Elon University’s new Health Center expands the campus recreation and wellness facilities with a large natatorium, basketball courts, fitness and weight spaces, classrooms, and offices. The project highlights a hybrid structural approach, with long-span steel trusses supporting a biophilic Cross-Laminated Timber (CLT) roof over the primary assembly spaces. This combination of materials showcases the flexibility of mass timber and its ability to complement conventional structural systems while creating warm, natural interior environments. 

Sterling Structural supplied the CLT roof system for the natatorium, basketball courts, and fitness center—large, open spaces that benefit from the structural efficiency and visual quality of exposed mass timber. 

Beyond material supply, Sterling supported the design team through delegated engineering in partnership with KPFF. This work included engineering the mass timber connection design, optimizing panel orientation to improve material efficiency, and coordinating significant mechanical penetrations—some approaching 5 feet in diameter—within the CLT roof panels.