Maine’s College of the Atlantic Dedicates Second Mass Timber Building

The College of the Atlantic, located in Bar Harbor, Maine, recently completed and dedicated a second mass timber structure on its campus, Mainebiz reported (6-14-24).

Designed by OPAL Architecture of Belfast Maine, the 12,000-square-foot residence hall, dubbed ‘Collins House’, is a 46-bed eco-friendly building. The mass timber structure was installed by an affiliated company, OPAL Build, with construction management provided by AlliedCook of Scarborough Maine.

The structure uses blown-in wood fiber insulation from Maine company TimberHP, which sources small-diameter pulp trees and residual wood chips from the state and produces rigid insulation, batting, and blown fill at the former paper mill in Madison.

With its mass timber construction, wood infill walls, and wood-fiber insulation, Collins House sequesters “biogenic” carbon and is expected to perform to Passive House energy standards.

“Biogenic” carbon is carbon dioxide that is absorbed by plants from the atmosphere during photosynthesis and then converted and stored as solid carbon making up the structure of the plant, Timothy Lock, a management partner at OPAL Architecture, told Mainebiz.

Lock went onto say that any plant-based material can do that. But the project prioritized wood for two reasons. “It’s massive — I mean this literally,” Lock said. “Wood is a heavy material, capable of being used as building structure, even at large scale, and thus has much greater mass than other materials. If half of wood’s mass is that stored biogenic carbon, the more total wood mass one can get in the building, the greater that negative will be.” It’s also a material that can be sourced locally, and is less intensive to harvest and extract than, say, concrete and steel, he said.