ARCHITECT Magazine has featured the Design Building at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, highlighting its innovative zipper truss, in the March 2017 issue.

The Design Building is currently the first and largest mass-timber academic structure on the East Coast, and became the first project to use several cutting-edge building technologies, including a “zipper truss” and a composite floor system developed by the school’s faculty. It is also  one of only two buildings in the U.S. to use timber for every major structural system.

In keeping with the building’s pedagogical mission, all its structural systems are exposed: the glue-laminated post-and-beam structure, CLT shear wall cores, composite concrete-and-CLT floor plates, and the custom steel-and-glulam zipper trusses, named for the way they converge multiple structural members to a single point.  Read the full article here