On a private drive just above the shoreline of Canandaigua Lake, the New Energy Works timber frame team collaborated with Grossi Construction on the raising of an expansive multi-use barn.
Architect Dan Pieters came to the New Energy Works team with, “the initial architecture and schematic design and then we drove the sizing, the structure and the finite dimensions of it.” says New Energy Works designer Bethany Schaertl. There was a lot of coordination back and forth between our team, Dan Pieters, and Grossi construction to make sure all the moving parts were working toward the same goal.
“It was mainly designed for a car barn, and a little bit of utility stuff, and the second floor is going to be a Yoga studio and office, says Steve Grossi of Louis J. Grossi Construction, Inc. “You could call it multi-use, but the main purpose is for vehicles.”
Five years earlier Grossi had built the homeowners current living quarters just down the private drive from the barn. “Their house is conventionally framed with a few timber elements, says Grossi. “We knew that we wanted to incorporate some of those timber features from the house into the barn.” In the end, the entire barn became a fully structurally supported timber frame.
On the morning of the raising, efficiency and precision were the order of the day as our timber frame team moved quickly around the property as one unit, moving the heavy Douglas fir trusses weightlessly through the air. The darkened timbers were carefully put into place, lending the biophilic bones to the two-story barn structure.