3SIX0 Gives a Providence Nonprofit a New Home—and Brings Mass Timber to Rhode Island

String instruments, traditionally, are made of wood. Vibrations created from bowed and plucked strings that carry through their hollow bodies produce sound. But what happens when a strings-focused education center and performance space is constructed of mass timber? How do you keep the building from reverberating when music is played within it? In other words, how do you prevent a work of architecture from becoming a giant instrument?

This was one of the challenges that Providence-based 3SIX0 Architecture, a 2002 Design Vanguard, confronted when designing the new home of Community MusicWorks, a local nonprofit that brings music instruction and performance to underserved residents of the South Providence and West End neighborhoods. Located at the corner of Westminster and Dexter Streets on the site of an old gas station, the 24,000-square-foot building opened in September and accommodates its roughly 150 students. It’s also one of a small handful of mass-timber structures recently completed in Rhode Island.