Our Services
OPAL Build offers a full scope of Mass Timber Design / Build services.
Design / Pre-Con / Planning
A good building starts with a careful plan. We offer integrated design services, including structural engineering, to come up with a panelized shell package that makes sense for your project. Our comprehensive digital twin computer model includes every piece of the design, down to the fastener. Once we have a design in-hand, we are able to generate a cost estimate and schedule to fabricate and deliver your shell package, as well as to install onsite, including logistics, crew deployment, crane, barge, and more.
Pre-fab / CLT Panelization
Once design, budget, and schedule are to your satisfaction, we move to shop drawings and material ordering. Mass timber, wood fiber insulation, high-performance windows and doors, and other materials are sourced from high quality, precision manufacturers in North America and Europe. For fully insulated projects, we direct these materials to our shop, where our fabrication crew assembles them into building panels, per the digital twin computer model.
CLT / Mass Timber Installation
Whether or not we source the material, we offer CLT and mass timber installation services. Think of this aspect of our business as a traveling team of mass timber installation experts. Our experienced team will install buildings up to five stories tall. Services include installing pre-insulated and raw CLT panels, glulam timbers, hardware, and more. While our general area of operation is New England, we are willing to travel further afield in certain instances.
CASE STUDY
Cornerspring Montessori
Middle School Building
Belfast, Maine
2021
OPAL Build is pleased to have worked with Cornerspring Montessori School in expanding its facilities to accommodate a thriving middle school program. Part of a site master plan OPAL Global developed for Cornerspring’s 35-acre campus in Belfast, Maine, the project fulfilled the school’s longstanding goal of extending the opportunity for Montessori education to a broader population of middle school-age students in the midcoast community.
The new facility, a freestanding 1,000-square-foot building, reflects Cornerspring’s ethos of environmental awareness and sustainability, its embrace of technological innovation, and its vision of Montessori education in a post-pandemic world.
Enclosing two classrooms joined by a common entry, coatroom, and bathroom, the Middle School Annex design shares the main school building’s form and materials—along with its Passive House-level energy performance—while establishing a modest physical distance appropriate to the growing independence of the middle school years. The flexible, makerspace-like floor plan responds both to Montessori pedagogy and to lessons learned during the past year of shifting health protocols.
Among those lessons is the virtue—and occasional necessity—of responding nimbly to change. In that spirit, the new building employs advances pioneered by OPAL and its affiliated companies, GO Lab and OPAL Build, that increased the speed, precision, and quality of building construction while reducing on-site construction time, site disturbance, and project carbon footprint. Our system of prefabricated construction combines the emerging technologies of cross-laminated timber and wood fiber insulation in prefabricated, all-wood panels that are quickly assembled to provide the structure, thermal insulation, and interior finish for an entire building envelope.
To execute the project we fabricated the all-wood panels at our Madison, ME facility, loaded them onto trucks, and assembled them onsite in just two days using a crane and our in-house installation crew. In partnership with building science graduate students at the University of Maine, we outfitted the building envelope with over 50 sensors to be able to measure moisture and temperature performance through time. As a data driven company, this information will provide valuable build performance feedback.
