ABSTRACT
The paper Towards a Mass Timber Agenda examines the potential of the southern yellow pine (SYP) forests to produce viable solid wood building material and the capacity to implement these materials in Miami-Dade County (MDC). To better frame the project, it is positioned within a broader need of architectural speculation that questions accepted [and practiced] proclivities of the built environment and their surrounding ecologies. The project challenges the agency of architecture and provokes us to explore novel approaches to designing and making through the lens of a developing material culture, mass-customization and borrowed strategies of assembly and distribution through regionally manufactured cross-laminated timber [CLT] products. The work incites a forest to building approach as the underpinnings of a solid wood mass-based architecture in the southeastern United States. The successful implementation of the first designed and constructed cross-laminated timber structure in MDC (House in a Garden) serves as the project case study through which research is transferred into applied knowledge and the viability of the design, fabrication, and construction processes of CLT are tested. Case study findings reveal the need for adapting stagnant building codes and challenges in linking the manufacturing of CLT and the resultant CLT product into a fully integrated building assembly.
