‘It has a heroic, Roman quality’: how Arkansas’s timber university building could revolutionise architecture

First conceived as a ‘spider’s web of sticks’, this vast wooden wonder may end up being a template for the environmentally sound buildings of the futureFringed by a fragmented strip of big box stores, auto repair shops and brick buildings marooned in oceans of asphalt, the state highway of Martin Luther King Jr Boulevard in Fayetteville, Arkansas, is not a place of architectural beauty. And yet, as unlikely as it may seem, this rumbling stretch of road on the edge of this small city is now home to one of the most significant buildings for the future of architecture in North America.Even at speed, it’s hard to miss. Standing opposite a 200-space Walmart parking lot, the Anthony Timberlands Center for Design and Materials Innovation looks like a group of great big barns caught in a highway pile-up. It begins as a low wooden shed at the back, before suddenly buckling up in jagged folds, its roofline jerking in staccato slopes until it greets the highway with a six-storey shop window. Peer through this glass billboard and you will catch a glimpse of dancing robotic arms, whirring drills, and big wooden building components gliding to and fro on a gantry crane, conjuring the future of low-carbon timber construction. Continue reading...

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