BCT Showcases Design Building to Secretary Beaton

BCT Showcases Design Building to Secretary Beaton

by Alexander Schreyer Comment Closed
BCT had the pleasure today to showcase our research and our beautiful new heavy-timber Design Building to Matthew Beaton, State Secretary of the Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs (EOEEA). BCT faculty member Dr. Peggi Clouston and program director Alexander Schreyer provided a tour of the new building to Secretary Beaton, Chancellor Subbaswamy, Dean Goodwin, and others. Secretary Beaton even took a moment to sign our commemorative glulam beam....
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Clouston featured in Suffolk Construction video about Design Building

Clouston featured in Suffolk Construction video about Design Building

by Alexander Schreyer Comment Closed
A new video and blog post on the Suffolk Building Smart Blog shows the construction of the new, engineered wood UMass Amherst Design Building. It features interviews with BCT's Dr. Peggi Clouston, as well as Tom Chung, Principal at Leers-Weinzapfel Associates and Robert Malczyk, Principal at Equilibrium Consulting. It also shows the construction site from various angles, including from above! https://videos.files.wordpress.com/qI2r6Jqm/umass-design-building3_dvd.mp4 Source: Suffolk blog post...
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UMass celebrates new Design Building’s construction

UMass celebrates new Design Building’s construction

by Alexander Schreyer Comment Closed
On Friday, October 16th, 2015, UMass campus officials, local politicians, faculty and students celebrated a belated "ground-breaking" for the new UMass Design Building. This event was covered by the Daily Hampshire Gazette, the Republican, and WWLP. UMass University Relations also produced the video shown below, in which the chancellor and the three program and department leaders elaborate on their vision for this new collaborative academic space. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENOuRscC6H0 We in BCT are of course tremendously proud of the fact that this building will be the most technologically advanced heavy-timber structure in the eastern US, which makes it a showcase for sustainable building with wood in the region and far beyond. It even includes wood-concrete composite technology that was researched right here in our program by Peggi Clouston et al. In a steel-dominated construction environment, this would not have been possible without the vision and support of many people. Those include BCT faculty Peggi Clouston and Alex Schreyer, former congressman John Olver, state representatives Stan Rosenberg and Ellen Story, and UMass administration with chancellor Kumble...
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Article in Hampshire Gazette features wood-concrete bench

Article in Hampshire Gazette features wood-concrete bench

by Alexander Schreyer Comment Closed
An article in this Monday's Business section of the Daily Hampshire Gazette described the Design Building project at UMass. It also featured prominently our student-built floor mockup bench that now adorns Holdsworth Hall. You can read the complete article here: http://goo.gl/2h16Su...
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Building a Wood-Concrete Floor Mockup Bench

Building a Wood-Concrete Floor Mockup Bench

by Alexander Schreyer Comment Closed
As part of their independent studies, two BCT students, Henry Braley and Loran Kaleci (with help from fellow student Rommel Cordova-Fiori and shop manager Dan Pepin), this semester built an 8 ft bench for Holdsworth Hall. This bench (while arguably extremely overdesigned) serves as a mockup of the wood-concrete composite floor construction that will be in the new (Integrated) Design Building. As shown in the diagram below, it consists of a three-layer cross-laminated timber (CLT) slab, which we generously received from Nordic EWP (thanks!). Above it is a 3/4 inch layer of rigid insulation and a 3 inch cast-in-place concrete topping. The concrete and the wood layers are connected rigidly with glued-in shear "HBV" connectors by TiComTec from Germany (thanks for those, too!), making both act as a single composite element. If you want to learn more about this technology, check out this research spotlight. BCT has been researching this technology for quite a while now and we are excited to see it in a real building on campus soon. The floors...
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