Throughout the last two decades the timber building sector has experienced a steady growth in multi-storey construction. Although there has been a growing number of research focused on trends, benefits, and disadvantages in timber construction from various technical perspectives, so far there is no extensive literature on the trajectory of emerging architectural typologies. This paper presents an examination of architectural variety and spatial possibilities in current serial and modular multi-storey timber construction. It aims to draw a parallel between architectural characteristics and their relation to structural systems in timber. The research draws from a collection of 350 contemporary multi-storey timber building projects between 2000 and 2021. It consists of 300 built projects, 12 projects currently in construction, and 38 design proposals. The survey consists of quantitative and qualitative project data, as well as classification of the structural system, material, program, massing, and spatial organization of the projects. It then compares the different structural and design aspects to achieve a comprehensive overview of possibilities in timber construction. The outcome is an identification of the range of morphologies and a better understanding of the design space in current serial and modular multi-storey mass timber construction.

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The arrangement of columns and their spacing in multi-story timber construction is restricted to rectangular grids by the production and shipping sizes of floor assemblies. This is particularly true for hollow box floor systems, for which the punctual supports must be placed at the reinforced edges of the hollow boxes. The arrangement of the columns and their spacing is thereby restricted by the production and shipping sizes of the box ceilings to rectangular grids. To overcome these design limits a new wooden box building system is developed that allows for irregular column layouts through a tailored slab interior design. This development allows for the increased applicability of timber floor systems regardless of site shape or architectural design intent. The slab interior design is dependent on occurring forces and fabrication requirements. Three methods for the internal slab layout are developed and compared: a sequential method, a structurally informed agent-based method, and a geometrically informed agent-based method that uses both a sequential and agent-based approach. The structural performance of each method is compared through the analysis of three reinforcement layouts an architectural testing setup.

This paper discusses the architectural design potentials of a novel hollow timber slab building system for flexible and adaptive multi-storey timber building typologies. Current timber building systems are defined by their standardized nature, which limits most structures to unidirectional, rigid grids and limits designs to rectilinear layouts. At the same time, recent developments in computational design and digital fabrication open new possibilities to overcome these limitations. In this paper we present four building design applications of a new multi-directional slab building system that allows for a greater level of spatial flexibility and adaptability with free column placement and a tuned network of internal shear webs. These examples expand on previous work through the co-development of building design, skin, building system, and building service integration strategies for a long lifespan and changeable building program. The design applications illustrate open, reprogrammable floor plates that can support three different program states: office, residential, and mixed-use. Furthermore, the novel conceptual approaches to building service integration and the resulting slabs are compared to approaches more common in mass timber construction. Finally, we contextualize the study with related developments and discuss how computational and integrated design thinking could lead to a greater level of design freedom in timber construction and an increased applicability to more complex site conditions than in conventional mass timber construction.

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