A six-story multifamily building on the rise in Eugene will be the first residential development in the city to be made of structural cross-laminated timber.

Crosswood Apartments will offer 127 units near the University of Oregon campus. They’re intended to serve professionals – particularly those working at the fast-growing Knight Campus for Accelerating Scientific Impact.

“We’re catering to the Knight science campus researchers and faculty, the UO faculty, post-docs, researchers,” said Philip Farrington, director of planning and real estate development for project owner CDC Management Corp. “That’s our primary market – as well as professionals of all stripes who want to live so close to the halo of campus.”

Eugene lacks multifamily options for professionals, said Mark Miksis, a partner in Eugene-based deChase Miksis Development – the project’s development representative.

“Eugene has just not had the expansion of multifamily units outside of student housing over the years that it probably should have had,” Miksis said. “It’s a strong market to be coming into right now.”

The property at 1841 Garden Ave., between Millrace Drive and Villard Street, has long been owned by the Chambers family, which has substantial business interests in the Willamette Valley. CDC Management Corp. is one of the family’s real estate businesses. Family members also own or owned television station KEZI, Silvan Ridge Winery, a food processing company and an auto dealership among other ventures. They also have been involved in several high-profile commercial property developments in Eugene.

Crosswood will feature a concrete podium topped by five stories of wood framing. It will ascend to about 59 feet, below the 65-foot height limit for the property.

Cross-laminated timber buildings have proliferated in Portland, but have only begun to show up in Eugene. A farmers market pavilion and plaza under construction in Eugene will have CLT wall and roof panels. A building at the Knight science campus has CLT for staircases. But Crosswood will stand out among multifamily buildings in the city.

“The ownership had an interest in doing something innovative and distinctive,” Farrington said.

Crosswood’s CLT will come from Structurlam, a manufacturer based in British Columbia. The materials were competitively bid.

Rowell Brokaw Architects‘ design showcases the CLT materials, Miksis said.

“We’re going to have exposed ceilings in all of our living spaces,” he said. “This really will expose the wood. We’re able to run our windows right up to the underside of the ceiling, which makes a difference in lighting the room.”

The ground floor will feature townhome-style units with exterior doors as well as access from the building’s interior. A large entry plaza will be available for events. The ground floor will also have a leasing office, space for mail services, secure storage and amenity space.

John Hyland Construction began work in July 2021 and is expected to finish this fall – most likely in November, Farrington said.

“This is going to be a distinctive project in the marketplace, not only for its construction technology – CLT – but its location is unparalleled,” he said.

Project: Crosswood Apartments

Location: Eugene

Cost: $38 million

Size: 131,000 square feet

Architect: Rowell Brokaw Architects

General contractor: John Hyland Construction

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One of the advantages of mass-timber construction in the Portland-metro area is that products aren’t far away. They can be produced at plants in Oregon, Washington and British Columbia, Canada. That has taken on even greater importance now, when deliveries of many materials are beginning to take longer.

P&C Construction knew that as it began to construct the Robert Libke Public Safety Building in Oregon City. Rick McMurry, chief safety officer for MHA Resource Co., parent of P&C Construction, said delayed arrivals of materials due to the COVID-19 pandemic haven’t yet impacted the anticipated completion date for the project. But the possibility of that happening is on team members’ minds.

“Once this (pandemic) rolled out, we’ve been checking in weekly with subcontractors about anything with a lead time,” said Will Somme, a P&C Construction project manager. “We’re like, ‘Guys, this is a public project. We have an avenue to get stored material paid for; let’s get it here.’ At some point it’s going to have an impact. We just don’t know when that’s going to happen.”

The Robert Libke Public Safety Building will be a single-level, 34,000-square-foot, multipurpose facility located on the Mt. Pleasant property that formerly held school buildings over more than 150 years. The ex-Mt. Pleasant Elementary School, at 1232 Linn Ave., was demolished to make way for the new building. It will house the Oregon City Police Department, municipal court space and emergency management operations.

The building is named for the late Reserve Officer Robert Libke, who in 2013 responded to a house fire, was shot by an occupant of the house, and then died the next day. A new outdoor plaza will feature a memorial wall made of bricks and a main entry window salvaged from the elementary school.

Designed by FFA Architecture & Interiors, the new building is being constructed entirely from mass timber, with cross-laminated timber panels for walls and ceilings, and glulam beams and columns holding everything up. The entire heavy-timber package was fabricated by British Columbia firm Structurlam. All structural elements were placed this past winter, prior to the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The facility is designed to seismic standards that call for immediate operations in the wake of a significant earthquake. Even interior shear walls meant to protect the building during seismic events are made from cross-laminated timber panels.

Engineers designed a roof structure with the entire diaphragm locked into the structural elements via a series of massive, six-inch, metal-plate drag struts, Somme said. KPFF Consulting Engineers is the structural engineer for the project.

Typically, on a wood structure locking the diaphragm together with angle brackets, drag struts and other measures is not needed, he added. But because this is a Category 4 building it was required.

Steel, buckling-restrained brace frames were considered and rejected on aesthetic grounds, Somme added.

“On a CLT structure you can incorporate those BRB frames,” he said. “But you don’t really want to because it takes away from the visualization of the interior of the building. You see the cross braces and you think, ‘Well, that’s a beautiful wall behind it.’ It was a challenge for our structural engineers.”

The building’s interior is designed to showcase the heavy timber, with CLT wall and ceiling panels left exposed along with ductwork.

The rectangular massing features a variety of cutouts that create courtyards with protected views and openness to ample natural light. Public areas, including the municipal court, will be separated from law enforcement-only spaces, including offices, conference rooms, evidence storage and more. All of these spaces will feature vaulted ceilings and natural light coming from a clerestory that parallels the main corridor running the length of the building.

On the exterior, metal panels will feature predominantly, along with curtain-wall storefronts.

For now, the scheduled completion date for the project is Aug. 21. That could change, however.

“The way (the pandemic is) going it might eventually, but for now it hasn’t,” McMurry said.

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Mass-timber production, barely more than a decade old in North America, is encountering some growing pains.

Wait times stretch months for new material such as cross-laminated timber panels, leaving construction schedules on hold.

At the same time, new factories are coming online – some branched off from small sawmills and others backed by deep-pocketed international equity – and major timber companies are showing serious interest in becoming�� players in the mass-timber market.

“Projects have been struggling to get supply and lead times of a year have not been uncommon,” said Iain Macdonald, executive director of the TallWood Design Institute, a collaboration of Oregon State University‘s College of Forestry and the University of Oregon‘s School of Architecture and Environment.

Demand is not the problem. Google’s Sidewalk Labs has announced a sprawling mass-timber project in Toronto that would have 34,000 housing units in buildings with up to 30 stories made from CLT and glulam beams. The buildings would be the tallest mass-timber structures to date in North America.

Other mass-timber projects under way include: a new headquarters building for Walmart in Bentonville, Arkansas; a 17-story, 137-unit residential tower in Vancouver, British Columbia; and a 300,000-square-foot, six-story speculative office building in San Francisco designed by Portland’s Hacker.

Mass timber‘s supply chain is not like those of concrete, steel and traditional timber framing. Mass timber must be made to order and cut to certain dimensions. It must be processed to include channels cut to fit adjacent panels or beams, and in some cases, holes to accept hardware. It must be made to fit into the building being designed.

“If you want mass timber to work as a concept and to be economically viable, you need to involve suppliers early in the project,” Macdonald said.

There’s no off-the-shelf way to buy mass timber. That means developers, architects and their contractors typically engage a mass-timber supplier long before construction begins in an integrated project delivery method.

“It is very much a project-based industry,” said Hardy Wentzel, CEO of Penticton, British Columbia-based Structurlam – the largest mass-timber manufacturer in North America. “It’s not like a mass production of lumber or plywood where you make standard sizes. That’s just not the case here, but it’s not the case in Europe either.”

Long lead times also make it difficult for project teams to switch suppliers. If a manufacturer falls behind, project teams have few alternatives.

The supply shortage is having consequences on the groud for mass-timber projects.

“Most of the West Coast suppliers are really starting to be maxed out,” said Stefee Knudsen, a Hacker principal who is leading design of the Pier 70 office building in San Francisco. “This project is actually too big for most of the suppliers.”

Opportunistic European manufacturers are looking to fill the gap, scooping up North American market share where they can.

“The European supply chain is able to compete on the West Coast,” Knudsen said. “It’s looking like it could be a European supply of the mass timber (for Pier 70). It actually costs about the same to put it on a ship through the Panama Canal as it does to put it on a truck down the West Coast.”

Knudsen said she would prefer to use a local manufacturer if capacity were not an issue.

“We just need the supply to catch up with the demand,” she said. “It is hard to be an Oregonian and to think our project could be supplied by a European (manufacturer). One thing I hope happens is some more come online in the Pacific Northwest because I really support our rural communities here.”

ZGF Architects is designing mass-timber projects in Portland and Texas.

“Supply continues to be an issue, but we’re working through it,” Kristina Thomsen, a ZGF principal, said at a 91��Ƶ Builder Breakfast event in December.

More supply is coming. Locally, Swinerton Builders is investing in its own glulam fabrication capability, Macdonald said.

“That’s showing they’re seeing a bottleneck in certain aspects of the supply chain,” he said, referring to Computer Numerical Control (CNC) machines that perform detailing work on CLT panels.

Swinerton officials could not be reached for comment.

A major timber company is considering construction of a mass-timber manufacturing facility in southern Oregon, said Macdonald, who said he could not divulge details because of a nondisclosure agreement.

“Major timber players are poised to jump into the mass-timber sphere,” he said. “The major timber companies for years have been kicking tires and looking at when is the right time to jump in. They have considerable capital, and as that happens, you’ll see some economies of scale.”

Mass timber has attracted vocal boosters for its lower carbon footprint in comparison to concrete, ability to withstand earthquakes and fire, faster construction timelines, and its warm look and ability to integrate into sleek, modern designs.

Other mass-timber plants are planned or beginning to operate.

Structurlam and Walmart have announced the manufacturer will open a facility in Conway, Arkansas, a suburb of Little Rock, to supply 1.1 million cubic feet of mass timber for the retailer’s headquarters. The facility will be housed, in a twist of irony, in a retooled former steel fastener plant that had been shuttered.

Katerra is another emerging player that could provide significant new supply. The company opened a 270,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in Spokane Valley, Washington, in September. Katerra is backed by SoftBank, the same investor with large stakes in Uber and WeWork, and has raised eyebrows by closing a factory in Phoenix last year and laying off employees amid reports of unfinished projects. Still, the company has announced plans for manufacturing facilities in California and Texas.

Another, smaller entrant into the market is Vaagen Timbers of Colville, Washington. The company was started by members of the same family that operates Vaagen Brothers Lumber, a local mill company that dates to the early 1950s.

Vaagen Timbers was certified for construction in July, and is now providing CLT material for everything from a small ski lodge in Idaho to a Lutheran church in Minnesota.

“We’re at about 30 to 35 percent of our production capacity currently,” said Russ Vaagen, founder and chief executive of the firm. “But that’s not what we see for our market in general. Not all the architects have us in their sights as far as supply.”

There’s also some consolidation occurring: SmartLam, based in Montana, bought an operation in Dothan, Alabama, that was started by International Beams.

In Oregon, D.R. Johnson has been hailed by politicians as a new answer to the state’s longtime battles between the timber industry and environmentalists, and a bridge across the rural-urban divide. The Riddle manufacturer has by all accounts bounced back strongly after one of its CLT panels in March 2018 at the Peavy Hall project site at Oregon State University.

Following that incident, investigations indicated the material failed because standard procedures weren’t followed, Macdonald said.

“They heated up the wood too much,” he said. “When the adhesive was applied, it was dried before it was bonded.”

D.R. Johnson has since invested in climate control at its Riddle facility, instituted further quality control checks and made personnel changes, Macdonald said.

“They seem to have moved forward really well from that,” he said. “There was so much demand and so little supply that they were able to continue without a hitch.”

One of the first project teams to use D.R. Johnson’s CLT products after the incident was Urban Development + Partners and Beam Development for District Office in Portland’s Central Eastside.

The incident may have temporarily made it easier to get CLT material, said Eric Cress, principal at UD+P.

“We had no problem,” he said.

D.R. Johnson is in the preliminary stages of considering an expansion at its property in Riddle, President Valerie Johnson said.

“We have quite a bit of vacant property here at our plant,” she said. “I would say, yes, that we are looking at that.”

Industry officials said the Riddle manufacturer is rumored to be booked up with supplying the Sidewalk Labs project in Toronto. Johnson declined to comment on the project.

“The Google project is the worst-kept secret in the industry,” Macdonald said.

The forest-products industry is continuing to innovate to meet demand, Johnson said.

“We’re excited about growth,” she said. “It’s frustrating to not be able to feed more of it, and we certainly don’t want the market to get frustrated waiting for material. …��I think everybody’s trying to gear up.”

As the industry matures, some manufacturers are seeking the next step.

Vaagen Timbers has made a bet on 4-foot-wide CLT panels that can be manufactured up to 60 feet long. They are ideal for uses such as elevator shafts, Russ Vaagen said.

In Europe, a popular size is 1,250 millimeters – slightly wider than 4 feet, Vaagen said. He believes the CLT industry will move toward a standard size.

“I do think there are going to be stock panels – and I think they’re going to be the 4-foot panels, and that isn’t because it’s what we produce,” he said.

Structurlam’s Wentzel, however, was skeptical that the industry would make such a move.

“We just don’t see a standardized offering,” he said. “There is no such thing as a standard building. Somebody in the supply chain is going to have to manipulate that standardized piece to fit the building.”

Structurlam does not keep inventory of manufactured panels. That would introduce additional costs into the supply chain and make mass timber less competitive, Wentzel said.

Wentzel said manufacturers are not alone to blame for supply issues, pointing to a lack of building professionals who are experienced in mass timber.

“Not everybody knows how to design and build the material yet,” he said.

Mass timber has proved to be a use for the small-diameter lumber that is readily available. Old-growth timber is not needed to manufacture the pressed panels and beams.

Macdonald said he sees an opening for CLT manufacturers to use reclaimed lumber. Wood material that is now wasted could be diverted from the landfill, he said.

“We’ve looked at processing those kinds of fibers from panels, and technically it’s absolutely viable,” he said. “There’s no performance deficit. The issue is there’s no supply chain there, so it’s not economically viable at the moment.”

In Portland, a cottage industry has sprung up of architects, developers and builders who specialize in mass timber. Some of the first mass-timber projects in the U.S. were built in Portland.

“Oregon has really been leading the charge, I would say, in the U.S.,” Wentzel said. “It’s a very good market for us.”

As the industry matures, it’s increasingly apparent there will be plenty of competition.

“The market is an unforgiving judge, so you have to be competitive, you have to provide quality, you have to be timely, you have to provide service,” Wentzel said.

As for supply, he added, the industry is growing quickly.

“It is nascent, but the market will find a way, and it is finding a way,” Wentzel said.

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Next to Carbon 12, an eight-story mass-timber mixed-use building in North Portland, the Kaiser Group and PATH Architecture are sticking with wood.

The Canyons, at the corner of North Williams Avenue and Ivy Street, will also feature cross-laminated timber (CLT). It will be six stories and offer market-rate apartments as well as substantial commercial space. But The Canyons won’t be a carbon copy.

“It’s a different type of structure,” said project architect Emily Dawson of PATH Architecture. “This is much more like a conventional multifamily project where we don’t have a post-and-beam structure like a lot of the CLT projects going on right now.”

R&H Construction is the general contractor for The Canyons. Crews broke ground in February on what will eventually be a 65-foot-tall building with 70 residential units. In total, there will be 110,000 square feet of floor space. It is designed for seniors, but there won’t be an age restriction. The team sought to offer physically accessible accommodations within a vibrant urban environment. Light-filled apartments will have open floor plans and modern designs. Plus, a resident paramedic will be available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Then there’s the unique open-air Alleywalk marketplace that will feature two separate buildings with several small businesses. These micro-retail spaces will range from 250 to 420 square feet.

Also, officials are working to establish partnerships with Legacy Health, New Seasons Market and others to help residents save on dining and health care costs.

The project is designed in part around the concept of intergenerational living. To that end, the team hopes to attract a Montessori school or a similar tenant.

On the design and engineering front, Dawson noted, there have been plenty of lessons learned from PATH Architecture’s experience with Carbon 12 to apply to The Canyons. While both buildings use CLT floor panels (fabricated by British Columbia-based Structurlam), there are more differences than similarities between them. Carbon 12, for instance, features a structural steel core, while The Canyons is being built more or less as a conventional building with a post-tensioned concrete podium.

One unique use of CLT panels in The Canyons will be in an interior atrium structure that links all five stories of apartments through the building’s open-air center. Zigzagging walkways on each floor will bounce from entryway to entryway along the length of the building. Those CLT walkways will be supported by other panels, but at skewed angles to form a never-before-seen load-bearing structure.

To obtain a final building permit, Dawson and her team had the walkway design tested by the Tallwood Design Institute at Oregon State University.

“Because they sit along each corridor wall, but sit at this kind of skewed angle, it creates what is called torsional shear through the panel,” Dawson said. “It’s shear moving through the panel in a way that we don’t have tested values that we can pull from charts.”

Under guidelines in Chapter 17 of the state building code, an exact copy of the atrium design was fabricated and sent to the Tallwood Design Institute lab for load-bearing tests. The results showed the design could bear at least three times its intended structural load – the lab ran out of weight to add after roughly 60,000 pounds.

“Our panels recovered to the level at which it passed the two-times test,” Dawson said. “Even when we took it to three times, we actually tried to break the panel but we couldn’t get it to failure.”

Crews from R2M2 Rebar & Stressing and Marion Construction are working below grade to construct the building’s underground parking structure, foundation and core.

“We are pouring structural concrete in the basement right now,” said Adam Peterson, senior project manager for R&H Construction. “Work on most of our foundations are complete. We are working on columns and walls, and right now we’re trending a little bit ahead of schedule. We will be in structural concrete through summer and starting wood framing in September and then the CLT will go up quite quickly.”

Cross-laminated timber offers multiple benefits, Dawson said.

“The first thing was the schedule advantages and ease of construction and lack of complications,” she said. “The second is the look; people just really love being in those spaces. It looks really beautiful and it feels so good to have that exposed wood. So, we see that as a differentiator on the market, and as a building owner it was really important to us.”

Completion is scheduled for fall 2020.

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Tucked next to a park and other corporate offices in Hillsboro, a structure touted as the largest cross-laminated timber building in the United States is gaining occupants.

First Tech Federal Credit Union is in the process of moving 650 employees from its former office in Beaverton and short-term leased space in Hillsboro to its new 156,000-square-foot building that integrates wood, glass and steel.

The building is First Tech’s base of operations in Oregon, where it serves clients such as Intel, Nike, Hewlett-Packard, Amazon and Tektronix. The credit union’s headquarters is in Mountain View, California.

The five-story building has cross-laminated timber from Structurlam, a manufacturer based in Penticton, British Columbia, Canada. The CLT was stamped and readied off-site. It was then assembled into place – in a process not unlike stacking Lincoln Logs – by general contractor Swinerton Inc.

The CLT is complemented by glass, flat steel panels and mirrored steel panels. The effect is a warm, modern building that’s more horizontal than vertical as it cuts across the site.

“The idea was not to make a building that is next to the park, but a building that is the park,” said Scott Barton-Smith, project architect with Hacker.

Each floor has floor-to-ceiling windows that let in natural light. An in-floor HVAC system reduces the need for clutter on the ceiling, allowing the CLT panels to show.

“They wanted to create a distinctive workplace that helps them attract and retain the best staff,” Barton-Smith said. “Wood is one way of doing that.”

Using CLT tightened the construction timeline, said Monique Little, First Tech’s chief people and administrative officer.

Swinerton broke ground in May 2017 and finished the project in 15 months.

“It was a pretty aggressive timeline, which was why CLT was advantageous for us,” Little said.

Hacker and First Tech began discussing CLT early in the project timeline, Barton-Smith said.

“It just became clear in early phases of programming that mass timber would be a particularly good fit for their institution,” he said.

Little declined to provide the project’s cost, but she said work was completed on schedule and under budget. Using CLT saved an estimated 4 percent compared to a comparable steel structure, she said. First Tech self-financed the project.

The project did not use CLT from D.R. Johnson, a Riddle-based firm that supplied material that delaminated in March at an Oregon State University project site. D.R. Johnson’s CLT has been touted as a potential economic engine for Oregon.

Structurlam buys wood on the open market, and Barton-Smith said he saw pallets of Oregon wood products being used when he visited Structurlam’s facility.

“The CLT makes such a beautiful finish,” he said. “It’s a particularly elegant material because it does many things: It is a structural deck. It is its own fireproofing. And it’s a beautiful material.”

The project team believes the First Tech building is the largest CLT building in the United States. There are larger mass timber buildings in the U.S., but not one with CLT. However, there are some larger CLT projects in Canada, including the Brock Commons building at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.

Use of CLT required installation of sound-deadening panels in some areas. CLT projects need special attention paid to acoustics, Barton-Smith said.

Both the office building and the parking garage have bike parking for employees. The office building also has showers and locker rooms.

Last week, workers were putting up a First Tech sign in the lobby. Employees worked at their desks, save for a pair playing pingpong.

First Tech chose the site after a long search. The financial institution was dedicated to staying in the West Portland metro area, Little said.

“Being on the west side is important to us,” she said. “That’s where our members live. That’s where they work. That’s where our partner companies are.”

First Tech is building a five-floor parking garage on the other side of the 17-acre campus. In between is an open area, which was being graded last week to accommodate grass. That area is expected to be the eventual home of a second office building as First Tech expands. The first building has capacity for up to 900 employees. The site also has a large surface parking lot.

“The vision is we’ll have a sister building,” Little said.

Visit /news/2018/09/04/photos-inside-first-techs-new-clt-office-building/ to view more photos of the building.

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A mixed-use office building taking shape in North Portland features a unique shape reminiscent of the iconic Flatiron Building in New York City. Flatiron PDX will consist of a ground-floor retail space and open office space on the upper floors. Works Progress Architecture is the designer of the six-story structure, which Abbott Construction is building on a triangular lot at North Mississippi Avenue and Cook Street for developer Brandon Brown of Southern Miss LLC.

The building’s first two floors are post-tensioned concrete slabs, with the upper four floors constructed of cross-laminated timber supported by glue-laminated beams. The CLT floors, sourced from Structurlam in British Columbia, Canada, will be topped with a three-inch slab of poured-in-place concrete. Five concrete shear walls will provide lateral stiffness.

The building’s upper four office floors will each have a footprint of around 4,400 square feet, while the second-floor office space will measure around 2,400 square feet. The building also will feature a small parking garage at a half-floor below grade.

The 12-month core-and-shell project is slated for completion in March 2018.

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