Balloons and Booleans
A CLT Towersupervised by Hanif Kara and Jennifer Bonner
Location: Virgina
Date: 2021
Balloons and Booleans stems off A CLT McMansion, investigating how cross-laminated timber morphs as the scale moves from a suburban house to a residential tower. Similar, the tower uses a series of marching walls as structure, but walls are stacked upwards to create the tower. These stacked panels are rotated to create a mix of both affordable and market-rate housing and different bedroom types. The CLT panels are efficiently utilized as both main structure and room separation, capitalizing on CLT’s thermal, sound reduction, and structural properties. The wall roations are a series of 2.5 to 5-degree rotations to allow the walls to structurally transfer in their stack. By virtue of the material’s aesthetic and structural tendencies, the project looks to create towers intrinsically different from the generic glass monolith towers. CLT’s ability to build tall has the potential to radically change our skylines.