The construction industry is historically a slow adopter of innovation, but as more investment is being made into innovative building techniques and strategies, disruption is not far off. As part of the session “Timber Construction: A Smart Investor’s Playbook” at the 2020 ProSales 100 Conference, Troy DeGraff, director of operations and supply chain at Woodside Homes; John Osborne, vice president of national builders and innovation at BMC Stock Holdings; and Erik Ghenoiu, head of research, and Casey Rehm, faculty member, at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), spoke about the potential disruption mass timber can have across the construction industry.
DeGraff spoke about techniques used by Sekisui House, the Japanese parent company of Woodside Homes, including the company’s Shawood post and beam framework system. Gheniou and Rehm focused on innovations at SCI-Arc related to robotic automation and 3D printing of cross-laminated timber (CLT).
The Shawood system, a mass timber, glue-laminated system, allows for simpler, faster, and more precise building processes and enables builders to construct strong, more resilient structures compared to the typical American house in a significantly shorter timetable. Sekisui House has built over 70,000 Shawood homes in Japan. The system was also used in the Builder magazine Chowa Concept Home in Las Vegas, on display at CES 2020 and the 2020 International Builders Show. Six months elapsed from breaking ground of the Chowa Concept Home to final furnishing, with minimal training or needed expertise for framing, according Osborne.
Sekisui House’s use of mass timber also coincides with the company’s “Love of Humanity” guiding principle. The company often deconstructs homes and builds custom homes on the same lot, recycling every piece from the demolished home. The company is also heavily involved in home resistance research and none of the more than 177,400 homes in the impact zone of 2011’s devastating 9.0 earthquake collapsed or experienced structural collapses.
An environmental risk map of the U.S. shows earthquake liabilities in the west, fire liabilities in the Midwest, tornado risk in the southwest, and hurricane liabilities in the southeast up the east coast,” Degraff said. “At Woodside, we see this Shawood mass timber product being very applicable. When you think of the history of natural disasters we have, we think there is a similar play for [Shawood] in the United States [as in Japan].”
SCI-Arc, an architecture school, is involved in artificial intelligence (AI) research and is testing the ability to build CLT with AI. Rehm is working on the process of developing architectural sketches into computer programs that can allow CLT to be custom-assembled by robots to save time. Rehm said SCI-Arc is looking to augment the space that CLT manufacturing currently exists into more eccentric spaces that can only be currently done with steel or concrete. The techniques being explored can revolutionize how CLT is used and virtually eliminate the waste and include structural complication that is not currently available in generic paneling, Ghenoiu said.
“We don’t want to do this as an intellectual exercise for academia,” Ghenoiu said. “We want to do this so that in two stages this is something that is available to and useful to [those in the audience]. This is intended to become something that can be deployed in the building industry and use wood that is otherwise not usable on sites where labor costs or other reasons make it hard to justify affordable housing prices.”
