Category Archives: Wood, Paper & Green Building

Parkland linking the lake to Toronto’s downtown skyscrapers; a skyline more densely packed all the way to North York and timber buildings anchoring glass towers. That’s how some of the city’s leading developers, planners and architects envision Toronto in twenty years. They came together last week at Toronto of the Future, an exhibit in Metro Hall featuring renderings and models of the new development projects. They want green spaces, walkability and eco-friendly buildings to be the way forward. …In the next twenty years, city projections show 200,000 more people are expected to move into the downtown core. …But the biggest change could come from implementing Sidewalk Labs’ Quayside project. The area will likely be the site of new buildings following a burgeoning trend toward more environmentally-friendly architecture. Planned for George Brown’s waterfront campus is a striking mass timber building. [to access the full story a Globe & Mail subscription is required]

Sidewalk Labs, Snøhetta, Michael Green Architecture, and Heatherwick Studio have unveiled a controversial $1.3 billion plan to reprogram a portion of Toronto’s industrial waterfront into a new smart city prototype that envisions a wireless, data-driven, and mass timber-filled future for the city. …The scheme also features a mass timber “library of parts” system developed by Sidewalk Labs that has been interpreted by the architectural teams into a series of design proposals. Michael Green Architecture, for example, has created a residential scheme that assembles the various mass timber modules into a series of interconnected housing towers. Snøhetta, on the other hand, proposes to arrange the components in a semi-circular configuration around a central courtyard with the housing components lifted above the plaza on a series of stilts. With characteristic flare, Thomas Heatherwick Studio envisions a series of mid-rise wooden towers marked by projecting circular balconies and ground-level gothic arches. 

…Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen has announced a pilot project that he hopes will boost “dwindling economies” in Northern Ontario. …The problem is that it will do very little for the Northern economy. …The real challenge is to increase labour demand in Northern Ontario, not supply. …What does Northern Ontario have? One obvious answer is trees: lots of trees. But trees standing in the forest have pretty limited economic value. Someone has to cut them down, saw them up, maybe laminate or glue chunks together, and move the result to where it is needed. This adds economic value. …Unfortunately, with improved technology, we need fewer and fewer Northerners to ship out the wood. That is why our economy is “dwindling.” We won’t get a lot more trees to cut, so the one strategy remaining is to add more value to each tree. How? That is the key question for  Northern Ontario economic development.

Washington, DC — Wood was thought to be ill-suited for constructing apartment buildings and office towers. But timber is enjoying a renaissance, thanks in part to climate change. Rather than building with concrete and steel, some tech companies are revisiting wood to help lower carbon emissions. Microsoft, for instance, is using timber as it renovates its Silicon Valley campus, and expects a carbon savings of more than 20%. Sidewalk Labs, the urban development arm of Google’s parent company Alphabet, plans to build an entire neighborhood in Toronto out of wooden buildings. It expects to set world records with timber structures 30 stories high, provided regulators are convinced the buildings are safe. …The technique, called cross-laminated timber, is so new to the United States, that environmental groups are only starting to take note and endorse it. Businesses focused on wood buildings are springing up around the country. 

In an attempt to persuade the city of Toronto and its suspicious residents, Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs released a 1,524 page plan to transform 12-acres of industrial waterfront east of the city center into the “most innovative district in the world.” …Toronto has been wary of the plan since its inception in 2017 as residents and city leaders have ultimately dismissed Sidewalk Lab’s plans as a power grab by …Google, an outsider. …Sidewalk Labs (via third-party analysis) says in the proposal that up to 93,000 jobs could be generated. …Sidewalk Labs has proposed building structures from mass timber. …Google has decided to build exclusively with the material… and have proposed investing significantly in a mass timber factory creating an additional 2,500 jobs by 2040. …It is these ideas that led Prime Minister Trudeau to say: “Today’s announcement is about creating a new type of neighbourhood that puts people first.”

TORONTO — The smart city is the king of go-to solutions for the problems that bedevil urban areas. At the moment, the concept—tech innovates those problems away!—is trending hard in Toronto thanks to the work of Sidewalk Labs. …Unlike New York’s super-sleek Hudson Yards, a comparable “big development,” there will be a forest’s worth of wood buildings in this project. …Sidewalk Labs is turning to mass timber for 12 major buildings in the Quayside portion of the development. The showcase here is both structures by London’s Heatherwick Studios, the eminent go-to firm for megadevelopers, and an $80 million vertical timber supply chain for those buildings that will extend from forests to an Ontario factory to fashionable city blocks. Doctoroff said his company is working with the Toronto buildings department to amend rules that cap timber building heights at six stories in order to build up to 30 stories tall.

Sidewalk Labs released its Master Innovation and Development Plan (MIDP) for Toronto’s eastern waterfront yesterday. …Derek Nighbor, President and CEO of Forest Products Association of Canada issued the following statement today in response to the MIDP. …“The Toronto Tomorrow proposal prominently features the use of wood from Canada’s sustainably managed forests as a cornerstone of its project – including a plan to build with mass timber, to use wood to build affordable and below market housing for Torontonians, and to invest $80 million in mass timber manufacturing. …”This project is a great way to address a number of community needs in Toronto, while providing a boost to our rural and northern forestry communities.”

A municipal works yard squeezed in-between the Bonaventure Expressway and the Lachine Canal will be transformed into an example of what an ecological city of the future would be like. On Tuesday, Mayor Valérie Plante announced the winner of a competition sponsored by Reinventing Cities, a global initiative to encourage sustainable real-estate developments on underused sites in 14 cities [around the world]. The winning design, Demain Montréal, backed by real-estate firm Ivanhoë Cambridge, builder Pomerleau and real-estate manager Cogir, proposes a carbon-positive wood-structure highrise complex with 250 mixed-income housing units and co-working spaces… It will include an indoor farm in the basement that will produce 423,200 kilograms of food annually, beehives on the roof, a “souk” (public market) for events featuring zero-waste grocery stores and restaurants, and an orchard. Skyscrapers constructed of cross-laminated timber (CLT) — large, prefabricated wood panels — have a significantly lower carbon footprint and are much lighter than concrete buildings.

Today, the Ontario Forest Industries Association (OFIA) applauded SidewalkLabs’ proposed Master Innovation and Development Plan, which showcases the use of Ontario forest products. The plan proposes to build a new neighbourhood on Toronto’s waterfront almost entirely out of tall timber. “Sidewalk Labs’ Quayside development is focused on using building materials that are more sustainable without sacrificing affordability or design flexibility,” says Jamie Lim, President and CEO of OFIA. “Building with tall timber systems is the obvious choice. We believe innovative and ambitious projects, such as Sidewalk Lab’s proposed development, recognizes that we are in a wood construction renaissance. The project also compliments the Ontario Government’sproposed Provincial Forestry Strategy by aspiring to grow our renewable natural use and use locally sourced forest products in innovative construction.” Tall timber is a safe, efficient and sustainable form of engineered wood.

Google’s sister company Sidewalk Labs provided the first detailed glimpse of its proposal for a smart-city development on Toronto’s waterfront. …Here are five things you need to do know about the plan: Sidewalk Labs wants to expand beyond the Quayside development and says the 12-acre site is only Phase 1 of its plans for a much larger area of waterfront. …Sidewalk pledges that half of all housing units would be purpose-built rentals and 40 per cent of the units would be family-sized units of two bedrooms or more. …The plan says that Quayside will be the first neighbourhood built entirely of mass timber. A new Ontario-based factory would produce building materials, and, Sidewalk promises, be the catalyst for a new industry. The plan also details a number of other urban innovations planned for the neighbourhood, including building raincoats — to block rain, wind and sun along sidewalks…