Traveler

CATEGORY: Architecture (Professional)
LOCATION: Boston, MA
TYPE: Residential/Commercial/Retail
PROGRAM: 154 units; Office; Restaurant; Parking
HEIGHT: 12 stories; 150 feet
AREA: 172,000 sf
FIRM: Generate
TEAM: Niles Bolton Associates (Design); BuroHappold (Structure); StructureCraft (Builder); Code Red (Code); Related Beal (Developer)
PHASES: Concept Design, Schematic Design
DURATION: 2019-2020
STATUS: Unbuilt

DESCRIPTION:
Traveler explores the new Type IV-B construction category under the 2021 International Building Code (IBC) which allows mass timber buildings up to 12 stories with limited exposure of timber on wall and ceiling surfaces.

As a mixed-use high-rise building with different types of program— residential, commercial, retail, and basement parking across various floors— Traveler presented challenges to the mass timber post, beam, and plate system which demanded careful consideration of a flexible structural grid to accommodate the various building uses.

ROLE/CREDITS:
As the Director of Architecture at Generate, I led the design of the building layouts including the basement parking, ground floor retail, office and residential floors, structural grids, mass timber system detailing, and project coordination. Along with Generate’s Director of Design, I also worked closely on the building’s formal massing articulations and exterior facade design. The image renderings below were completed by Forbes Massie.

Vertical Stack

Transitioning from eight residential and three office floors down to ground level retail and finally to underground parking, the design of Traveler required “threading the needle” of not only the mass timber structure, but also the mechanical services, all the way through the building to reduce the number of structural and mechanical transfers needed to accommodate the various programmatic uses. Where required, mass timber bracing was exposed on the upper office floor, the main ground level entry, and the large retail/restaurant space to showcase the building’s novel timber structure. This transition of program is also reflected on the facade as a “gradient” in the brickwork and vertical fin elements to allow larger window openings at the lower and more open public parts of the building.

Structural Solutions

A matrix of structural solutions— conventional concrete, steel, and steel/timber hybrid— were explored in relation to two variations (one code-compliant, and the other, a code-variant) of the timber post-beam-plate system to be able to compare the cost and embodied carbon of each, and more specifically, the relative impacts of the new Type-IV B code requirements for timber encapsulation.