Work · Neighborhood

Timber Way

A multi-family building is the part of a neighborhood that either makes room for the rest of the neighborhood or quietly displaces it. We designed Timber Way to do the first. The building keeps its block porous — an amphitheater you can fall into on the way past, a marketplace stair that turns into Friday-night seating, a tube of light that opens as you climb it. The street has not been replaced; it has been given more places to gather, and a place to live above them.

Site Wallingford, Seattle

Program Apartments over market, gallery walk + amphitheater

Structure Cross-laminated timber

Type Studio project · two-person team

Timber Way was co-authored with a studio partner; the prose says we throughout. The thresholds — The Tube, the marketplace stair, the gallery walk — were worked jointly at the table.

The courtyard between the two timber volumes on a market morning — We made the marketplace steps wide enough to sit on, deep enough to set a coffee down, and angled toward a wall that takes a projected image on summer evenings; on a Saturday morning the same geometry works as the spine of a small market. The building does not have to be redesigned between those two uses.

A block learning to stay porous

Wallingford’s cultural life is mostly horizontal — small studios, a movie house, weekend markets, the slow drift between them. The risk for any new multi-family building on a block like this is that it shows up as a wall. We took the brief as an invitation to do the opposite: to make the building permeable to the life already on the street, and to add to that life rather than replace it.

The massing studies show the block being taught, step by step, to give its ground away — courtyards opened, corners eroded, gaps held between the volumes for the amphitheater and the market stair.

Six massing states, from solid block to porous pair of volumes — We kept these six states of the same block pinned above the desk as a reminder of what the building had promised the street.

The Tube · from city to apartment

Diagram of The Tube cutting through the block, panels opening along its length — We lined The Tube with panels that get smaller as you climb, so the walls open progressively and the daylight increases as you rise.

The most considered threshold in the project is the one we called The Tube — the route by which a resident, or a visitor, ascends from the public ground floor into the residential building above.

The compression at the bottom is the city; the expansion at the top is the apartment. The building announces the change in scale through the threshold itself rather than through a sign at the top of a stairwell.

What does this building add to Wallingford that Wallingford did not already have?

Gathering, above and below

The covered art gallery walkway around the block's perimeter — We lined the shared circulation with display walls that turn it into a slow gallery, giving residents a reason to pause, meet, and claim the building as more than a stack of units.

The site plan is organized around a central sunken amphitheater — shallow enough to walk into without thinking, steep enough to seat the crowd a neighborhood market or an outdoor screening pulls. Around the block’s perimeter, an Art Gallery Walkway carries work by local artists; it is a covered route in a city that needs covered routes, and the gallery program gives the walk a reason to slow down.

A subterranean studio, lit from above through square holes cut in the courtyard floor, hosts public classes during the day. At night those same holes leak light upward, so the floor of the gathering space is gently illuminated from below by the activity beneath it.

Cutaway through the block — market level below, timber volumes above — We cut the section to show the marketplace level held under the timber volumes — where the street's life and the residents' route upward share the same structure.

Timber is the means, not the meaning

Cross-laminated timber is the building’s primary structural system. We chose it because the warmth of the exposed wood inside the apartments and the public rooms was integral to what we wanted those rooms to feel like, and because CLT’s construction time and carbon profile were honest answers to the program’s sustainability brief.

But the material is not the architectural story. The story is the set of thresholds — The Tube, the amphitheater, the gallery walk, the marketplace stair — that let the building participate in the neighborhood instead of competing with it. CLT is what those thresholds are made of; it is not what they mean.

Street elevations of the two volumes — We held the street elevations to the block's existing datum; the new volumes step where the neighbors step.