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The Sustainable Wood Cooperative in southwestern Wisconsin hopes to build a new office and educational facility to showcase it's sustainably harvested products. And they want to team up with the nationally-known Forest Products Laboratory to build with roundwood. This means using structural wood as it grows, without sawing it into boards, and with very little other processing. The roundwood technique allows the use of lower-grade species and smaller, younger trees. If more building strucures were to use roundwood, we could preserve more old-growth forests and save manufacturing energy as well.
But they haven't yet developed a fully enclosed, heated building. Our challenge is to adapt the roundwood structure for wall, roof and foundation details, to incorporate insulation and interior and exterior finishes, and create a passively-cooled and solar heated building. |
Master site planning for the Coopertive's storage, drying
& millwork operations, and sales & education facility
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| Visitors will enter the new building under a vine-shaded arbor of roundwood beams. The facility will include offices, a combination boardroom -and- classroom, and a sales area. The Co-op's solar powered wood drying kiln -- Wisconsin's only -- helps enclose an outdoor demonstration & merchandising area. |
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The researchers at Forest Products
Lab have devised clever structural details for roof trusses using
roundwood, and have built some full -scale buildings, such as
outdoor shelters for the Winter Olympic Games in Salt Lake City,
Utah. 