In December 2023, a 53-foot truck loaded with just under 44,000 pounds of prefabricated, modular panels left Durango, Colorado. Its destination was New York’s Hudson Valley, where its cargo would be assembled to form the Hemlock House, the first single-family home to be built using the Timber Age Modular Building System (TAMBS).

The Founder

When Kyle Hanson arrived in Durango more than a decade ago, he noticed two related problems that have long affected many small and mid-size cities around the United States. First, there is a lack of affordable housing. The median sale price for a home in 2023 was $649,000. Second, there is a lack of good-paying jobs. As of 2023, the area median income for La Plata County (where Durango is located) was just over $100,000 for a family of four. Given the economics of the situation, even families with multiple middle-class incomes are struggling to establish roots in the city. Without roots, it is common for folks to lack a deep attachment to their neighborhood or to feel it worthwhile to invest time or resources into the community. It’s also more likely that they’ll leave at the slightest whiff of a greener pasture.

A lot of people may recognize that affordable housing and stable, good-paying jobs are crucial for the creation of strong communities, but Kyle Hanson also wanted to provide a solution—he wanted to make affordable housing and create 1,000 good-paying jobs. Paradoxically, he decided to look for this solution by focusing on yet another problem: the declining health of forest systems in southwestern Colorado. This strategy would lead him to found Timber Age Systems.

From Forest to Frame

“In Colorado, 90% of wood products come from out of state,” Hanson says. For a state with 24 million acres of forest and woodlands cover, there is something perverse about this figure. Hanson felt there was also something perverse about the notion that there was an overabundance of potentially manufacturable building materials sitting in the woods on the outskirts of a town that lacked sufficient housing and manufacturing jobs, and so he decided to do something about it.

Hanson, who has a background in wood manufacturing, began researching how he could turn the ponderosa pine into a building material. Eventually, he found that even low-grade wood can be used in the fabrication of cross-laminated timber (CLT) panels, so he applied for and in 2018 received a grant from the U.S. Forest Service to produce a proof-of-concept CLT structure. As his vision for Timber Age developed and he probed the depths of building science nerdom, he saw that he didn’t have to stop at the fabrication of CLT panels; he could potentially fabricate an entire modular structure within a factory. He also saw that by using Passive House standards he could create homes that are efficient, healthy, and durable, and over the next five years Hanson and his team worked to create TAMBS, a system capable of achieving Passive House levels of performance using CLT from ponderosa pine.

The team currently sources wood from an approximately 40-mile radius around Durango, and they then mill, dry, and process the wood themselves in their facility. While it is unlikely that Hanson will create 1,000 jobs in Durango with this model, it can easily be replicated elsewhere, offering an opportunity to revive small, regional sawmills that can then work with local arborists and landowners to thin overcrowded or diseased forests. Ideally, the result will be healthier forests, more jobs, stronger communities, and more TAMBS that can be used to build homes like the Hemlock House.

The Engineer

Despite being based in Durango now, Hamm’s connections to the Passive House community on the East Coast run deep. Hamm is a licensed mechanical engineer who was introduced to Passive House by his sister more than a decade ago. She was a Passive House designer working for Habitat for Humanity and partnered with the Stevens Institute of Technology and Parsons Schools of Design team behind Empowerhouse, which tied for first place in the Solar Decathlon 2011 Affordability Contest and later became the first building in Washington, D.C., to be built following passive principles.

Hamm followed in his sister’s footsteps, participating in the Solar Decathlon while finishing his graduate studies at Stevens Institute of Technology. While working on the SURE HOUSE, which ultimately won the Solar Decathlon in 2015, Hamm met Ed May of bldgtyp, who served as the project manager. Hamm would later work with May again while working for Nastasi Architects on the Candela Lofts in Hoboken, which was also one of the first featured projects on the Passive House Happy Hour in May 2020. Following his time with Nastasi, Hamm then joined Steven Winter Associates in New York City as a Passive House consultant, focusing on energy modeling for mid- and high-rise residential projects.

Throughout his work with SWA, Hamm remained interested in digital fabrication, especially its applications in high-performance building. During the pandemic, he began to reconsider his career trajectory and became increasingly fixated on the use of digital fabrication and CLT as a low-carbon building material and its role in addressing the wildfire crisis. He eventually stumbled upon an article about Timber Age. As he recounts, he shared it with his wife, telling her, “‘This is exactly what I’ve been talking about. I can’t believe that somebody’s doing this.’”

He eventually moved on from SWA, joined up with a former professor to build a machine capable of 3D printing sheet metal, and continued to monitor progress at Timber Age. He knew they were on to something.

The Architect

Armand Graham is a designer’s designer. Prior to establishing his own practice in 2012, the New Jersey-based architect worked at several firms with a global reach, and worked on mega projects that included the W Abu Dhabi and the expansion of Marco Polo Airport in Venice. Completed in 2009 and built over a Formula 1 racetrack, the former is one of the United Arab Emirates’ landmarks and an example of how design tools can transport things from digital space into the real world. However, it was while working as the project architect on the latter that Graham says he got his first real taste of integrating sustainability and data-driven engineering for lower energy use with interesting design.

This was a lesson he would take to heart. Since opening his own office, Graham has done a mixture of residential work up and down the East Coast and has embraced an agenda of sustainability. Unfortunately, not every client has been responsive. As frustrating as this has been, it has encouraged Graham to explore better ways of educating clients about the benefits of sustainable design and materials like CLT while also pushing the needle when it comes to his own practice and abilities with respect to taking abstract, digital ideas and converting them into something tangible and energy efficient.

Consequently, when the opportunity arose to build his own home on a 10-acre property in the Hudson Valley, Graham hoped to marry elements of digital fabrication, prefabrication, and CLT. As he describes this initial plan, it was meant to function as an ADU and stand in the forest as a mysterious wooden sculptural form inspired by the rock formations on the site. As of the start of 2020, he was finalizing plans with a local contractor and certain that the start of construction was just a few weeks or maybe months away.

And then the pandemic hit.

Pushing the Envelope

The plans for a small, charming cabin in the forest went out the window in March 2020. As supply chains broke down and labor became scarce, Graham not only put the project on hiatus but decided to return to the drawing board, where he created perhaps 30 different iterations of what would eventually become Hemlock House. It was also during this time that he began to learn more and more about Passive House construction.

“One of the ideas that I thought was powerful was that aiming for Passive House certification is a form of accountability, which includes making sure that the entire team is on its A-game,” Graham says. “When you know you have a test at the end, and all the details will be verified by a third party, it helps ensure people aren’t cutting corners. So, I really liked the idea that we would impose a system of accountability on the project, both in terms of sustainable design and for the quality of construction.”

There was one uphill battle that they still faced, which was finding a source for CLT. Graham had reached out to multiple sources in North America but had found the products to be beyond his budget. The problem of sourcing became a lot simpler, however, when Hamm landed a job consulting with Timber Age in 2022.

Though the transition to Passive House design had been bumpy, the transition to using Timber Age’s system has been very smooth. The firm’s base module grid works with 4’x10’ panels or 5’x10’ panels that are either uninsulated CLT or insulated, Graham explains. They decided on the latter as the basis for the entire project, which will be a two-story, three-bedroom home with 1,410 square feet of conditioned space and a 358-ft² covered porch all supported by an ICF concrete foundation.

“The mission for this project is to simplify, simplify, simplify,” Graham says. “I wanted to use their grid system as a base for everything as opposed to the other way around. The idea was that, if we could use their system in the simplest way possible, then we could keep costs down, and any deviation from the standard 5’x10’ module would have to be duly justified. For me as a design-oriented architect, there’s a certain pleasure in approaching a project this way—with a construction methodology in mind. The constraints make things more interesting and more precise.”

The constraints also require a lot of upfront coordination, even if the modular panels will be assembled onsite in a matter of days. Speaking at the end of 2023, Graham and Hamm say the team has had weekly Zoom meetings since March 2022, and numerous email chains containing shop drawings and other technical data stretch back for months.

“It’s been fantastic so far. It’s such a great group of people with an amazing, shared vision,” Graham says of working with Timber Age. “We’ve been working on this quite intensely for about a year now and I’ve learned a ton from Chris and the whole team. We’ve also had the input of many consultants along the way,” Graham says. These consultants include Fire Tower Engineers for the CLT structure, Clapper Structural Engineering for the foundation and porch structure, 475.Supply for Passive House related materials, Baukraft for mechanical engineering, Praetorius & Conrad for site engineering, window and door provider Sash and Frame, and RTP Carpentry who will be assembling the structure on site.

In the next installment, we’ll dive into the design of Hemlock House, describe the process of assembling it onsite, and show off some images of the final product. Stay tuned!