Skyhive Portland

This was a design submitted to a design competition in 2023 sponsored by Buildner. The premise was to design a mixed-use, office skyscrapper that presents an innovative use of mass timber building systems. The main submission was only one page of A2 paper, which had to contain all plans, sections, diagrams, and renderings.

The inspiration for this building is a fiddlehead, or fern tendril, Celtic geometric patterns, and American art deco architecture. I was very excited to experiment with different ways of expressing the wooden structure, and tried as much as possible to make the structure exposed and integral to the building's form. This is most evident in the exposed glue-lam trusses, which I have deformed into interlinking rings, hoops, and tendrils. Most of the load bearing structure is comprised of a standard grid of CLT walls and floors.