A 27-year-old civil engineering student at the University of Waterloo has caught the attention of mass timber engineering and design professionals in Europe through his design proposition for a seven-storey teaching and lab research facility for engineering students.

Tyler Hull was presented in Cortaccia, Italy, with the top prize in the student category of Build the Impossible, an international competition organized to increase visibility around the world to mass timber innovation.

One of Hull’s objectives in the contest was to show that seven-to-14-metre spans can be achieved using hollow-core panels. Solid panels of cross-laminated timber or nail-laminated timber by comparison are heavy and reach efficiency limits at about seven to eight metres, preventing their specification for Class A office projects that typically require nine-by-nine-metre grids, he says.

His use of long-span hollow-core panels has caught the eye of Ontario-based timber manufacturer Element5. The contest was created by mass timber expert Peter Lang, a partner at Rothoblaas, a global supplier of screws and fasteners for modern timber construction.

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Source: Daily Commercial News | Photo: Tyler Hull