Pine CLT: Performance, Standards and Modular Design

Ponderosa pine has historically dominated the landscape of the east Cascades, Klamath, and Blue Mountains. These ecoregions face new management challenges as a result of climate change and a history of fire suppression, resulting in denser stands and higher fuel loads under increasing drought conditions. Dr. Mariapaola Riggio and Dr. Lech Muszynski will showcase and discuss research efforts focused on utilizing ponderosa pine for CLT and validating its performance, from the PRG320 standard through modular construction design applications.

Acoustics

While wood is a great material for resonating tones in musical instruments, it comes with its own challenges when designing for acoustic separation in multifamily homes, hospitals, and other building types that require peace and quiet. Join Dr. Mark Fretz of the University of Oregon’s Institute for Health in the Built Environment (IHBE) to learn about acoustics in timber structures, and to see a live demo of acoustic testing devices used to assess mass timber structures acoustic performance.

Seismic + Energy Retrofitting Using Mass Timber

Join TDI, OSU and UO researchers as they discuss the evolution of their work in utilizing scanning, prefabrication and mass timber as a potential solution for retrofitting URM buildings for superior energy and seismic performance!

About the A.A. “Red” Emmerson Advanced Wood Products Laboratory

The Emmerson Lab’s 12,500 square-feet of structural testing space and 2,500 square-feet of advanced wood products manufacturing area immediately captures the eye with its massive reaction wall and strong floor system, and its use of cross laminated timber from D.R. Johnson Wood Innovations and the first ever structural use of mass plywood panels (MPP) from Freres Lumber. The strong wall/floor is one of the largest in the nation dedicated to timber engineering (60-by-80 foot strong floor area with a 25 foot tall reaction wall system) and enables testing of up to 3-story structures.

Description coming soon.

Please join us for an exciting multi-media tour of the massive new roof structure at the Portland International Airport in Portland, Oregon, USA. This virtual visit to a once-in-a-career project will give you an in-depth look at the planning, logistics, and craftsmanship that are going into the over 2 million board foot mass timber and steel roof over the expanded terminal. Since the roof is being fully prefabricated on the ground (membrane, skylights, etc) prior to moving it into place, this tour will be a unique opportunity to see the near final product close up. The tour will also share progress photos and behind the scenes details of the more than four years of planning that have prepared the team for the big move later this summer. The tour will culminate in sequence showing the plan for moving these massive sections across the runways and into place above a fully operational airport.

Always wanted to visit a CREE building but never had the chance?

Join us virtually as we experience the largest building project currently underway in Germany: the Siemens Campus Erlangen.

This is an ambitious project in every respect — when finished it will cover an area equivalent to an incredible 75 soccer fields. What makes it truly remarkable is that the new central reception building and four office buildings (with a total area of around 860,000 sq. ft 80,000 m2) are being built using CREE Buildings’ prefabricated, regenerative timber-hybrid system, with the whole project supported by model-based work processes (BIM — Building Information Modelling). Thanks to innovative prefabrication processes, the CREE system significantly shortens the time needed to erect the main structure, while simultaneously reducing the dust, noise, and waste generated on site compared to conventional concrete construction projects.

These new campus buildings will serve as a testament to Siemens’ ecologically responsible mindset, as well as showcasing the possibility of saving time and resources through smarter building practices.

Michael Kamenik, lead architect and global partner coordinator at CREE Buildings, will be your tour guide. He will show you the attractive campus setting with its state-of-the-art office infrastructure and buildings, punctuated with valuable technical insights. Accompanied by two experts, you will gain insights into the challenges and lessons learned during planning and construction. You’ll also get insights into the prefabrication and assembly process, as well as the main idea and decisions behind this exceptional project.