Grafton Architects completes first mass-timber building for University of Arkansas

Irish studio Grafton Architects and US practice Modus Studio have completed a mass-timber building topped with an angular roof for the University of Arkansas's architecture and design school.

Located in Fayetteville, Arkansas, the Anthony Timberlands Center for Design and Materials Innovation is Grafton Architects' first completed project in the USA and its first mass-timber building.

"It was a part of the world we didn't know, and it was an amazingly attractive challenge to take on timber, because most of our projects would be described as in situ concrete or brick," Grafton Architects cofounder Yvonne Farrell told Dezeen.

Designed for the university's Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design, which is led by dean Peter MacKeith, the building centres on an 11,000-square-foot (1,020-square-metre) workshop on the ground floor with double-height ceilings.

A lecture hall that doubles as a gallery space is positioned above the workshop, with windows giving views of the space below. This is designed to create a sense of excitement and visual connection between students from different courses.

Classrooms, studios and conference rooms were placed on the two floors above the lecture hall.

"Normally, a lecture theatre is away from a workshop for reasons of noise," said Grafton Architects cofounder Shelley McNamara.

"We suspended the lecture theatre in the workshop, and the two floors of teaching spaces are above that – a workshop with noisy, dusty machines is overlooked by quiet rooms," she continued. "They benefit from each other."

"We don't know any other school of architecture that has put the workshop at the centre – it makes for an exciting place."

Facades are designed to minimise intense direct sunlight, while the characteristic roof profile responds to Arkansas's southwesterly winds and heavy rainfall.

At the tallest end of the building, glazed panels line a facade with a protruding upper portion. Elsewhere, the building is clad in metal panels, thermally modified southern yellow pine and red cedar wood.

Cross-laminated timber roof panels made from Arkansas-sourced southern yellow pine rise and fall at jaunty angles, and between them, large glued-laminated timber gutter beams direct rainwater.

"These canoes – they're spanning beams but they're also gutters that give an architectural language, an expression of doing the job of carrying the water," said Farrell.

Grafton Architects wanted architecture and design students in the building to learn from its structure and materials.

"We often talk about the building being like a new professor," said Farrell. "In terms of it being an educator itself, the students will get to know the texture and grain and atmosphere of timber."

"Then, bit by bit, it's about getting to know dimension," she continued. "We wanted students to know that every 40 feet there's a big column, that the width of the room down below is 50 feet, so as a young interior designer or architect, you learn a vocabulary of spatial dimension."

Grafton Architects and Modus Studio aimed to source most of the timber locally from Arkansas, but Farrell said they were limited because the region's timber industry does not specialise in mass timber. The majority of engineered wood was imported from Austria.

"On one hand, it was necessary to use local material, but also to show what timber can do," she said. "It was a combination of Austrian technology and what's available within Arkansas."

"The industry in Arkansas uses smaller elements," Farrell continued. "This building is trying to encourage the larger-scale use of composite timber spanning larger spaces."

Completing the project is a courtyard planted with local Loblolly pine trees, designed by American landcape architecture studio Ground Control to provide shaded public space for students.

Grafton Architects is one of the world's most decorated architecture studios, having won the 2020 RIBA Royal Gold Medal, the 2020 Pritzker Architecture Prize and the Stirling Prize in 2021. The studio's concrete university campus in Lima, Peru, also won the inaugural RIBA International Prize in 2016.

In an interview with Dezeen, Farrell and McNamara explained how they stay motivated after decades in the architecture industry, despite describing it as "stressful, painful and terrifying".

The photography is by Tim Hursley.

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