A field laboratory for Penn State — mass timber in the Pennsylvania woods.

Shaver's Creek was founded in 1976 as a resource for the community and as a field laboratory where Penn State students could get hands-on experience teaching about the natural world. It has grown into a year-round Environmental Center, Outdoor School, and Team Development Center serving families, schools, corporate groups, and the University itself.

When Penn State planned the expansion, the material question was obvious: a building meant to teach people about forests, ecosystems, and stewardship should be built out of the forest itself. Mass timber — a timber frame paired with a high-performance Structural Insulated Panel envelope — carried the story and the performance. Warm on the inside, quiet, tight, and durable enough to hold a research schedule for decades.

Hearthstone cut the frame in Newport, Tennessee and delivered it to Petersburg for raising. Douglas fir principal timbers, traditional joinery expressed in classrooms and gathering rooms, and SIP walls and roof panels installed against the frame to lock in the envelope. The administration building anchors the daily operations of the center; the classroom building gives students and school groups a proper indoor room to work in on the days the weather won't cooperate.

It is the kind of project Hearthstone builds happily — a client whose mission is to teach the next generation how to care for the land, housed in a building that is itself a lesson in how to use it well.