Webinar arranged to tout mass timber

The nonprofit U.S. Green Building Council Arkansas is offering an online webinar June 18 from 10 to 11 a.m.

The program “USGBC Arkansas: Focus on Mass Timber” will discuss an industry that may soon be a much larger part of the Arkansas economy — mass timber construction.

Canadian-based manufacturing company Structurlam Mass Timber Corp. is investing $90 million to buy, retrofit and equip a former Nucor plant in Conway. When it comes online in mid-2021, the facility will support Walmart as the exclusive supplier of engineered wood products for the office buildings in the retailer’s new corporate campus in Bentonville.

Founded in 1962, Structurlam was the first manufacturer to bring mass timber to market in North America, and the company has completed 250 mass timber construction projects in Canada and the U.S. since 2015.

Sarah King, director of community outreach at Fayetteville development firm Specialized Real Estate Group, is a U.S. Green Building Council Arkansas board member. King and Matt Poe, an associate architect at Fayetteville firm Modus Studio, organized the webinar.

Speakers include Structurlam CEO Hardy Wentzel and Nabholz Corp. executives Mark Dilday and John Strack. Nabholz was the general contractor for the University of Arkansas’ Adohi Hall, the largest mass timber building in the U.S., completed last year.

Yvonne Farrell with Grafton Architects in Ireland will discuss the company’s approach, in partnership with Modus Studio, to designing the $16 million Anthony Timberlands Center for Design and Materials Innovation at the UA. The building will serve as the epicenter for multiple timber and wood design initiatives, a growing design-build program and fabrication technologies laboratories, and serve as the new home to an emerging graduate program in timber and wood design.

The webinar is free to watch and registration is available at this link.