The Offices at Southstone Yards, Building B

Overview

In Dallas-Fort Worth, mass timber design isn’t the norm. The predominant construction material for buildings in the region – by a wide margin – is concrete framing with post-tensioned concrete decks. But one forward-thinking developer, Crow Holdings Development (CHD), is helping to change this mindset. 

Everything’s bigger in the Lone Star State, and with The Offices at Southstone Yards, timber-framing design has entered a colossal American market in a big way. This isn’t just any wood structure; it’s the first mass timber office building in the region and the second largest in the country. And it’s opening doors for other large timber projects in the area. (We’re slated to design a second mass timber building on the same site in the near future.) 

From the project’s outset, CHD was committed to lowering carbon, even if it meant implementing a structural system that was rare in the area. So when we presented them with two potential design schemes – one in concrete and one in mass timber – they selected the timber option. 

We provided structural engineering services to Gensler for the seven-story, 242,000-square-foot office building (Building B), which reduced embodied carbon by combining concrete and mass timber. The design features a concrete podium, core and shear-wall lateral system paired with a mass timber framework of glue-laminated (glulam) columns, beams and cross-laminated timber (CLT) decks. 

Highlights

• Building into a hill imposed height restrictions, so we collaborated with architects Gensler and Duda Paine to maximize the available space, resulting in floors with windows and ceilings at least 11 feet tall.
• The building follows biophilic principles and is designed for circularity, so that the mass timber components – all southern yellow pine from Alabama – can be reused or repurposed in future projects.
• To confirm the timber’s fire resilience and structural capacity, our team conducted structural and char-layer analyses that demonstrated a one-hour fire-resistance rating. We also performed a life-cycle assessment that helped the entire team meet the project’s environmental goals.
• In August 2024, Southstone Yards, Building B achieved LEED v4 Gold certification under the USGBC’s Core and Shell rating system. The construction is nearly carbon-neutral, with mass timber reducing or offsetting around 2,589 metric tons of carbon, or 34% of the carbon footprint of an equivalent concrete building. The building also achieves 3,444 metric tons of CO2e Bio (biogenic carbon storage) due to its timber content.