Public projects often follow a traditional design-bid-build model, which brings challenges. We will cover procurement hurdles, coordination strategies, and the regulatory pathways that shape these projects. To show how this works in practice, we will walk through recent TYLin projects, including an elementary school in Ann Arbor, a library in Brooklyn, and a recreation center in the Bronx. Each one shows how mass timber can fit into community-focused facilities, even when early design assist is not an option.

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What You’ll Learn:

• How to keep a mass timber project cost-competitive on public work, where design-bid-build rules out early design assist and the timber provider does not come on board until after CDs.
• How to write design narratives and flexible connection details that hand bidders priced alternatives, like the sizing and sourcing tradeoffs between Doug fir and spruce-pine-fir, instead of defaulting to conservative assumptions that inflate the price.
• How to use a public owner's sustainability goals, like embodied carbon targets, to make the case for timber, and why public projects can lead on innovation rather than follow private work.

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