Museum of Fine Arts - Houston
Dowel Laminated Timber - a North American First
The campus of the Museum of Fine Arts Houston underwent a bold transformation with two new buildings, a conservation building, and a landscape plan that knit the buildings together.
Alongside Lake Flato Architects, W. S. Bellows Construction Corporation, and Cardno Haynes Whaley, StructureCraft designed and built the structural timber components for the Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation Centre for Conservation.
The Museum of Fine Arts Houston is the first project to use Dowel Laminated Timber (DLT) in North America. The mass timber structure is comprised of DLT roof panels on a Glulam post and beam substructure. The DLT panels utilize an architectural kerf cut profile on the exposed underside surface, which provides a clean shadow reveal at every board.
Check out Think Wood's in depth case study on the project: Museum Conservation Finds Inspiration with Mass Timber.
Successful Fabrication of First DLT Panels
These were the first DLT panels to be produced in our sleek line of machinery housed in our new facility in Abbotsford, British Columbia. The client chose a kerf cut profile, which was cut in-line into each board edge prior to dowelling. As DLT panels do not rely on glue in the production line, panels were able to be fabricated at a fast throughput.