New center focused on Arkansas timber, affordable housing

September 8-14, 2025

By Antoinette Grajeda

University of Arkansas officials dedicated a new architecture building in south Fayetteville Friday that will, among other things, serve as a center for developing solutions to affordable housing. 

The Anthony Timberlands Center for Design and Materials Innovation is a nearly 45,000-square-foot, primarily mass timber building that includes wood and metal fabrication workshops, a 3D printing lab, external fabrication yard and lecture hall. More than 62,100 cubic feet of Arkansas timber was used in the $43 million facility, which is part of the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design.

Mass timber buildings are constructed with large pre-manufactured, multilayered, solid wood panels that make for efficient construction and enables disassembly and material repurposing, which contributes to waste reduction and extends the lifetime of carbon stored in these wood products, according to the American Wood Council.. 

The new applied research center is focused on Arkansas timber and wood products, and offers students hands-on experience with innovative design and construction materials, according to a university press release. The center will also serve as a research and development lab for construction technologies and affordable housing. 

Deacue Fields, vice president for agriculture in the UA’s Division of Agriculture, told the more than 300 people who attended Friday’s dedication that the new building provides a space for education, research and innovation that can help transform communities. 

“This is a concept of integrative research and educational outreach on which the land-grant university was actually founded,” Fields said. “This facility has a vision to utilize local timber resources to address the tremendous need of affordable housing in our state and in our nation.”

Affordable housing is a big issue in Northwest Arkansas where the population has been rapidly expanding. The need for regional leaders to work together to address the area’s worsening housing crisis is more urgent than it was five years ago, according to a report released in May. 

John Folan, head of the architecture department and director of the Urban Design Build Studio, said he’s been looking at mass timber and how it can be used to address workforce housing issues in Northwest Arkansas. 

“As the population grows here and the economic forces of that population expand, then people who are in lower income sectors, maybe essential workers at the $16 to $18 an hour payscale, are finding it more and more difficult to find housing close to jobs, close to resources,” he said. 

To address the issue, Folan said they’ve been developing mass timber strategies, specifically one called “design to income.” This strategy involves considering the cost of land, materials and labor and then backing “into the size of home that somebody can actually afford to build,” he said.

Folan and his students have constructed prototypes in their lab and will build one in the newly dedicated center in a few weeks, he said. They’ve been using a mass timber construction system called wave layered timber that doesn’t use adhesives and allows wood to be shaped and stacked “stick by stick,” he said. 

The benefits of this process, Folan said, is it creates a long-lasting durable shell, allows him to train a workforce and uses a renewable resource. 

Forestland covers nearly 57% of Arkansas, which has the second most timber-dependent economy in the nation, according to the Arkansas Economic Development Commission. About 4% of the state’s gross domestic product relies on forest industries, and forestry contributes more than $7.27 billion to the state’s economy according to the U.S. Forest Service. 

Folan said they’ve been working with Northwest Arkansas municipalities to identify underutilized land that would be good sites for the prototypes they’re building. He’s been working with the city of Fayetteville to install six of these homes, which will be built on site, on land near Wilson Park.

“It takes populations in that income sector and puts them in a mixed-income environment where there are lots of community assets,” he said. 

Noting that “there’s no single solution to the housing crisis,” Folan said they’ll use shavings created as a byproduct from the wave layered timber process to 3D print structures in southern Arkansas where they don’t have the needed labor force. 

“There’s a huge opportunity that a building like this affords us because it becomes the shelter for doing all the experimental work … there are a lot of projects that are underway and we’re so excited to be in here and really can’t get moving fast enough,” Folan said. 

Antoinette Grajeda is a multimedia journalist who has reported since 2007 on a wide range of topics, including politics, health, education, immigration and the arts for NPR affiliates, print publications and digital platforms. A University of Arkansas alumna, she earned a bachelor’s degree in print journalism and a master’s degree in documentary film. 

arkansasadvocate.com

Photo Caption:

University of Arkansas officials dedicated the Anthony Timberlands Center for Design and Materials Innovation in south Fayetteville on Aug. 29, 2025. 

Photo Credit:

(Photo courtesy of Timothy Hursley)