First US Mass Timber Architecture School Under Construction at The University of Nebraska

The University of Nebraska’s Lincoln College of Architecture will soon be home to a mass timber addition that will serve as a living laboratory, according to a feature by ThinkWood. Currently under construction, the new mass timber building is a collaboration between Boston-based NADAA and Lincoln-based HDR.

It has been designed as a four-story CLT–framed structure that will primarily house open loft studio spaces for the college.

The building will be the first mass timber architecture school in the United Sates and promises to be a unique new teaching tool. With a focus on sustainability and carbon reduction, the new addition was initially designed to be 100% mass timber. However, the team developed a more cost-efficient design by converting the interstitial support space between the existing building and the new studios to conventional steel framing. The precision of prefabricated mass timber construction leads to minimal waste and safe, efficient work on site.

The new addition connects the three buildings in the campus’s Architecture Hall complex, the construction of which spanned three centuries: the 1895 University Library, the 1912 Law College, and a 1987 renovation and addition that includes a glass link between the two earlier buildings. The newest addition stretches across the north façades of the old Law College and link buildings, aligning with the north face of the old University Library.