ABSTRACT
The Navy Demonstration Project is a collaborative research project between architects, material scientists, and structural engineers whose end product is a 5,400 square foot demonstration building for the U.S. Navy designed and built by architecture students at the Wood Materials Engineering Laboratory (W.M.E.L.) on the campus of Washington State University. The project is a unique combination of design and science; it engages a series of experiments with new material development in the field of plastic wood composites, building envelope design and structural engineering. On the one hand, the Navy Demonstration Project was an exploration into design possibilities inherent in engineered products such as wood plastic composites, oriented strand board (O.S.B.), laminated veneer lumber (L.V.L.) and I-joists; on the other hand, the project was an exploration of the engineering potentials in these same materials. The building is possibly the first in the world to use wood plastic composites so extensively and for such a wide variety of applications.
