The Oscar Johnson Jr. Community Center in Conroe, Texas, will begin construction in 2022. The project’s architecture firm is Burditt Consultants and the structural engineering firm is DUDLEY. The building will utilize mass timber construction and is intended to be an architectural statement for the community. Its 120,000 square feet of public space strives to affect countless lives for more than one hundred years. To fulfill that goal, however, the building needs to stand the test of time. There are many factors and environmental loads at play, but perhaps the most daunting is expansive soils. DUDLEY’s solution is building the Community Center’s foundation using a suspended hollow core plank slab system supported by elevated concrete beams constructed on top of belled piers. The system is designed to decouple as much of the structure as possible from expansive soil movements while saving overall foundation cost and construction time. It also allows for ease of future modification/repair for plumbing and mechanical systems, given that there is direct access to the crawl space.