ATELIERJONES JOINS NYC MASS TIMBER STUDIO

We are honored to join six other teams in the inaugural cohort of the New York City Mass Timber Studio! Our team, including Magna & York, Sage and Coombe, Swinerton, Timberlab, and DCI Engineers, is working to redesign a seven-story concrete apartment build in mass timber, bringing sustainable timber construction to Harlem. This program, sponsored by the New York City Economic Development Corporation, is a visionary effort to help lower embodied carbon in the built environment, and we would love to see municipalities around the country follow their example!

Clinton Presidential Center Presents "The Future American City... Now"

Susan Jones joins the Clinton Presidential Center, presenting “The Future American City…Now” in partnership with the University of Arkansas Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design. The program will feature an engaging discussion with four national leaders in design and policy shaping our urban futures. The conversation promises informative and stimulating perspectives on affordable housing, transportation, low-carbon design and construction, and civic engagement in city design.

ATELIERJONES AT THE 2024 iMTC

We’re looking forward to another year of seeing old friends and colleagues and meeting new ones at the International Mass Timber Conference. We hope you can join us for the Thursday sessions, where Meghan Doring will present Mass Timber Modular Housing: Scaling and It’s Challenges, and Susan will share the recent results of Heartwood’s Life Cycle Analysis in Transparency in Materials, Carbon Accounting, and Next Life Re-Use. See you out on the floor!

Heartwood Featured at the Skyscraper Museum

Heartwood is featured the Skyscraper Museum’s Tall Timber: The Future of Cities in Wood, an exhibition showcasing Mass Timber as a lower-carbon alternative to concrete and steel high-rises.

TALL TIMBER opens on February 27th in New York City

SUSAN JONES WINS AIA SEATTLE GOLD MEDAL

atelierjones founder and principal Susan Jones was awarded the 2024 AIA Seattle Gold Medal, recognizing distinguished lifetime achievement in architecture, including design and professional practice and service to the profession, the community, education and the arts.

VAAGEN VISIT

atelierjones visted Vaagen Timbers at their Colville, Washington headquarters. The visit coincided with the final production of CLT panels for the Roundhouse, and the team got to watch as the panels were pressed and prepared for delivery to Greenville, California.

MASS TIMBER MODULAR FIRE REPLACEMENT HOMES WIN TWO HONOR AWARDS

atelierjones’ Mass Timber Modular Fire Replacement Homes take home both an Award of Merit and the Young Voice’s Selection at the 2023 AIA Seattle Honor Awards!

ATELIERJONES OPEN HOUSE

On August 30th, atelierjones is hosting an open house for our collaborators, clients, and friends! Join us at our office in the Bullitt Center for food, cocktails, and fun. With so much to celebrate this year, we would love for you to join us!

1501 East Madison Street, Seattle, WA. 4-8pm

RISING FROM THE ASHES | SIERRA INSTITUTE HOMES

NBC Bay Area News came to visit our local home owner, Ken Donell and feature the Greenville, California community’s amazingly resilient response to the Dixie Fire devastation which occurred just two years ago, destroying over 1,000 structures in the small town in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Today, three houses are just weeks away from move-in. As Jennifer Gray Thompson of the Bay Area fire response group After The Fire says in the coverage, “They’re very creative, they’re very innovative…to see this amazing wildfire resistant, really climate resistant [house] go up here, really the most impressive example I’ve seen in six years of doing this work.” atelierjones is so honored to be working with the Sierra Institute for Community and Environment and Mass Timber Strategy on this important project.

Roundhouse to Begin Construction

The Maidu Roundhouse Cultural Center is moving forward with funding towards a late summer start for construction! Thank you to the incredible effort from the Sierra Institute and the willpower of the Roundhouse members to secure the funding needed to push the project forward from design into construction. atelierjones is expecting the permit in August and is working closely with Vaagen Timbers to approve the shop drawings. The builders will begin with groundwork on the site this month. This major step forward for Roundhouse exemplifies the resilience of the community around shared purpose: environmental and cultural justice. We are thrilled and honored to work with the Maidu and additional partners on this project.

The Architect's Newspaper's Best Firm (small) in the West - 2023

We are so excited to share that The Architect’s Newspaper has awarded atelierjones Best Architecture Firm (small) in the West alongside national leaders in design practices across the US for 2023. The Architect’s Magazine acknowledged that beyond the design merit of individual projects, how do you recognize excellence in the overall impact and values of a firm? Executive Editor Jack Murphy explains how atelierjones stands out: “Susan Jones’s leadership surrounding mass timber in Seattle is remarkable. Her work to introduce the technology into the ICC building code set the stage for the growing popularity of this structural system today. This is a major accomplishment!” We celebrate the award for our mighty and nimble team that beautifully executes fine details on large and small projects and has had enormous national impact introducing lower carbon design at scale to the United States!

SUSAN JONES ON MINDFUL CONSUMING AT THE SEATTLE DESIGN FESTIVAL

Susan Jones joins the Mindful Consuming Podcast to discuss mass timber construction with hosts Ruth True and Michael Bennett and guests Rico Quirindongo and Ethan Martin. The conversation was held in Michael Bennett’s CLT installation Public Display at the 2023 Seattle Design Festival.

Summer Retreat to Mt. Constitution

Last weekend, team atelierjones left downtown Seattle for Orcas Island to retreat from the city and into the woods. Susan led the team winding up Mt. Constitution to reach her family’s forest, a site for extensive restoration across multiple generations.

Everyone geared up with hardhats and axes to trim, collect, and pile thinned wood, making room in overstocked areas for sunlight and new growth. In these woods, time is a blink, and a tree is a drop in the ocean. A few hours of clearing and stacking wood feels satisfying; a small accomplishment in the lifetime of the forest. For atelierjones, working directly with timber inspires care and attention towards how we source and design with the material. Susan’s love and dedication towards the forest’s enduring health is reflected in how she continues to encourage family and friends to learn about and to work with wood in a lifelong project that keeps giving back to people.

atelierjones gathered on the deck of Constitution Shed, a small structure crafted from windfall trees found on site, to reflect on the past year. From the construction of one of the first tall mass timber workforce housing buildings in the US to the prefabrication of timber modular homes replacing those lost in a wildfire, each project ties back to sustainably sourcing wood. The tight-knit team’s greatest strength is balancing each other’s expertise across project management, technical detailing, strategic relations, and design, which allows them to navigate variegated project types together.

Moving forward, atelierjones will continue to tell the breadth of stories embedded in our design process because the depth of meaning in our work comes from the web of collaborations involved in each project. Our goal is to grow together through a shared vision with our network of partners, much like the thriving relationship between trees in the forest.

Evenings on the beach lit by campfires and enlivened with personal stories brought the group closer together. Susan’s family cabin provided a beautiful setting and creature comforts to make new memories through cooking meals, playing card games, and exploring the landscape. The weekend culminated in a day of hiking, swimming, and painting to relish the sunshine before returning to Seattle. We settled comfortably back into our new home at the Bullitt Center, refreshed and ready for the busy summer ahead.

Sierra Nevada Modular Mass Timber Homes featured

atelierjones’ mass timber, fire-hardened modular houses are just finishing up construction in Greenville, CA, and Architectural Record took careful note and published this wonderful article describing the homes, but more, the complexity and nuances of rebuilding resiliently in a remote, rural post-fire environment, using regional wood and local resources as possible. Thank you!

HEARTWOOD TOPS OUT

Construction on Heartwood’s superstructure is completed, marking a huge milestone for Washington’s tallest timber building! The final CLT panels were craned into place on December 9, 2022, with roofing soon to follow. Thanks to the building’s innovative mass timber system, years of intense trade coordination, and a hardworking on-site team, the structure has been completed in just eight short months.

HEARTWOOD WINS AIASEATTLE RESEARCH AWARD

Heartwood wins its first award — an AIASeattle Research Award for the first proof-of-concept Type IV-C building under construction in the US. Under the rigorous jury, led by Billie Faircloth, FAIA, LEED AP BD+C, the award celebrated the highly collaborative team’s work over three years to design, entitle, permit, price, and build the 67,000 SF 126-unit mass timber building. Our wildly talented and dedicated interdisciplinary team is thrilled to be working on such an impactful project with our owners at Community Roots Housing.

HEARTWOOD CLT PANELS ARRIVE ON SITE

The first shipment of CLT panels have arrived at our Community Roots Housing Heartwood construction site in Capitol Hill as of August 25, 2022. CLT Panels made by Kalesnikoff are currently being craned into place and positioned precisely over the glulam columns and beams engineered by DCI Engineers, fabricated by DR Johnson and Mass Plywood Panel stairs by Freres Lumber, all post-processed by TimberLab. Click here to see live aerial updates, thanks to our contractor, Swinerton Builders. What a great team!

ATELIERJONES RETREAT AT THE CONSTITUTION SHED

Lots of great thinking and planning for the future going on at atelierjones at our annual retreat! We definitely decided we would keep on seeing more of the incredible Pacific Northwest Mass Timber resources - from forests to factories to buildings. And we started with the Mt. Constitution Forest Camp - thinning hemlocks and spruce trees, to bring more light and diversity into the remote mountain forest that we are tendering.

METHOD HOMES VISIT

The Wet Core is moving ahead at record pace! atelierjones visited the three wetcores under construction at the Method Homes Factory earlier this week, and were excited to see them completely framed and mechanical/electrical/plumbing rough-in starting. The factory build was high quality, and it was exciting to see how much had been accomplished in just two weeks. These prefabricated wetcore modules will be the first of three mass timber modular homes to be built this summer and fall in the Sierra Nevada town of Greenville, CA, which was destroyed in the Dixie Fire in August 2021. atelierjones is leading the design and prefabrication process with Method and DR Johnson, who is supplying the mass timber structure for the homes.

TIMBERLAB VISIT

atelierjones visited Timberlab in Portland, OR, where they saw Mass Timber prefabricated elements undergoing production for our Heartwood workforce 126-unit workforce residential building. On display were the Freres produced mass plywood panel (MPP) Exit Stairs going through post-processing at Timberlab, and a mockup of Heartwood’s innovative all-wood beam to column connection.