Senior Design Team Tackles Affordable Housing With Mass Timber Proposal

A team of five senior civil and architectural engineering students is working to address Philadelphia's affordable housing shortage with a mixed-use development proposal for a long-vacant site in the city's Hunting Park neighborhood, and doing it with a construction material rarely seen on the East Coast.

The project envisions a multistory building that uses mass timber as its primary structural system. Mass timber, an engineered wood product made by laminating or compressing lumber into large, load-bearing panels and columns, has gained traction in Europe and on the West Coast for its combination of structural performance and sustainability benefits. Unlike steel and concrete, wood stores carbon rather than emitting it during production, and mass timber construction tends to be faster and quieter than conventional building methods, a meaningful consideration for an occupied neighborhood. The material can also offer greater fire resistance than traditional wood-frame construction.

"The choice of mass timber as a structural system led us to a design that focused on helping the building's residents and the surrounding community," said team member Sam Flora. "The site we selected in Hunting Park has been abandoned for years, and by developing this project we are trying to bring new equitable development to the area and reduce demand for housing within the city."

The team is composed of Flora, Yernur Abdulin, Kevin Nally, Sean Keller and Dina Owers, all seniors in Drexel's Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering. Their project is part of the College of Engineering's senior design program, a three-course sequence that asks students to take ownership of an open-ended problem from the ground up, build a team around it and see it through. Work was distributed based on each student's area of expertise, with the diversity of their classroom and co-op experiences shaping both how the team came together and how responsibilities were divided. Site grading work was coordinated with Stonefield Engineering, an industry partner that advised on soil extraction analysis and preliminary grading using Civil3D software.

Over the fall and winter terms, the team developed the project's structural, site and mechanical design. Now they are turning their focus to life cycle assessment, energy modeling for LEED certification and construction clash detection, the process of identifying conflicts between different building systems. The team says that the structure of the senior design sequence, allowing for a depth of iteration not possible in a standard course.

"Not everything has a clear answer, so you have to be able to adapt and make decisions as you go," said Owers. "I've also learned how important it is to take feedback and use it to improve both the project and my own ideas. It is not just about coming up with solutions, but also about how you present them, since communicating your work clearly is just as important as the work itself."

The project is a design exercise rather than a development proposal, but Flora sees it as a proof of concept with a longer reach. "The discussions and feedback I have received from my team, peers, advisors and reviewers have influenced and improved the design monumentally," he said. "As an engineer you are always learning and improving, and I hope this project brings attention to equitable and environmentally conscious design for incoming seniors."