Aug. 31st 2023
By Nancy Kristof
As a member of Women in Design you get some pretty great perks, including members-only hard hat tours! Thanks to Meegan Bennett at DLR Group and WiD Membership chair extraordinaire for helping set up a tour of Hines’ new T3 mass timber spec office building in Rino!
Jessie Johnson with DLR Group provides an overview of the project and its design to Women in Design tour goers, May 2023.
T3 is an acronym for Timber, Transit and Technology. T3 Rino is one among several other T3 projects under construction, including Nashville and Houston. McCaffery and Ivanhoé Cambridge are listed as partners on the Denver project.
From afar, one might miss this six-story, 235,000-sq-ft building among the sea of cranes and high-rise construction dominating the area around RTD’s 38th & Blake station. But get up close and all five senses will tell you this is a different kind of construction site. It not only looks warm and inviting, it smells good!
Hines’ embrace of mass timber is resulting in "26 T3 projects completed, designed or in construction", according to their website.
The first T3 was completed in Minneapolis in 2016. 2019 saw T3 West Midtown Atlanta completed, which is home to Facebook, Haworth and Interior Architects, according to a 2021 news release.
The Denver T3 Rino project topped out in April of this year and is scheduled for completion later this year. A spec office building, the development is yet to secure a tenant (at least as of the time of the tour), with JLL marketing the office space and McCaffery handling retail.
The design team includes DLR as architect of record and Pickard Chilton as design architect (DLR was also involved in the Minneapolis and T3 West Midtown projects as well). Whiting-Turner is the builder. The Rino office is their second T3 project with Hines to date.
The first floor is designed with concrete, primarily to accommodate ground-floor retail and food and beverage permitting, according to Johnson. Everything above is a cross-laminated timber (CLT) system. There are three levels of parking included, but the project’s location directly across from RTD's 38th & Blake A-Line stop, makes public transportation an attractive commuting option. You’ll understand if you've tried to find street parking in Rino lately.
Starting the tour outside, DLR principal Jessie Johnson pointed out the numerous balconies cascading along the edges of the floor plates. As seen in the photo, sections with orange barriers will have curtainwall, while those without will extend to the balconies.
A view of the project from just outside the RTD 38th & Blake A-Line stop.
The first floor is dominated by the open atrium central stair. Once we ascended to the second floor we were treated to a wide open space with seemingly endless views of CLT.
The second floor balcony over the main lobby stair.
Differences and conditions specific to the use of mass timber came up often as the tour progressed. Not only is mass timber more environmentally friendly, it can often be built faster, as CLT beams and columns are typically pre-fabricated as a pre-assembled kit-of-parts brought to the site. (T3 Rino will pursue LEED Gold, Well building and Wiredscore certifications).
The optimum moisture for setting CLT is between six and 16%. Even with this spring being one of the wettest ever in Colorado our humidity still remains below that of cities such as Houston and Atlanta
There’s a total of just under 3000 pieces of timber in T3 Rino. They were setting about 25 pieces a day when erecting the structure, tour leaders said.
Wood expansion typically occurs early during construction, Johnson says, adding she’s seen it go up to an inch or an inch and half in other more humid locations such as Atlanta. But it then settles, she says. The CLT on the T3 Rino project is treated with one coat from the factory and that’s all it will get, adding the colors fade together over time.
"Column spacing on mass timber is tighter," Johnson says, noting another difference. Other components of the T3 project’s structural design included steel cross-bracing.
"One thing about wood compared to steel or concrete is the shear," Johnson says, adding, "the lateral design - timber's not as good on the shear side of things.” The solution came in steel cross bracing.
"Wood would be about twice as big around," Johnson says, explaining the choice to use steel in the cross bracing. This did present an AHJ interpretation issue, however. The city of Denver said the cross bracing did not qualify as a secondary system, deeming it a primary system, which required fireproofing of intumescent paint. Johnson points to this as a lesson learned, as not all jurisdictions interpret the structure system the same way.
Overall coordination on mass timber requires precision in the modelling and design, crediting the efforts managing the model and clash detection. "It's all going to be exposed, so you have to think really neatly how all your HVAC is going to work in the space," Johnson says.
“MEP was a big thing,” for CLT Johnson says, adding the fabricator needs to know where all the penetrations are. Out of those nearly 3000 pieces, only one beam was fabricated incorrectly.
The team also wrote a detailed tenant manual for Hines’ strict requirements on any future modifications. It includes expectation for tenant finishes or raceway or chiller line modifications, some of which is already accounted for in the original design.
Johnson noted live loading for mass timber is a little different than for concrete or steel buildings. Large assembly spaces such as anticipated break areas or conference rooms were thickened to achieve a 100 pounds per square inch load.
Hines isn’t sharing the construction cost of T3 Rino, but on average, Johnson says mass timber projects are coming in at about a 5-8% percent premium.
So why mass timber?
Its numerous benefits are getting a lot of attention: Environmentally friendly, lower embodied carbon, and it often results in faster build times. Beyond statistics, Hines seems to have faith that the kinds of spaces created by mass timber will not only help attract, but also help retain tenants. And as downtown Denver office vacancy rates continuing to hover around 25%, developers are owners are seeking advantages to help them rise above the competition.
Johnson noted surveys of tenants showed many love working in older loft-style buildings and they're often easily leased. Yet the studies also found that people would leave after a few years, citing leaky windows or inconsistent heating and cooling among their reasons. She says projects such as T3 can modernize the look and feel of these older wood-framed buildings and provide tenants with space that helps them attract the best talent.
I’m looking forward to seeing the completed space and in the meantime will await Hines’ announcement on who will be taking the space!
Project team:
Design
Architecture: DLR and Pickard Chilton
Structural Engineering: MKA
MEP: Alvine Engineering
Envelope: Morrison Hershfield
Landscape: Norris Design
Construction:
General Contractor: Whiting-Turner
Structural: Nordic Structures
Concrete: Rago
Mechanical/Plumbing: Legacy Mechanical
Electrical: Weifield Group
Framing: Heggem Lundquist
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