#NELMA

Strip away the marketing and a high-performance house is a machine: heat pumps, solar arrays, continuous air barriers, triple-glazed everything. Builders are getting remarkably good at making these houses perform. What they haven’t solved is making them feel like somewhere you’d want to live. That’s where wood comes in. A recent North Shore project makes […] The post Wood: Making High-Performance Homes Palatable appeared first on NELMA.

A mid-size Czech city just built multi-story rental housing out of timber, on a budget, on schedule, for the first time in the country’s history. The Northeast U.S. has been sitting on the resource base to do the same thing for decades. Nobody’s built it yet. The model. Žďár Wooden Housing, designed by Kuba & […] The post Imagine This in the Northeast appeared first on NELMA.

Plant a single species in rows, on a schedule, at a set density, and you’re not growing a forest — you’re manufacturing one. Eastern white pine makes the difference obvious. Push it toward a uniform, printable output and you get the opposite result. White pine planted in dense, even-aged stands is the textbook target for […] The post You Can’t Print a Forest appeared first on NELMA.

When Jesse and Betsy went looking for more space on their Portland, Maine property, zoning gave them one option: build on the same long, narrow footprint as the rotting pool house it would replace. Six years after renovating their 1960s ranch house, the couple wanted a versatile studio that could serve every member of the […] The post Small Footprint, Full Warmth: Eastern White Pine Anchors a Portland Studio appeared first on NELMA.

Walk through any architecture publication right now and wood construction means one thing: mass timber. Cross-laminated panels, exposed glulam beams, landmark buildings photographed at golden hour. It’s a compelling story, and the engineering behind it is real. But it’s not how most wood buildings get built. Light-frame construction is still the workhorse of the American […] The post Mass Timber Gets the Press. Light-Frame Does the Work. appeared first on NELMA.

Every building material makes an argument about where it comes from. Concrete says it came from industry. Steel says it came from somewhere far away and very hot. Wood says it came from here. When Calgary-based Little Giant described their Forest Studio on Vancouver Island as drawing on the “spirit of a treehouse,” they weren’t […] The post The Only Material That Already Belongs appeared first on NELMA.

In Freeport, Maine, students and researchers now gather in a building that was designed to do more than shelter them — it was designed to teach them something just by existing. The Smith Center for Education and Research at Wolfe’s Neck Center for Agriculture and the Environment opened last fall as the campus centerpiece of […] The post Surround Students In Wood appeared first on NELMA.

Last fall, Smith College opened Kathleen McCartney Hall — a 15,000-square-foot mass timber hub on its Frederick Law Olmsted–designed campus in Northampton, Massachusetts. Designed by TenBerke with structural engineering by Thornton Tomasetti, the building houses the college’s career development and leadership programs. It’s all-electric, net-zero ready, targeting LEED Gold, and tied into the campus geothermal […] The post The Best Classroom Is the Building Itself appeared first on NELMA.

What Your Grade Stamp Is Actually Telling You. Part 1 of 3: How Lumber Gets Graded This is the first in a three-part series from NELMA breaking down what’s in a lumber grade stamp and why it matters. Part 2 covers species designations. Part 3 covers the certification and traceability system. Every piece of dimensional […] The post See The Stamp. Trust The Quality – Part 1 of 3 appeared first on NELMA.

In 2018, NELMA challenged architecture and design students to imagine a lunar colony built with wood. At the time, it read like creative speculation — an exercise in rethinking a familiar material in an unfamiliar place. Seven years later, with astronauts having just looped around the Moon on the Artemis II mission and NASA actively […] The post When NELMA Students Designed the Moon Base We’re Now Building appeared first on NELMA.