The Anthony Timberlands Center for Design and Materials Innovation at the U of A has received two international honors from the World Architecture Festival 2023. 

The project has won outright the WAFX award in the Building Technology category and is one of nine projects shortlisted in the Future Projects: Education category.

The World Architecture Festival honors come on the heels of international accolades announced by The Architectural Review this spring, when the Anthony Timberlands Center was named the Overall Winner in the AR Future Projects Awards 2023 and the winner for the Education category.

The new research center, part of the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design, is under construction in the university’s Art and Design District on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard in south Fayetteville.  

The World Architecture Festival is the largest global awards program and conference dedicated to sharing and celebrating the latest in architectural achievements. It is the only awards program where all finalists present their projects live to a panel of judges at the festival.

The WAFX award heralds the world’s most forward-looking architectural concepts and is awarded to future projects that identify key challenges that architects will need to address in the coming years. This year the judges have selected the winners that they believe are all excellent examples of projects that address the big issues facing architecture, society and the planet. 

The Anthony Timberlands Center has been designed by Grafton Architects of Dublin, Ireland, with Fayetteville-based Modus Studio. Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara, co-founders of Grafton Architects, are the 2020 recipients of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, an award known internationally as architecture’s highest honor. 

In early July, the architects presented the Anthony Timberlands Center project to an international audience at the 2023 World Congress of Architects, the world’s largest event on sustainable architecture, held by the International Union of Architects in Copenhagen, Denmark.

“With construction visibly in progress, the Anthony Timberlands Center is now progressing into view and appreciation by regional, national and international audiences,” said Peter MacKeith, dean of the Fay Jones School. “The University of Arkansas and the state of Arkansas are becoming well known for their commitment to design excellence and to innovative approaches to design and construction in timber and wood.”

This regional center will be focused on the research and development of new wood products and new approaches in sustainable construction materials. The building serves as a model of mass timber and wood product construction, with its eventual role being to educate and inspire design students in the ways wood can be used in construction while supporting the timber industry in Arkansas.

The new center will serve as home to the Fay Jones School’s graduate program in timber and wood and as an epicenter for its multiple timber and wood initiatives — in particular, the prototyping of affordable housing. It will house the school’s existing design-build program and an expanded digital fabrication laboratory. 

With a particular focus on Arkansas-sourced timber and wood, the center will serve the greater good of Arkansas by building on the rapid and productive commitment of the Fay Jones School and the U of A to sustainability and the emerging innovative timber economy. Given its prominence in timber production, the research excellence of its state university system and the national reputation of the Fay Jones School, Arkansas is uniquely positioned to respond to the local, national and global trend toward the use of wood in construction and other industries.

Located in the university’s Art and Design District, the four-story, 44,800-square-foot Anthony Timberlands Center will feature a fabrication shop as its largest and most active space. This will encompass a large central bay, with a metal workshop, seminar room and small digital lab, as well as a dedicated space for a large CNC router. These spaces will be served by an overhead crane that runs on rails outside to move large equipment and assemblies in and out of the building.

In addition, the center will include studios, seminar and conference rooms, faculty offices, a small auditorium and a public exhibition space.

Two covered outdoor teaching terraces and a 12,000-square-foot pedestrian plaza are part of the Aubra H. Anthony Sr. “Lumberman” Woodland Gardens at the center. The plaza, known as Anthony Way, will be located on the western side of the center. This area will feature a grove of softwood and hardwood trees of the same species that represent those native to the state and commonly used in manufacturing and construction.

Collectively, the building, the programs it houses and the collaborative relationships it fosters, will be of great benefit to students in their architectural education, revealing a layered and nuanced series of embedded relationships, creating an expanded understanding of sustainability, one that moves beyond embodied energy and carbon sequestration to address broader economic development for rural communities. 

About the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design: The Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design at the University of Arkansas houses undergraduate professional design programs of architecture, landscape architecture and interior architecture and design together with a liberal studies program. The school also offers a Master of Design Studies, with concentrations in health and wellness design, resiliency design, integrated wood design, and retail and hospitality design. The DesignIntelligence 2019 School Rankings Survey listed the school among the most hired from architecture, landscape architecture and interior design schools, ranking 10th, 14th and eighth, respectively, as well as 28th among most admired architecture schools.

About the University of Arkansas: As Arkansas' flagship institution, the U of A provides an internationally competitive education in more than 200 academic programs. Founded in 1871, the U of A contributes more than $2.2 billion to Arkansas’ economy through the teaching of new knowledge and skills, entrepreneurship and job development, discovery through research and creative activity while also providing training for professional disciplines. The Carnegie Foundation classifies the U of A among the few U.S. colleges and universities with the highest level of research activity. U.S. News & World Report ranks the U of A among the top public universities in the nation. See how the U of A works to build a better world at Arkansas Research and Economic Development News.