Timberlab

7 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE VOLUME 10, ISSUE 5 T IMBERLAB anybody any time. This is the building system that has brought the modeling to fruition. Now, we start to see where it is saving time and we can build 15-20 percent faster than a conventional approach by having all those trades participating. That’s an amazing thing that I appreciate as a builder,” he elaborates. “Swinerton built its first mass timber project in 2017– the First Tech Credit Union’s Oregon Headquarters,” Spiritos recounts. “That was the largest installation of CLT in the U.S. at that time. We delivered that project at a cost- savings and schedule-savings compared to the steel building that we were benchmarked against, and validated that mass timber was viable on this scale,” Evans adds. Since then, Timberlab has been racking up projects – some three dozen over the last several years, a few of which are record holders. “In December 2021, we delivered the timber structure for the tallest hybrid, mass timber structure in the world – the Ascent project in Milwaukee, Wisconsin,” Spiritos adds. and plumbing conduits, has begun to alter the traditional manufacturing processes of Timberlab’s construction partners. “What’s transformative about mass timber on these large commercial projects is that due to our manufacturing process, you really have to pre-plan the building,” he explains. “That has forced the industry, in a good way, to coordinate designs during the design process, not during the construction process. On most construction projects, you wait until the last minute to do everything and the last minute for mass timber just happens to be four or five months earlier in the design process. That led to the use of building information modeling, where you have to coordinate with the mechanical and electrical and plumbing, and fire sprinkler trades. As a result, that coordination provides for the quicker erection of buildings, and fewer questions during construction, and by default, the other trades end up having fewer people on site.” “Now, those other teams can spread their resources out. Fifteen years ago, it was an added cost to do building information modeling on a project and it wasn’t seen as saving