Construction on Heartwood’s superstructure is completed, marking a huge milestone for Washington’s tallest timber building! The final CLT panels were craned into place on December 9, 2022, with roofing soon to follow. Thanks to the building’s innovative mass timber system, years of intense trade coordination, and a hardworking on-site team, the structure has been completed in just eight short months.

Heartwood wins its first award — an AIASeattle Research Award for the first proof-of-concept Type IV-C building under construction in the US. Under the rigorous jury, led by Billie Faircloth, FAIA, LEED AP BD+C, the award celebrated the highly collaborative team’s work over three years to design, entitle, permit, price, and build the 67,000 SF 126-unit mass timber building. Our wildly talented and dedicated interdisciplinary team is thrilled to be working on such an impactful project with our owners at Community Roots Housing.

The first shipment of CLT panels have arrived at our Community Roots Housing Heartwood construction site in Capitol Hill as of August 25, 2022. CLT Panels made by Kalesnikoff are currently being craned into place and positioned precisely over the glulam columns and beams engineered by DCI Engineers, fabricated by DR Johnson and Mass Plywood Panel stairs by Freres Lumber, all post-processed by TimberLab. Click here to see live aerial updates, thanks to our contractor, Swinerton Builders. What a great team!

Lots of great thinking and planning for the future going on at atelierjones at our annual retreat! We definitely decided we would keep on seeing more of the incredible Pacific Northwest Mass Timber resources - from forests to factories to buildings. And we started with the Mt. Constitution Forest Camp - thinning hemlocks and spruce trees, to bring more light and diversity into the remote mountain forest that we are tendering.

The Wet Core is moving ahead at record pace! atelierjones visited the three wetcores under construction at the Method Homes Factory earlier this week, and were excited to see them completely framed and mechanical/electrical/plumbing rough-in starting. The factory build was high quality, and it was exciting to see how much had been accomplished in just two weeks. These prefabricated wetcore modules will be the first of three mass timber modular homes to be built this summer and fall in the Sierra Nevada town of Greenville, CA, which was destroyed in the Dixie Fire in August 2021. atelierjones is leading the design and prefabrication process with Method and DR Johnson, who is supplying the mass timber structure for the homes.

atelierjones visited Timberlab in Portland, OR, where they saw Mass Timber prefabricated elements undergoing production for our Heartwood workforce 126-unit workforce residential building. On display were the Freres produced mass plywood panel (MPP) Exit Stairs going through post-processing at Timberlab, and a mockup of Heartwood’s innovative all-wood beam to column connection.

On May 18, 2022, atelierjones visited Greenville, CA, where four of their mass timber homes will be erected in the fall to help rebuild the town after it was devastated in the Dixie Fire of 2021. They also participated in the Sierra Institute’s ribbon cutting ceremony for a new sawmill on their wood utilization campus. The mill will bring jobs back to the area, provide local lumber to help rebuild the town of Greenville, and salvage charred ponderosa pines. Read more here.

atelierjones’ mass timber middle-income housing project, Heartwood, officially started construction as of April 4, 2022. The eight-story, mass timber Heartwood is one of 15 Tall Wood Buildings (defined as 8 stories or over) either under construction or completed in North America. It is the first Type IV-C building under construction in the US. Construction is scheduled for completion in March 2023.

At Mies van der Rohe’s beautiful S.R. Crown Hall, at IIT Chicago, atelierjones presented their Type IV-C Heartwood Tall Wood Middle-Income Housing project at the Council for Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, CTBUH Spring Conference, on Steel-Timber Hybrid Buildings from May 23-24, 2022. Heartwood’s superstructure is a glu-lam post and beam, with CLT floor/ceiling assembly, that utilizes a robust steel Buckling Restrained Brace (BRB) Frame system with steel drag struts, for its lateral system, as part of the core of the building. The well-attended international conference sought to advance hybrid structural systems of Mass Timber and Steel to reach the potential of Tall Wood buildings across North America and Europe. Currently, Heartwood is one of 15 Tall Wood Buildings (defined as 8 stories or over) either under construction or completed in North America.

A small off-grid restored SHED used to support forest restoration on a remote island mountaintop, Constitution SHED layers built reflections of site, ecologies, memory and legacy. The simple, utilitarian SHED, located high on a remote mountaintop on a Pacific Northwest island, had lost its functional purpose as a support structure for a large water tank, and its strong proportions had been slowly decaying for decades. The grandfather of the owner/architect had built the SHED, as a protection against fires high on the then nearly inaccessible mountain. Upon refinding the SHED, decades later, during intense forest restoration efforts of the long-neglected mountain island forest, the owner/architect had the SHED relocated to a island local workshop, to restore the stalwart proportions and the 80 year old Douglas Fir boards that had once been milled on site

Susan spoke at the beautiful historic Riverside, California Fox Auditorium in early September, for CBU/AIA Inland California. See the lecture here - students, professionals, and faculty, as well as the general public attended - all masked, socially distant and in person in the large historic theatre. A beautiful evening.

excited to present for ALTA LIVE! ALTA Magazine is an important emerging journalistic West Coast-forward voice out of Los Angeles, with a broad environmentalist and cultural vision for our cities and landscapes. Looking forward to lending our atelierjones’ perspective on forests, lower-carbon construction, and design-forward, sustainable architecture from the single family homes to mass timber affordable and workforce housing apartments. With Scott Shell, journalist Lydia Lee and editor Beth Spotswood. Live: Tuesday 6/2 12:30 pm PST.

thrilled to be recognized internationally for our innovative work with mass timber, from our small house to our current 8-story mass timber housing project, and of course, helping to lower the construction industry's carbon footprint through new codes, fire/lifesafety, and lower carbon construction at scale. Thank you to all our valued atelierjones colleagues and national collaborators!

Thrilled to announce the World Architecture News (WAN) Finalist in the Innovation in Architecture Award category for their FEMALE FRONTIER AWARDS for atelierjones founder, Susan Jones, FAIA. The Award material states: “Her prolific work over the last nine years has advanced and restructured the carbon-intensive construction industry towards adopting lower carbon materials by using design as a catalyst creating sustainable change at scale. She is an exemplary role model for architects, demonstrating how design can lead innovation at all scales, to urgently lower our carbon footprint in our fight against climate change.” World Architecture News | Innovation in Architecture Finalist 2021. Thank you WAN!

great interview about our innovative work with prefabrication and lower-carbon mass timber and lots going on around here at atelierjones! Thank you GOOGLE Sidewalk Labs!

atelierjones is proud to be a member of Grace Farms Foundation Working Group on their groundbreaking initiative, Design For Freedom. Led by their CEO and Founder, Sharon Prince, Design for Freedom is rapidly mobilizing the Architecture/Engineering and Construction disciplines to eradicate the use of slave labor for the production of building materials as part of the built environment’s global supply chain of materials. We were thrilled to see Susan presenting at Design for Freedom’s Inaugural event in late October, in partnership with Harriett Harriss, Dean of Pratt University’s School of Architecture , moderated by Yale University’s Associate Dean of the School of Architecture, Philip Bernstein, and fellow architects, Chris Sharples and Michael Green. The link for the recorded event is in the title, and here: https://gracefarms.org/events/innovations-for-slave-free-buildings/

Yep. That’s us. atelierjones is geeking out over here. Today we found out that we are using almost three times the amount of sustainably-harvested Pacific Northwest wood than concrete for our 8-story middle income housing project in central Seattle. We’re excited to be planning a project that houses 126 folks with such a light impact on our environment! See more at our material takeoffs detail under Mass Timber Middle Income Housing project.

super cool to have Tom DiOro interview our founder, Susan Jones at Stanford University - back in November 2019 - for MODERN ARCHITECT. It was amazing to be on campus again - yes, it seems like ages ago - but this PODCAST was released some weeks ago, just before COVID times started. Hear about atelierjones’ leadership in Mass Timber, our CLTHouse, stories of being an undergraduate Stanford philosophy major, and other various moments that Tom had fun teasing out of Susan’s lore of architectural and personal memories.

atelierjones has been working virtually at home since March 5th, and our teams are moving quickly along with our fabulous clients and extended teams. We seem to be more productive than ever - helped along by some great virtual Happy Hours along the way! Heartfelt thanks to all.

GSD writes: “From cross laminated timber blanks to glulam slabs, beams, and columns, topics on mass timber tend to center around sustainability and industry advancements. The aim of this symposium is move beyond default topics of instrumentality and technology in mass timber by collecting unique positions from a group of architects, engineers, developers, and manufacturers in contemporary design, while also underscoring the value of intellectualizing these topics from within academia.” Organized and moderated by Jennifer Bonner and Hanif Kara. With speakers Nader Tehrani, Yasmin Vobis & Aaron Forrest, Kirsten Haggart, Friedrich Ludewig, Michael Ramage, Ben Kaiser, Susan Jones, and Kay Hartmann.