Mass Timber Modular Construction: Developments in Oregon
Bibliographic record
Abstract
With the mass timber industry taking off in 2015 in Oregon, when DR Johnson Lumber in Riddle, OR started producing CLT panels, government officials were eager to support it for its promise of economic development in rural communities and also had hopes of addressing the state’s affordable housing crisis using mass timber modular construction. While mass timber modular housing has had some success in Europe, the different construction standards and building culture in the United States make it more challenging. With few areas in Oregon in which housing is likely to be built over six stories tall or in large-scale developments, it did not seem possible that mass timber could solve the affordable housing crisis where it cannot compete in cost with standard light wood-frame construction. However, it did seem feasible that mass timber panels, which are so well-suited to customizable pre-fabrication through digital manufacturing, might be successful in an alternative building type for modular construction: classrooms. In successful models of mass timber modular classrooms in Austria and Germany, schools were built in much shorter timeframes and for 25% less cost than steel or concrete construction. The authors are now working with a modular building manufacturer in Oregon, Modern Building Systems (MBS), that produces custom-designed modular light wood-frame classrooms. While mass timber classrooms cannot compete in price with light wood-frame, particularly in single-story applications, they could be competitive for two story (or taller) schools, which are usually built using steel braced-frame and concrete block. Because MBS is 18 miles west of Freres Lumber, which is newly producing Mass Plywood Panels (MPP), and the MBS facility needs no modifications to use MPP instead of wood-frame, the authors are working with them to design an economically competitive mass timber module, with several potential clients interested in testing a prototype in 2019.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.021 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".