IKD's Adventures in Cross-Laminated Timber

Conversation Plinth by IKD, situated between the I.M. Pei-Designed Cleo Rogers Library and the Elial Saarinen-designed First Christian Church in Columbus, Indiana. (Courtesy IKD)

Boston-based IKD is on the cutting edge of heavy timber design. It's pavilion for last years Exhibit Columbus event explored the use of up-cycling low-value wood into high-demand structural material.

"The motivations behind using hardwood are two-fold. Currently, over 50 percent of the 80 million cubic feet of hardwood harvested in Indiana each year is used for low-value industrial products. By integrating this wood into the higher-value cross-laminated timber (CLT), it raises the value of what is already Indiana’s largest cash crop. And from the perspective of designers and engineers, hardwood CLT provides the possibility of a more fire-resistant panel and a form-factor advantage.

Being a comparatively new technology, everything built out of CLT most be simulated in the latest digital stress modeling programs to understand its constraints. (Courtesy IKD)

“We are currently exploring a number of applications that could have larger scale building applications,” IKD partner Yugon Kim said. “Since hardwood has superior mechanical properties, we believe we can achieve a panel that could be thinner to meet the same structural capacity of an equivalent softwood CLT panel.”

Read the full article on The Architecture's Newspaper - IKD has pioneered hardwood cross-laminated timber

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