At the time of this project, the University of Massachusetts in Amherst was seeking seeking proposals for the design of a new Arts building. I created the design presented herein as a semester project for an Architectural Studies studio led by Sigrid Miller-Pollin.
To understand the long-term behavior and to test a wood-concrete system in the New England climate, we constructed a 14 ft. slab (the “bridge”), loaded it and have been measuring deflections and strain in the structure since November 2005.
This is a specialized dictionary for timber engineering terms in English and German. It currently contains approx. 1000 timber engineering and general engineering terms.
The objective of this study was to investigate the monotonic and cyclic behaviour of different kinds of slender dowel-type fasteners. To accomplish this, four types of fasteners were tested in a series of 73 monotonic and cyclic tests. All tests used either one or two slotted-in steel plates in PARALLAM®, a Parallel Strand Lumber (PSL) product.
This program allows the user to take an Excel spreadsheet with any type of calculation data (no matter how complex) and optimize a calculation outcome (e.g. total cost) using a Genetic Algorithm approach. Genetic algorithms (GAs) are based on biological principles of evolution and provide an interesting alternative to “classic” gradient-based optimization methods.