The use of wood in buildings is an age-old craft, but recent proliferation of innovative wood-derived materials such as mass timber in commercial, institutional, industrial, and residential building signal the need for an education that expands upon these technological shifts. Academia and industry are proactively developing new curricula to address this challenge. This paper describes a wood design studio taught in combination with a seminar course run prior to the Fall 2020 launch of a new Master of Design in Integrated Wood Design at Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design at the University of Arkansas, located in a state that is 60 percent forested. This post-professional degree is part of a long-term investment to meet future needs of the wood industry in Arkansas and the nation. The studio–seminar clusters explored the nexus between mass timber and the built environment. These courses brought together teams of students from the departments of architecture, interior design, and civil engineering, and challenged them to examine the design potential of presenting wood and mass timber with the respect and legitimacy they deserve, to the extent of rivaling other materials like concrete or steel. This paper will first provide a discussion of the interdisciplinary collaboration, followed by the design method applied to mass timber. The pedagogy of the studio rests on collaborative interdisciplinary teaching and learning between faculty, faculty and students, and students. The design method applied in these courses does not follow a typical process, simply to allow students to remain focused on working with wood to inform the making of space. Rather than starting with the site, programming, massing, and so on, the process is reversed, beginning with the small—the detail connection—culminating into the large—the building.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.