Mass Timber Building Systems and Their Layout

This chapter serves as a concise guide to the most important aspects a designer must consider for mass timber buildings, along with associated best practices – a kind of “cheat sheet” for any building project. It provides a high-level overview of the many early design choices that mass timber designers face, outlining the available options along with their respective advantages and disadvantages. Owing to tree growth patterns and the resulting natural directionality of wood fiber in all wood-based products, wooden buildings generally exhibit certain basic material characteristics and typologies. Building-level layout concepts include choosing the structural system, panel layout, span capacities and optimization, primary/secondary beam hierarchy, interruptions in load flow and cantilevers, and long-span solutions. Detail-level concepts include column continuity, beam-column connections, panel connections, general connection considerations, and acoustics and vibration.