1030 Music Row
Engineer-Build
A New Mass Timber Office Building in Nashville
A classy, five-story mass timber office building has come to Nashville’s Music Row. The project is Panattoni’s third office building on Music Row. It is designed specifically to target the creative office market in our post-COVID environment, with easily accessible floors and modern HVAC and access systems.
StructureCraft was pleased to be involved as structural engineer and builder for the mass timber and steel superstructure, working alongside Turner Construction and Anecdote (formerly Tuck Hinton Architecture) to bring this project to downtown Nashville.
The superstructure uses shop prefabricated spruce DLT panels on Glulam columns and beams, with a central structural steel core as the lateral load resisting system. The first level is partial office (timber) as well as a parkade (steel) with 4 underground parking levels. The building’s glass skin shows off the warm timber interiors.
Engineering
Steel was chosen for the core system of Music Row by our structural engineers to improve schedule and cost efficiency. With the goal of minimizing the exposure time of the walls to the elements, the steel core was sequenced to be erected first so that the CLT elevator shaft could be dropped in from the top after the first 4 levels of steel had been erected. This added some complexity to the detailing of the connections between the steel and timber and meant taking a close look at how each piece of the shaft would be installed.
The elevator shaft uses 7" thick CLT walls. Fully exposed on both sides, the CLT provides the necessary fire rating for the shaft. These walls are close to 40' tall, requiring only one splice to go from level 1 to the roof.
As a highly visual building, the connections and details on 1030 Music Row have to be clean and finished. We had to get creative with the typical connection details, including at the glulam column base connection where timber landed on a post-tensioned concrete slab. To simplify and lighten the steel diagonal brace connections, additional seismic testing was performed allowing a reduction in site class.
Fabrication
Our team completed manufacturing the DLT for Music Row, using wide 3x laminations to create a high-quality visual surface.
Because the DLT panels are 3x instead of 2x, the whole lifting scheme had to be re-evaluated. Extensive testing was done to come to an optimal solution, including friction testing the dowels by pulling them directly out of a 3x lamination. Following these and other tests, our engineers were confident with how these panels would be erected.
Installation
A key structural aspect of 1030 Music Row is its core system. Instead of using traditional concrete shear walls, we used a structural steel core with bracing to resist the lateral loads. Increasing both schedule and cost efficiency, our crews installed the steel frame concurrent with the timber.