Patrons Oxford Insurance Office Building

Structural engineering services for the design of a new two-story 20,000-square-foot building located in the Portland Technology Park in Portland, Maine. 

The structural framing consists primarily of timber elements. Wood floor and roof trusses are supported by a mass-timber frame constructed with glulam timbers. While serving as the primary structural support system, glulam beams and columns are architectural grade and exposed to view, providing a key architectural feature to the building.
The building’s geometry is unique and contains several skews, knuckles and overhangs. Construction of the joinery of the glulams required significant coordination between the designers, contractors and fabricators in order to meet the architectural and structural intent. Challenging aspects of the joinery included pre-fabricated slots and bolt-holes to conceal connections, bearing plates accepting multiple glulam beams from skewed angles, and hybrid “flitch-columns” at the braced frames consisting of solid steel plates sandwiched by glulam members. Due to the complexity, many of the connections were custom designed and detailed by Becker Structural Engineers.