Winners Announced for the 2024 Timber Education Prize

For Immediate Release:

Washington D.C., September 13, 2024 — The Softwood Lumber Board (SLB) and the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) are pleased to announce the 2024 Timber Education Prize winners. Established in 2022, this annual prize recognizes effective and innovative curricula that create a stimulating and evidence-based environment for learning about structural lumber systems.

From seminars and design studios to building technology classes and structured lessons, the winning courses will equip students with the knowledge and design skills to embrace wood-based solutions with confidence and enthusiasm. These courses highlight the significance of sustainable education, emphasizing the lower-carbon benefits of timber compared to traditional building technologies.

The jury selected five courses, three winners and two special merits, to receive a cash prize and support to lead their course at their host institution within the next two years. In addition, the jury selected a course to receive an honorable mention for its impact. The five winning course proposals will be presented at the 2025 ACSA113 Annual Meeting in New Orleans, LA.

For the last two years, the SLB has funded this competition with the goal of advancing deeper investigations into wood design at all schools of architecture. Developed course syllabi are available at the ACSA website.

The winners are:

Design from Tree to Timber: Building Non-Planar Futures
Kyle Schumann, University of Virginia

This advanced research studio will address questions of sustainable wood construction early in the material pipeline by interrogating the production of timber buildings beginning with the milling of logs into lumber. The course asks: How might the irregularities present in trees be strategically incorporated into construction and design processes? How can novel fabrication technologies facilitate the understanding, evaluation, and use of this material? What radically different futures for timber architecture are possible if construction is not limited to planar boards, straight columns and beams, and flat sheets?

Forest – Fiber – Frame
Philip Tidwell, University of California, Berkeley

The environmental, economic, and energetic imperatives of the global climate emergency have enabled – even demanded – a renewed interest in timber building. We can welcome this growing enthusiasm, but it is no longer sufficient to make broad claims about carbon and sustainability without situating them in a larger framework of environmental management. To that end, this year-long research and design studio takes a comprehensive view of wood construction as a material practice that extends from silviculture and forest management to manufacturing, construction and waste reclamation. In keeping with UC Berkeley’s mission to serve the state, the course centers around issues that are especially pertinent to California, but the conditions and methods under consideration are broadly applicable to a wide range of places and institutions throughout the world.

Exploring the X, Y, and Z Wood Connection
Nicholas Wickersham, North Dakota State University

This seminar is about the experience of working with wood at the full one-to-one scale. Working with wood at a workable scale allows for a greater understanding of its idiosyncrasies and inherent properties. These experiences of material exploration will inform and benefit the student in the future when they begin to specify, draw, detail, and imagine new avenues for wood within their fully realized projects.

SPECIAL MERIT

A Holistic Approach to Timber Construction in a Regenerative Design Framework
Veronica Madonna, Athabasca University

Presented by the RAIC Centre for Architecture and PowerEd at Athabasca University, this course is crafted to meet the urgent need for climate action by focusing on regenerative design, with timber as a central element. Acknowledging the significant impact of the construction industry on global greenhouse gas emissions, the course emphasizes timber’s transformative role in advancing sustainable and regenerative practices.

Mass Timber as Naked Material
Jordan Kanter & Ray K. Mann, UMass Amherst

Wood is a comparatively naked material system. It is designed, in many cases, to be exposed. But perhaps more importantly, it is tactile, malleable, and part of everyday experience – ready-at-hand such that students can more directly intuit and engage in its design and constructability. Building on this conceptual and material nakedness, this studio employs mass-timber in the adaptive re-use of historic New England brick and timber mill buildings, with the pedagogic objective of more fully integrating structural and material thinking into the design process.

HONORABLE MENTION

Compoundologies – Timber, Folklore, and the Community Irrigation Networks of Chiang Mai
Tommy Yang, Carnegie Mellon University

The Compoundologies Studio fosters knowledge built off of years of engagements in Chiang Mai, TH using fieldwork, film, and visual storytelling to explore citizen empowered design and the regenerative building practices of Indigenous timber construction in Chiang Mai, Thailand. As a design family, we will situate contemporary discourse in timber into systemic socio-ecological processes that includes folklore, forests, land ritual, harvesting, building, repair, and the geologic commons. At four different scales – geology, the city, the building, and the construction detail – we will posit emergent narratives from the villages to establish a critical thinking position, a manifesto, and redefine the notion of the city and its architecture engaging social, political, and economic realities.