Founders Hall, Foster School of Business, University of Washington

Designed with students and sustainability in mind, this beautiful five-story mass timber building creates an environment that promotes collaboration among scholars at the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business.

Founders Hall houses instructional, academic, and administrative spaces, including classrooms, offices, lecture halls, and large common areas, in a building that balances high performance with low carbon impact. Use of mass timber reduced the structure’s embodied carbon by 58 percent, and a high-performance envelope reduces ongoing energy costs and operational carbon, lowering energy use by 79 percent. Efficient operations were valued since Founders Hall is the first project at the University where the academic unit, Foster School of Business, is responsible for the building’s annual operating costs.

The innovative hybrid structure uses Type IV-HT construction for the mass timber portion of the building—a glue-laminated timber (glulam) post and beam frame with cross-laminated timber (CLT) decking—and Type I-B for the large assembly spaces, constructed using concrete and steel. The beautiful mass timber is left exposed throughout the interior, and strategic building positioning allowed them to preserve many of the towering Douglas fir trees on site, giving everyone the chance to connect the wood outside to the wood within.