Mass Timber: Evan Breutsch and Christopher Rancourt's open-air market hall and community center

Work by Evan Breutsch & Christopher Rancourt (both MArch '23)
Completed for Winter 2023 Advanced Topics Studio "On Timber: Sticks, Stacks, and Composites," led by Heather Roberge

Breutsch and Rancourt designed an open-air market hall and community center, utilizing a variety of stacking techniques in order to organize and define how spatial, atmospheric, and structural logic can be gleaned from a spectrum of stacking strategies. Each strategy is carefully deployed in response to a design requirement of the building. The project’s resulting qualities vary from those produced by post and beam, arrays of various densities, and repetitive load-bearing walls, to ornamental facades and load-bearing infill. Rather than defer to programmatic or structural conventions, the students sifted through their material spectrum to produce arrangements of material that are sometimes elusive in their structural performance. At times, excess material appears to be purely a matter of structural expression. At other times, ornament appears superfluous but in fact, serves as a load-bearing array of members. These slippages in identity complicate a singular reading of the material array as simply tectonic.