Study Architecture 
ProPEL 2024 Timber Education Prize Winners
Overview
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 2024 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.
Kyle Schumann, University of Virginia
Juror Comments:
Design from Tree to Timber: Building Non-Planar Future is a fantastic course proposal that delves into timber production. The blend of material and technological processes makes for a compelling course.
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.
Juror Comments:
Forest – Fiber – Frame presents a clear and research-driven course proposal. The focus on local forest fires in California is compelling. The students will expand on impactful research in both group and individual efforts.
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.
This project acts as a vehicle to allow students to explore the material of softwood and to further utilize analog and digital tools to reshape wood in new and inventive ways. There has been a massive decline in making in the post-COVID era. Making is a vital part of architectural education and the new tools regarding digital fabrication promise to be a larger portion of tomorrow’s architecture. This class will promote more use of the 3D Printer, CNC Router, and other digital and analog tools.
The Cartesian Coordinates of X, Y, and Z are typically required elements of most architectural projects. For the rest of this short seminar, we will investigate the intersection of the column and two beams. The first measure of the student projects should be structural. Then with time permitting we will explore additional ideas such as material irregularities, construction, transportation, preservation, thermal performance, fire, attachment of additional elements, and more. Each student will be asked to explore one of these three categories: homogeneous, coupling, and redundant (there is always the possibility to find another category or create a new unique hybrid).
Juror Comments:
Exploring the X, Y, and Z Wood Connection is a clear and concise course which includes working with timber at full scale. The approach for students to utilize analog and digital tools to reshape wood in new and inventive ways is refreshing.
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.
Timber, celebrated for its versatility and renewability, has been a fundamental construction material for millennia. Advancements in manufacturing processes, carbon accounting, and regulatory frameworks have further underscored its importance, positioning timber as a critical component in achieving a low-carbon, regenerative future.
The course bridges the gap between timber education and practical application, focusing on timber systems, low-carbon strategies, and life cycle assessment. It includes a simulation building and AI-driven experience that mirrors real-world scenarios, preparing participants for industry challenges.
Participants will explore mass timber, biomaterials, life cycle assessment, and design for manufacturing and assembly, all within a regenerative framework. This continuing education program is designed for students and industry professionals who aim to deepen their expertise in timber-related disciplines and contribute to a circular economy and a sustainable future.
Juror Comments:
A Holistic Approach to Timber Construction in a Regenerative Design Framework is an inventive course proposal that targets professional continuing education. This course has the opportunity to be disseminated beyond the university.
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. A key reference for Type IV construction, these remarkable structures will be the jumping off point for analyzing the legacy and future of heavy-/mass-timber. Through a series of research, making, analysis and design exercises that are both imaginative and pragmatic, we will explore the potential of mass-timber—in all its capacities to infill, clad, span, support, brace and extend—as a material framework for interventions into the existing buildings, as well as new structures on and over the site. We will demonstrate how a multi-layered approach grounded in the medium of wood/mass timber will leapfrog students towards achieving the generative embodied knowledge skills essential in the context of the climate crisis and ever-accelerating technological change.
Juror Comments:
Mass Timber as Naked Material is a unique course proposal aligning timber with adaptive reuse. This proposal has the potential for intriguing building designs and concepts.
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.
With a focus on locality, this studio believes that contemporary building practices can be recalibrated with the embodied knowledge of everyday stewards, ultimately transitioning object-based approaches to address systemic issues that frame contemporary architectural practice. The semester-long journey nurtures a comprehensive project that includes animations, detailed architectural illustrations, and scaled fabrications in the design of a village compound. A pilot exhibit will close the design studio, holding a larger conversation around community-empowered architectural design, regenerative practices in architecture, storytelling, and activism.
Juror Comments:
Compoundologies – Timber, Folklore, and the Community Irrigation Networks of Chiang Mai provides students the opportunity to travel to Thailand and engage timber through local practices. The jury gave Compoundologies high praise and wanted to highlight this course, though the research is outside of North America.
Jury
The jury for the 2024 Timber Education Prize includes:
Liz McCormick
University of North Carolina at Charlotte
James Michael Tate
Texas A&M University
De Peter Yi
University of Cincinnati
Softwood Lumber Board
The Softwood Lumber Board is an industry-funded initiative established to promote the benefits and uses of softwood lumber products in outdoor, residential, and non-residential construction and to increase demand for softwood lumber and appearance products. Through strategic investments in pro-wood communications, standards development, design and engineering assistance, research, demonstrations and partnerships, the organization seeks to make softwood lumber the preferred material choice from both an economic and an environmental standpoint.
Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture
The mission of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture is to lead architectural education and research.
Founded in 1912 by 10 charter members, ACSA is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit association of over 200 member schools in several categories. These include full membership for all accredited programs in the United States and government-sanctioned schools in Canada, candidate membership for schools seeking accreditation, and affiliate membership for schools for two-year and international programs. Through these schools, over 5,000 architecture faculty are represented.
ACSA, unique in its representative role for schools of architecture, provides a forum for ideas on the leading edge of architectural thought. Issues that will affect the architectural profession in the future are being examined today in ACSA member schools. The association maintains a variety of activities that influence, communicate, and record important issues. Such endeavors include scholarly meetings, workshops, publications, awards and competition programs, support for architectural research, policy development, and liaison with allied organizations.
ACSA seeks to empower faculty and schools to educate increasingly diverse students, expand disciplinary impacts, and create knowledge for the advancement of architecture.
