Construction is currently taking place to bring about one of the tallest cross-laminated timber office/retail buildings in Los Angeles (LA). The 125,000 square-foot mixed-use structure, designed by LEVER Architecture, will stand just under 75 feet tall when it is completed in August 2022. The project, adaptive reuse of a single-story retail mall that had been abandoned for 30 years across the street from Metro’s Chinatown Station, began in April and is roughly 30 percent complete. The Cross Laminated Timber installation began last month. Structurlam, a mass wood producer located in British Columbia, supplied the 5-ply Cross Laminated Timber for the Los Angeles project, which had 364 panels totaling 75,776 square feet.
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LA Cross-laminated Timber Building Concept
According to the architectural team, the concept divides the five-story structure into two portions, with a tiered vertical garden plaza between the office wings. The location has a modest incline, and the entry stairway will connect Spring Street to New High Street. According to the website Urbanize Los Angeles, the building team collaborated with landscape architectural company James Corner Field Operations to feature a variety of outdoor terraces and decks, as well as open-air circulation components.
Shawmut Design and Construction Executive Vice President-West Greg Skalaski noted that adopting locally produced mass wood at a period of concern regarding lumber pricing and availability “adds consistency to the supply chain.” Furthermore, the use of CLT, a carbon-negative material that emits less CO2 than conventional construction products, allows for less concrete, significantly decreasing the building’s carbon footprint. He also feels that this project will be a watershed moment for the west coast in terms of mass timber’s adoption as a building material among developers, AEC businesses, and municipal building authorities. He adds that Redcar would have used even more CLT on this project were it not for code-mandated limitations.
