HP Traces 85 Per Cent of Its New Lab’s Timber Back to the Forest
HP’s new 225,000-square-foot research building in Vancouver, Washington, showcases mass timber construction alongside an extensive effort to trace the building’s wood back to its source. The project team traced 85 percent of the wood to a specific forest, management unit, or harvest plan, with 44 percent supplied by tribal forests.
Swinerton served as the builder, working alongside ZGF Architects and Swinerton’s mass timber subsidiary Timberlab to coordinate the building’s distinctive timber structure. Two ZGF team members spent six months working with Swinerton and Timberlab to map the penetrations required for ducts and wiring before fabrication. According to the article, incorporating these penetrations into the model avoided field cuts that could otherwise cost approximately $400 to $1,000 each.
The project also demonstrates the construction efficiencies of prefabricated mass timber. The lighter timber structure allowed for shallower foundations on the former quarry site, where soil compaction was expensive, while prefabrication enabled two workers and a crane to install a timber panel approximately every seven minutes. Timberlab also served as the project’s mass timber contractor.
