Woodbury School of Business - University of Utah — Orem, UT

The $75 million Scott C. Keller Building at the Woodbury School of Business, Utah Valley University, Orem, Utah, has 205 offices and 30 classrooms serving 12,000 students. Layton Construction, Sandy, Utah, was the general contractor. Method Studio, Salt Lake City, was the architect of record. Goulder Acoustics, West Jordan, Utah, had the wood and acoustic ceilings. 9Wood, Springfield, Ore., provided 12,905 SF of wood cross piece grille panels and acoustic plank ceilings.

PEAK PERFORMANCE

The 12,905 SF wood ceilings at a newly built western business school include 11 different wood and wood finish compositions, some of which combine to form patterns representing mountain peaks and waterfalls.

The building features 7,290 SF of wood cross piece grilles, 2,200 SF of wood wall grilles and 3,415 SF of acoustic plank ceilings.

“We had multiple zones with different scales and programmatic uses that warranted the different sizes and finishes [of the wood ceilings],” the architect says.

PANELS FORM PATTERNS. The installation was complicated. The ceiling subcontractor had to cut and keep straight 1,614 individual wood panels, of which 51 were unique. Some panels with multiple wood species had to be cut and meticulously combined to form “mountain” silhouettes in the ceiling plane. Wood grille panels in another area were cut and combined to form a “wood waterfall.”

“We had a large wood ceiling in one direction and two lower clouds in another,” the ceiling subcontractor’s foreman says. “We integrated the ceilings with wall grilles to create a ‘wood waterfall’ effect down to the first floor.”

Cutting was done in the field. A crew of up to 15 members worked on the wood ceilings over six months. They stained or edge-banded the cut ends on site. Care was given to position the panels properly to create the desired patterns.

“To watch my guys put up panels, snap chalk lines and then pull every panel back down — 20 to 30 rows in some cases — and cut, stain and edge-band them, and then place them with perfect 2-inch gaps between systems, was amazing,” the owner of the ceiling subcontracting firm says. “It’s one of the nicest ceilings I’ve ever seen. It has the precision and accuracy the designer intended.”

MANUFACTURER LOGS EXTRA HOURS. The ceiling manufacturer also went over and beyond to meet the design aesthetic. The manufacturer provided samples of all 11 wood ceiling combinations to the architect and created special shop drawings of the wood ceilings.

The shop drawings included labels to identify each cross piece grille and acoustic plank ceiling to help installation crews track the placement of all 1,614 panels, which included solid white oak, white oak veneer, solid western hemlock members in a variety of finishes.

Also, the manufacturer issued the shop drawings in color, a level of detail helpful to the execution of the project. Since some panels had alternating species of wood, and backers painted to match adjacent wall colors, the colored drawings confirmed to the architect, through the GC, how the design intent would be met and showed the installer where to position each panel.

The drafting team invested 180 hours preparing the colored shop drawings, shop drawing revisions and other instructions for the project.

“The number of man hours invested on the shop drawing front alone was a lot higher than I have ever seen for a project this size,” the manufacturer’s project manager says.