New Energy Works designs, fabricates, and raises a lot of timber frames every year. We’re blessed with challenging projects, great clients, and plenty of work. Yet every year or so a project comes along that shouts, “let’s do this as a community hand raising!”. After a few decades in the business, these still stand out as very special days.

Matt and Laura approached us about their own community of friends and family, how they were bursting at the constraints of isolation that COVID-19 had placed on us all, and how now that so many were getting fully vaccinated they felt the same thing so many of us were feeling: free to GATHER!  As a sidenote, both Matt and Laura are front line medical workers. They know.

Their vision was a pavilion with a pizza oven, dance floor, even a bath. My vision was that they had such a strong network, and those folks might enjoy a day of hard work and free labor. (Um, my vision can be a bit strange, for sure.) I did know for certain that every hand raising I’ve ever done has had such an impact that all those friends & family would feel that indeed, this pavilion was theirs as well. One definition of community, surely.

One of the best ways to reduce the energy a home or building consumes is careful consideration of the envelope. Our journey to creating the most efficient building enclosure/envelope began in the mid 1990’s with the first version of the Matrix Wall™. We regularly adjust this wall system, incorporating what we’ve learned and what new sustainable materials may be available to reduce consumption and increase comfortable living. In 2017 this journey took us to Poland to learn more about wood fiber insulation from Steico. In 2018 we landed in the Netherlands to explore semi-automated custom tooling. Fast forward (let’s all just skip 2020) to 2021 – welcome to High Performance Made Easier!

We’ve added a new building with new semi-automated tooling to produce the latest evolution of our Matrix Wall™ systems–we’re calling it HPEz, High-Performance Made Easier–to our campus in Farmington NY. Earlier this month we ran the very first wall panel for calibration and plain old getting-to-know-the-tools practice: 

Growing up in Buffalo, NY is one of the biggest pieces of who I am. If you’re from Buffalo, or any small town with a lot of pride, I am sure you can relate to being shaped by your hometown. I eat chicken wings, not Buffalo wings. I add a “the” before a major highway (I get on THE 90, not i-90). I do not care for football at all, but even I get a little sentimental when the Bills win anything. I consider myself basically Canadian-lite.

So it was a pretty big deal for me to learn that New Energy Works would be part of Canalside, Buffalo's urban-waterfront revitalization project, through a timber frame pavilion that houses a solar-operated historic carousel. It checks all of my boxes.