Auburn’s Timber Architecture Design Development Workshop Gives Faculty the Full “Forest-to-Frame” Experience
The Timber Architecture Design Faculty Development Workshop sought to bridge the traditional divide between academia and professional practice, a core ambition of both LWA and Auburn’s Mass Timber Collaborative. In the runup to the workshop, 46 faculty members applied for 25 program spots, demonstrating the growing interest in incorporating information about lower-carbon wood solutions in U.S. architectural curricula.
The workshop introduced early-career faculty to the forest-to-frame mass timber supply chain, encompassing material science, lifecycle carbon accounting, structural systems, procurement strategies, and construction logistics through immersive tours and expert-led discussions.
“[The workshop] took us from the forest to the factory to the building, giving me exactly the end-to-end understanding I need to weave mass timber into both studio and lecture,” said Professor Adam Dayem, Rensselaer Polytechnic School of Architecture, one of the workshop participants..
To kick off the workshop, LWA Principal Tom S. Chung led participants through a rapid-fire overview of wood architecture, followed by sessions on embodied carbon, wood engineering, and sustainable forestry led by Auburn researchers and professional engineers from KPFF. Faculty also experienced a real-world demonstration of the stump-to-structure cycle as they toured the Kreher Preserve and Nature Center’s new CLT preschool, which uses regionally harvested Southern Yellow Pine from less than 200 miles away.
On day two, participants observed active harvesting operations in an Alabama pine forest and explored West Fraser’s Opelika Sawmill before heading to Rural Studio—Auburn’s internationally recognized design-build program—to see how wood systems can contribute to design that is simultaneously experimental, socially grounded, and rooted in local materials. There, they toured recent student-designed-and-built community structures and heard from Director Andrew Freear and Assistant Professor Emily McGlohn about how good design and mass timber innovation can intersect to catalyze long-term social impact in rural communities.
Rounding out the full forest-to-frame supply-chain cycle, on the final day faculty explored the production line at SmartLam’s 225,000-square-foot CLT and glulam plant—the first in the U.S. to press Southern Yellow Pine panels—and observed timber erection at the Wiregrass Innovation Center office and laboratory building before traveling to Atlanta for tours of two urban projects: 619 Ponce at Ponce City Market and Georgia Tech’s Living Building Challenge-certified Kendeda Building.
“[The program] was an informative, effective, and eye-opening experience in which professionals from all parts of the country learned about mass timber,” said Professor John Phillips, a workshop participant from Oklahoma State University. “I’m looking forward to taking what I learned as I develop and offer a course in Mass Timber Design and Construction at my institution next year.”
Funded by the SLB and U.S. Endowment for Forestry and Communities, the Timber Architecture Design Faculty Development Workshop is part of a broader effort to translate forest stewardship, carbon literacy, and prefabrication knowledge into the next generation of design professionals. By balancing architecture, engineering, and construction perspectives, the workshop equipped early-career faculty with ready-to-use syllabus resources and the practice-grounded expertise necessary to integrate mass-timber design into their design studios and technical seminar courses.
