The project team calls it the Pringle, and the nickname fits. A saddle-shaped timber shell has risen at Assembly Studios in Doraville, Ga., and its engineers say no one has built a mass-timber structure of this type at this scale anywhere in North America. The 82-foot canopy curves in two directions at once, which is what gives it both the snack-chip silhouette and its stiffness.
The engineering is the story. The 4,000-square-foot shell is framed from thin wood laths bent elastically into a doubly curved grid, then locked in place by a plywood diaphragm and finished with stainless-steel shingles. A gridshell carries load through its geometry rather than heavy beams, so a structure this thin can span this far. The full $10 million budget covers everything around it too: site work, civil, landscaping and MEP.
From World Cup watch party to performance venue
The timing wasn’t an accident. Substantial completion was set for early June so the bandshell could host a two-day watch event for three World Cup matches. After the tournament, it becomes the focal point of a public park, with programming that runs from movies to full concerts. The venue sits on Assembly Atlanta, the 120-acre film and production campus owned by Gray Media.
Why a gridshell, and why now
StructureCraft, the engineer behind the shell, has built bent-timber roofs before, but not one this size on this continent. The appeal is straightforward. Elastically bent laths are cheap, light and fast to set, and the finished form does the structural work, so you spend less material to cover more space. It’s a different argument for mass timber than the carbon case driving towers and labs. Here the wood is the structure and the show. See our reporting on mass timber’s push into labs and big institutions. Details via Engineering News-Record and StructureCraft.
Related project on Exchange: Assembly Studios Bandshell (Doraville).