Uenoa, a Tokyo-based architectural practice, has completed a new building for Synegic, a structural screws manufacturer in the Miyagi prefecture, north of Tokyo. According to Uenoa, the client wanted to showcase newer possibilities of wooden construction, particularly in light of the fact that it provides the structural screws used to build wooden buildings. As such, the studio proposed a plan that incorporates a three- dimensional, cross-laminated timber (CLT) roof with a large truss spanning 18 meters.
The three-dimensional roof shape is formed by connecting flat trusses made of laminated timber with triangular CLT panels. By adopting a CLT panel for fastening flat trusses, complicated processing of joints and joining by hardware are avoided. In addition, it enables a rational method of factory pre-cutting and on-site screw joining. In addition, the use of heavy CLT panels here, which are traditionally used for walls and floors, represents a new way of incorporating CLT in a roof.
The CLT structure is also used as a partition wall that bears a vertical load on the first floor. Not only did Uenoa thoroughly try to control the texture of the CLT surface just like marble, they also wanted to use screws factoring in design and workability rather than hardware commonly used to fix CLT walls. Through such an ambitious process, a large CLT wall that emphasizes the wood texture without modules has been realized in the atrium. The designers hope that their use of CLT for this building will encourage further experimentation in its application moving forward.
The CLT panels for this project were commissioned to be manufactured by factories in the prefecture, who co-operated in the selection of sapwood lamina from the design stage for the decorative panels used on the walls. The finished CLT panel was further checked for the texture of the adjacent panels so that the colors of the adjacent panels would match.