In Arkansas, it's not an uncommon experience to hear sirens during a storm. Those often mean a tornado has touched down in your county. For many, it's a signal to seek safety in a storm shelter. However, these shelters are often no more than a subterranean concrete box. Fayetteville's Modus Studio recently received a grant from the Softwood Lumber Board and the Forest Service to design a new kind of storm shelter, one that utilizes a resource Arkansas is becoming known for. Mass timber principal architect Jason Wright came to the Carver Center for Public Radio to speak with Ozarks at Large's Jack Travis about the new project.
Jack Travis: He says this won't be Modus' first storm shelter.
Jason Wright: Yeah, we've got a couple under our belt in north central Arkansas for small rural school districts. And how this all came about was we're designing — or we have designed and we're under construction for — the new Fayetteville Public Schools Woodland Junior High, and it's a mass timber structure. Naturally we wanted to do mass timber everywhere if we could. Some things had to be in concrete — foundation walls, naturally. But we had opportunities to explore the use of mass timber for the ceiling components, the interior facing walls of the storm shelter components within the larger school. And once we started really digging into the weeds and having these discussions with our structural engineer, they were like, hey, wait, pump the brakes. We don't see where there's testing data to support the use of mass timber in these ICC 500 — which is a fancy way to describe how international building code classifies these structures. They're like, we don't see where we can use mass timber, there's no data to support the use of mass timber in these more public environments. We dug around a little bit more. We found out that there was a study for use of mass timber at a residential scale, but you couldn't apply that to commercial construction or in this case, public construction. So that got the old wheels turning. I said, OK, if we wanted to do this, how would that happen? We did some research. We found a path to get it done, but it would require testing — like physical, destructive testing of mass timber elements. It would take us basically acquiring these cross-laminated timber panels, shipping them to Indiana, to the International Code Council Evaluation Services facility. They would erect a test sample and they would shoot a 2-by-4 at it at like 250 miles an hour or thereabouts to see if it penetrated. And there's some more detailed stuff in there, but that's the long and short of the testing process that we'd have to go through in order to effectively have certified materials built out of mass timber to use in these shelter situations. So we reached out to our industry partners to see who might want to partner on it. We had worked with the Softwood Lumber Board before on a local project here called Via Emma — it's a multifamily project in Springdale. And we pitched the idea to them and said, hey, look, this seems like a pretty good idea. It would connect the built world with our state economy. It's going to support the mass timber producer, mainly Mercer, in Arkansas. It could also be applied throughout the southeastern United States or anywhere where there are tornado-prone areas, because there are mass timber producers up in Chicago, in Texas and in the Southeast. And they said, hey, it's a great idea, let's do it. We made sure that similar studies hadn't already hit the street. That was the case. And so yeah, we were able to partner with the Softwood Lumber Board. They helped fund this whole grant. And so here we are, going through the early stages of this project.
Travis: I'm having trouble even picturing what it would look like on the inside and out. Can you describe that?
Wright: So mass timber in this context is cross-laminated timber. You have giant slabs of wood. We all kind of know how plywood is made — you take layers of veneer and you rotate each layer 90 degrees and glue each one up. You end up with an odd number of layers, whether it's five, seven, nine, eleven layers thick. Well, think of cross-laminated timber as 2-by-6s laid out in layers, rotating each layer 90 degrees, gluing them all together. You have this giant billet of glued-together 2-by-6s. It's really thick. We were thinking, we've done many projects with this material locally — the Anthony Timberlands Center for the University of Arkansas, Adoha Hall, and the Fayetteville Public Schools Woodland Junior High. This could be a really good opportunity. You get the nice material effects on the inside — you'll see exposed wood grain. We like to call it biophilic qualities of the interior spaces. It's mentally a great environment to be in. We all love that feel and touch and smell of wood. Usually these structures are small enough that you don't have to cover it up. A lot of people think, oh, you're using wood in a structure that is subject to fire. Well, they're all sprinklered. They're small enough in area and height that the code doesn't make you cover up that wood. It's just not enough of a fuel load to be a problem. So it would be extremely nice. It's much better than a tilt-up concrete box. Would you rather be in a nice wood box that has a nice tactile feel, is beautiful to look at, smells great — or a damp concrete box? Because those are your two options.
Travis: Especially if you're a school teacher at, say, Woodland, trying to have a class of kids in there.
Wright: And these spaces are multipurpose in nature. We don't just design this space as an emergency shelter that only gets used in drills. These are multipurpose spaces. A lot of times we have gym-like functions — maybe half-court basketball or a volleyball court. The whole idea is that these spaces are being used on a daily basis, but they also happen to be where you go in case of a tornado emergency.
Travis: Can you talk about why, if you could do everything mass timber, you would pursue that?
Wright: There are benefits on multiple fronts — it's really multifaceted. You get the aesthetics, which are beautiful. You get the psychological benefits, the biophilic nature of being in those environments. You also get to tap into our state economy. Forestry is huge in Arkansas — over nearly 60% of the state is covered in forest, and namely softwoods, especially in the southwest to the southeast. It's a really good opportunity to take a southern yellow pine 2-by-6 that maybe wouldn't necessarily be able to be used in traditional stick form over three or four stories without being a number one select, which is an expensive cut-out member. When you put it together in mass timber, you get to use normal, everyday southern yellow pine 2-by-6 in a format that allows you to resist forces of nature that would otherwise not be able to be resisted in traditional stick frame construction. It's just checking a lot of boxes. The state economy can't be overlooked — that's a huge component. We want to keep our economy going, tap into the huge natural resource which is our forest industry. And it just makes sense.
Travis: Is there also an element of it being regenerative? Is concrete kind of the opposite of that?
Wright: Usually when we start to talk about these things in the context of sustainability, embodied carbon is a huge component to that conversation. Wood is a great example of how to do that. We can pack a lot of embodied carbon into the structure. It'll be there a long time — it's not going to decompose, break down and somehow make its way up into the atmosphere. It's going to be trapped in that structure. You mentioned concrete — is one better than the other? Not necessarily. We have to use concrete. We have to use steel. We have to use wood. It comes down to our responsibility to use those in responsible ways. Put concrete where concrete is appropriate, put wood where wood is appropriate. I want to use mass timber as much as possible just because it looks awesome, it supports our state economy, and in a context of K-12 schools it's great for the mental health and stability of our children. It's just checking a lot of boxes.
Travis: Why does your firm want to do stuff like this?
Wright: Way back in 2016 or thereabouts, we did Adoha Hall, and that's when we were introduced to mass timber. We got that introduction through the university, primarily through Peter Mackeith, the dean of the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design here at the Fayetteville campus. The more we learned about this material, the more we were like, oh, this is exciting. This is a material we can take advantage of locally. It's got a lot of momentum, and it hadn't really been explored that much, especially in the central United States. The Northwest was really ramped up by the time we got our hands on it. Europe had already been doing it — like Europe does everything else — 30 years ahead of us. We just saw it as an exciting opportunity to do something responsibly in terms of picking a building system. It's good for the environment, it promotes really good design opportunity, it's just good for the public in general. And so we just saw all those great green flags. If there was an opposite to a red flag — we just saw those opportunities to do something great with the building material and we hopped on the wagon. That snowballed, really. We did one project, then another and another, and before we knew it we were kind of positioned as experts in at least our region.
Travis: What's on your mind as the testing happens in Indiana? Are you going to get to watch them launch a 2-by-4 at it?
Wright: You know, I haven't talked about going up there to do that, but you just gave me a good idea. That's something I'd want to see. So what are we going to do with it — we want this to be sort of open source. The tests and the reports are going to be set up so that if you pick materials from, say, Mercer or Sterling Structures, you will have the data necessary to design a structure, and it doesn't have to be designed by Modus. Any architecture firm, any engineering firm, any team can take this information. It's like open source code — you can take it and apply it to your project. For us it's a way to make our mark in the region in this field, but it's also a way to just do a good thing. I would much rather be scared in a beautiful place than scared in a cold, brutalist concrete environment.
Travis: I've waited out a storm in a concrete box and it's not fun.
Wright: Exactly.
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a rush deadline and edited for length and clarity. Copy editors utilize AI tools to review work. KUAF does not publish content created by AI. Please reach out to kuafinfo@uark.edu to report an issue. The audio version is the authoritative record of KUAF programming.
