Glued Laminated Timber - History

History

One of the earliest still-standing glulam roof structures is generally acknowledged to be the assembly room of King Edward VI College, a school in Bugle Street, Southampton, England, dating from 1866, designed by Josiah George Poole. The building is now the Marriage Room of Southampton Register Office.

Two churches near Liverpool, England are now thought to have the earliest extant uses: St Luke, Formby dates from 1855, and Holy Trinity, Parr Mount, St Helens from 1857. Other examples of 19th-century British glulam have also been identified.

The first industrial patented use was in Weimar, Germany. Here in 1872 Otto Hetzer set up a steam sawmill and carpentry business in Kohlstrasse. Beginning in 1892, he took out a series of patents. DRP No. 63018 was for a ventilated timber floor deck that could be tightened laterally after installation, to compensate for shrinkage. Hetzer continued to patent various ingenious systems, but the first of these that could be compared with subsequently standardised horizontal glulam was DRP No. 197773, dated 1906. This entailed vertical columns which transitioned into curved glued laminated eaves zones, and then became sloped rafters, all in a single laminated unit. Each component, bonded under pressure, comprised three or more horizontally arranged laminations.

In other words, the glulam portal frame was born. In 1895, Hetzer moved his company to Ettersburger Strasse, still in Weimar. At the height of production, in around 1917, he employed about 300 workers, and Müller includes a fine engraving of the railway sidings and works in 1921.

In 1909, the Swiss engineering consultants Terner & Chopard purchased permission to use Hetzer's patent, and employed glulam in a number of projects. These included the former Hygiene Institute, Zurich, 1911, now the main building of the university, where the bell-shaped roof dome is still to be seen.

The technology arrived in North America in 1934 when Max Hanisch, Sr., who had worked with Hetzer at the turn of the century, formed a firm in Peshtigo, Wisconsin to manufacture structural glued laminated timber. One of the first glulam structures erected in the United States was a research laboratory at the USDA Forest Products Laboratory in Madison, Wisconsin. The structure was erected in 1934 and is still in service today.

A significant development in the glulam industry was the introduction of fully water-resistant phenol-resorcinol adhesive in 1942. This allowed glulam to be used in exposed exterior environments without concern of gluline degradation. The first U.S. manufacturing standard for glulam was Commercial Standard CS253-63, which was published by the Department of Commerce in 1963. The most recent standard is ANSI/AITC Standard A190.1-02, which took effect in 2002.

The roof of the Richmond Olympic Oval, built for speed skating events at the 2010 Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver, British Columbia, features is one of the world's largest clearspan wooden structures. The roof includes 2,400 cubic metres of Douglas-fir lamstock lumber in glulam beams. A total of 34 yellow-cedar glulam posts support the overhangs where the roof extends beyond the walls.

The roof of the Centre Pompidou-Metz museum is composed of sixteen kilometers of glued laminated timber. It represents a 90-metre wide hexagon with a surface area of 8,000 m². The glued laminated timber motif forms hexagonal wooden units resembling the cane-work pattern of a Chinese hat.