A new chapter for Columbus’ sustainable architecture will begin at the METRA transit hub
Picture this: a space dedicated to transit in Columbus – where bicyclists can safely store bikes adjacent to a bike trail and rideshare services like taxis, Ubers and Lyfts are welcomed – across the street from an existing bus station and park-and-ride lot.
Now, add in one-and-a-half foot wide Georgia Southern Yellow Pine wood beams holding up the open, indoor space. And look above to see wood panels crossing along the roof. Inspired yet?
That’s the vision the city’s transit department, METRA, and local architecture firm 2WR have in mind to attract Columbusites to use multiple different types of transit and create more regional connectivity. They’re calling it the Multimodal Center, and construction is set to begin this month and open by December.
The 4,774-square-foot building is a project funded by the Transportation Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax, commonly referred to as TSPLOST. The project has a budget of $2.8 million. It’s been in the Master Transportation Plan since 2012. The unused lot has been unoccupied since the 1990s, according to Robert Sheridan, METRA’s transit compliance officer, and it’s the second phase in the Linwood Park and Ride that opened last year.
When Scott Allen, adjunct professor at Auburn and senior principal architect and partner at 2WR, joined the project he was eager to make it sustainable, cost-effective and beautifully designed to inspire visitors. For Allen, that meant incorporating lots of wood.
The architecture and design industry calls this trendy, sustainable and more environmentally friendly type of construction, “mass timber.”
Mass timber has skyrocketed in the last 10 years throughout the U.S. By December 2024, there were 2,338 multi-family, commercial, or institutional mass timber projects in progress or built, according to Wood Works, a wood construction resource.
Industry experts say it’s booming because it is lighter, stronger and more carbon neutral than its rival, steel. And in some cases it’s more cost-effective.
Buildings 100 years ago used to do this, then during World War II in and into the 1950’s the production of steel and quick need to build stopped these types of construction practices.
‘Aesthetics and simplicity of construction’
The Multimodal Center, which will be at the corner of 16th Street and 9th Avenue, will be the first mass timber project in Columbus. But it won’t be the first in Georgia.
“Mass timber has really come to the forefront the last five or six years, and especially in the southeast,” Allen said.
Mass timber is wood that has been engineered with glue lamination to be stronger and more sustainable. Typically it’s used in high-rise buildings. In Atlanta, the Georgia Tech Kendeda Building was completed in 2020 and 619 Ponce (Jamestown) was completed in April last year.
The Columbus Multimodal Center project will be just one story. Still, Allen wanted to use the project as an opportunity to bring mass timber to Columbus, educating the city that it exists, something he’s been yearning to do for decades.
“I’ve been on a mission the last 25 years to raise awareness about mass timber,” Allen said at a Columbus Mass Timber Hub conference in January. “I wanted to get something in this community for people to look at, and this will hopefully be kind of the first stepping stone.”
The project will have a wall with sustainable roof framing and six structured framing of 18-inch by 6-inch wood. The will be an exposed cross-laminated-timber wood panel system and exterior beams with glue-laminated beams. The glue-laminated and cross-laminated are different styles of mass timber construction.
“The roof panel system in the project will allow for a really simple, clean ceiling system with exposed wood to the underside instead of covering it all up with acoustical ceilings, ” Allen said. “You can produce very wonderful things in a simple and efficient manner.”
The Georgia Forestry Foundation said mass timber products can result in construction schedule savings from off-site prefabrication.
“I’m really trying to work hard to get it into some smaller markets where the budgets are tight and educate people on how you can save some money while also contributing to aesthetic quality in the space.”
Less carbon and local Georgia yellow pine
The Georgia Forestry Foundation is an advocate for mass timber because Georgia has an abundant amount of private forests ready to be harvested for construction. The GFF hosted a conference last month in an effort to connect and create a mass timber hub in Columbus.
“The 619 Ponce (Jamestown) project in Atlanta harvested timber in Lumpkin, Georgia and the team made glue-laminated beams and cross-laminated timber panels,” Matt Hestad, senior vice president of Georgia Forestry Foundation, said at the conference. “So overall this is a 600 mile supply chain. It’s really farm to table if you think about it the same way we think about food.”
There are 22 million acres of private forests in Georgia, the number one state in the country for forestry, according to Hestad. For every one tree harvested, three to four trees are planted in its place.
On top of the supply chain and the untapped mass timber economy in Georgia, using wood instead of concrete and steel could significantly cut greenhouse gas emissions.
The amount of carbon released during the creation of steel or concrete is called embodied carbon. Laura Cullen, regional director in the Southeast at Wood Works, explained at the mass timber conference last month.
“We don’t have to heat wood to an extremely high temperature like we do with steel or cement,” she said. “So therefore we have a lot less carbon associated with the creation of mass timber buildings.”
Plus, wood has what Cullen called “biogenic carbon”, meaning the carbon in the wood stored carbon its whole life. “Wood is 50% carbon by dry weight so not only does mass timber give us embodied carbon reduction but also biogenic carbon reduction,” she told conference goers.
The 114,000 square foot mass timber project, 619 Ponce (Jamestown) avoided 653 metric tons of carbon dioxide, Wood Works found.
At the multimodal center, significantly smaller, could avoid an estimated 60 metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions compared to a traditional steel or concrete structure, according to the Wood Works Calculator.
The construction specifications don’t explicitly say whether Georgia the wood will be sourced in Georgia at the multimodal center, Allen said. But it will be from either Georgia or Alabama, he said in an email.
Allen is teaching a new generation of students are about mass timber in his classes at Auburn. “The past two semesters we’ve been looking at mass timber structural systems,” he said at the conference. “Mass timber is here to stay.”
“I hope the Multimodal Center is the first of many,” he said.
