Category Archives: Wood, Paper & Green Building

Day two of WoodTALKS—the wood design and construction education event held in conjunction with the 17th annual Global Buyers Mission (GBM) last week—kicked off with presentations on health and cultural heritage projects by Shelley Craig, of Urban Arts on the importance of starting with an indigenous framework. …Lubor Trubka, provided the online audience with a whirlwind tour of nine buildings from his repertoire of 70+ projects with First Nations bands and Tribal Councils. …Martin Nielsen and Ryan McClanaghan of Dialog Design spoke of their journey to a 10-storey mass timber design with Nature’s Path. …Brian Wakelin and Jamie Harte of PUBLIC: Architecture + Communication spoke of their work in designing the first university campus Passive House residence in Canada, at the University of BC, Okanagan. …The final session featured Gregory Borowski of Merrick Architecture on the innovative use of mass timber in a hybrid application, notably the top four floors of a  12-storey concrete residential building in Horseshoe Bay, West Vancouver. …And Yehia Madkour and Alysia Baldwin of Perkins + Will spoke of two projects motivated by their company’s commitment to research and advancement of wood design. …To view WoodTALKS Day 1 coverage click here.

Another wave of major construction is planned for the University of British Columbia’s (UBC) Point Grey campus, with the key projects creating new health sciences facilities located at the main gateway into the campus. …The new flagship replacement building currently carries an estimated construction cost of $136 million, complete with a 250-seat lecture theatre, classrooms, laboratories, office space, and meeting, informal learning, and student community spaces. A preliminary artistic rendering suggests this will be a four-storey building, with its interior spaces configured around a central atrium. Extensive wood materials will be used, and the university has noted this will be a LEED Gold green building.

…Rather than looking to our forests for relief for the fibre shortage, we instead should look to maximize reuse of materials already in circulation. Our forestry industry’s current fibre shortage has its roots in the pine beetle infestations and extreme wildfires that devastated millions of hectares of B.C. and Alberta forests. The resulting timber shortage has forced mill closures over the last two years. …The fibre shortage is an area where rethinking reveals better, more resilient, ways of doing business. One of the innovations emerging in the green-leader province of B.C. is deconstruction. That means disassembling and reusing valuable wood products, often old-growth timber, that would normally be discarded in the course of building demolition. This wood is often incinerated in waste-to-energy projects, which is better than landfilling but still produces additional avoidable emissions. …Finally, new buildings should be designed for end-of-life disassembly, accelerating the feasibility of future deconstruction.

This week, more that 600 buyers, sellers and specifiers of value-added wood products gathered (virtually) for the 17th annual Global Buyers Mission (GBM), Canada’s largest and most important wood show of its kind. Although the GBM tradeshow has been connecting wood buyers and sellers “live online” all week, WoodTALKS—a wood design and construction education event held in conjunction with the GBM—kicked off Thursday. BC Wood’s Ken Hori opened the event, welcoming the large number of architects and other building sector professionals in virtual attendance.

First to the (virtual) podium was Robert Cesnik of HDR Architecture Associates, speaking on the status of Kelowna’s first 12-storey mass timber buildings. Stephen Bartok of Keystone Architecture and Mark Robertson of Wicke Herfst Maver Structural Engineers spoke of their work on the first six-storey mid-rise project in BC’s Fraser Valley—Legacy on Park Avenue in Langley. Rob Grant and Nick Foster of Mcfarlane, Biggar Architects + Designers talked about the Kelowna airport expansion and two Vancouver transportation projects. Matt McKay and Gary Lahnsteiner of Design Build Services spoke of their firm’s work with the City of Langford, including the area’s first 12-storey mass timber tower. The final two speakers, Tracey Mactavish of MOTIV architects, and Arthur Lo, of Insightfully Healthy Homes spoke to small mass timber residential projects with a significant green building emphasis.

Is Vancouver ready for tree houses? Two new residential towers proposed for Alberni and Bidwell streets in the West End are designed to mimic large undulating cedars to lend a Vancouver character and identify to the project, according to the design architects, Heatherwick studio from the U.K. The design uses the “tree as our inspiration,” with the “idea of gentle curving vertical structures that connect the public on the ground flour to the top of the towers,” the architects say in materials to support its rezoning application for the land. …the designers say they wanted to counter the “generic glass and steel towers which look and feel the same no matter where you are in the world.” …The new towers would sit on a five-storey, “mixed use podium” that would incorporate varied architectural materials, including wood and lots of greenery. …It’s not known when the buildings, if approved, would be completed.

Penticton architect Geoff Orr has a pretty cool house. Orr built his dream home in the hills east of Penticton using recycled lumber from a defunct Penticton grocery store, with construction starting over 14 years ago. Orr and his home were recently featured on the popular YouTube channel Floating Orb Productions. The video titled “Man Builds Dream House From Recycled Lumber” has racked up over half a million views since it was posted on Jan. 10. When Orr began building the 5,600 square feet home he had just graduated architecture school and bought the land in the hills where lived in a tent on the property while starting construction. The majority of the lumber used to build the home came from the old Super-Valu grocery store in Penticton which was condemned and demolished over a decade ago.

Michèle Deluca and Sam Ellison

The City of Nelson is undertaking a research project into one of the most problematic aspects of climate change. The city’s building inspector, Sam Ellison, is searching for a way to account for embodied carbon in the city’s calculation of the carbon footprint of its new buildings. …Ellison says the BC Energy Step Code is a step in the right direction but doesn’t take embodied carbon into account. The Step Code calculates the heat loss from new buildings, and through increasingly advanced ways of constructing the building envelope, it attempts to reduce that loss and reduce energy use overall. …Now the City of Nelson is looking into embodied carbon on its own, independent of the province. …This technical work will be done by consultant Michèle Deluca of 3West Building Energy Consultants, using a calculator developed by Builders for Climate Action in Ontario.

The Canadian Wood Council and Wood WORKS! BC are pleased to announce the release of two technical reports and one cost comparison report related to the use of mass timber and/or wood-frame construction in taller schools than currently permitted under the BC Building Code. Some BC school boards have identified the need for larger 3- and 4-storey schools, and mass timber/light wood-frame provides a sustainable cost-effective option for meeting this need.  Only two-storey wood schools are allowed under the existing BC code. It is important to recognize that solutions which are not included in the building code can be viable solutions but have not yet been explored or put forward to the national and provincial building code committees.  Three- and four-storey schools require an Alternative Solution for an approved building permit.

BC municipalities are turning to wood construction and energy efficient design to reduce carbon emissions and boost economic growth. Climate change and its associated effects may be a global challenge, but BC municipalities are taking action to reduce its impacts at the local level. …Surrey, the province’s fastest-growing city continues to make timber central to its infrastructure expansion and urban design. Along with more than 50 other municipalities, it was an early adopter of the Province’s Wood First initiative that recognizes wood’s social, environmental and economic benefits and makes it the material of choice for public buildings. Other municipalities, big and small, are also encouraging more low carbon timber-built construction. More than 370 buildings in the province feature mass timber and thirteen BC communities have signed on as early adopters of mass timber for taller wood building. 

Mass timber buildings could become part of Delta’s landscape. It would be up to a proponent to bring forward a mass timber project and then see how it moves through Delta’s approvals process, the Mayor’s Task Force on Building Permits and Development Applications recently agreed. The provincial government has invited municipalities… to sign on as mass timber construction early adopters in the Provincial Office of Housing and Construction Standards Mass Timber Early Adopter Initiative. Council last fall agreed to consider the idea and sign an expression of interest, but also added conditions. The task force was told the main concern raised among the various city departments was Delta’s practice to have coordinating registered professionals do code reviews and inspections for more complex buildings, which may limit Delta staff’s ability to provide feedback as an early adopter. 

New Westminster wants to join some of its neighbours and allow tall wood buildings to be built in the city.  The city will inform the provincial government that it wants to be included in its tall wood initiative. Updates to the BC Building Code that took effect in December 2019 allow local governments to opt in to an initiative that permits construction of “encapsulated mass timber construction” (EMTC) in buildings of up to 12 storeys in height.  Staff anticipate the province will be providing an opt-in opportunity to the tall wood initiative in 2021, ahead of the province rollout for the program that’s expected in December 2022. The city didn’t participate in the first two opt-in opportunities in 2019 and 2020.  “Following the building code revisions, the city began receiving inquiries about tall wood EMTC construction, signalling there is interest by developers to use it for projects in New Westminster,” said a staff report to council.

VANCOUVER, BC — tentree, an earth-first sustainable apparel brand, has committed to planting one billion trees by 2030 to support 1t.org and the global movement to conserve, restore and grow 1 trillion trees by 2030. tentree sells sustainable apparel as a vehicle to plant trees, planting 10 trees for every item sold. tentree, an earth-first sustainable apparel brand, has committed to planting one billion trees by 2030. To date, 50 million trees have already been planted, providing over 500 full-time jobs in Madagascar, supporting over 200 farmers in Senegal, providing over 100 jobs in Indonesia, and supporting numerous communities across the globe. …”We are proud to have collaborated with tentree in developing this ground-breaking pledge…” said Jad Daley, co-leader of the 1t.org US chapter and president and CEO of American Forests. This pledge marks one of the largest corporate environmental pledges by a private company to date. 

Future of Prefabrication Symposium
February 19 & 26, March 5 & 12, 2021. Prefabrication in mass timber buildings is fast becoming a reality and, through digital design and manufacturing processes, it is having a disruptive effect on the building industry. In order to maintain BC’s lead in innovation in wood and to promote value added processes within the province, UBC Centre for Advanced Wood Processing (CAWP), UBC School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (SALA), British Columbia Institute of Technology (BCIT) and University of Nortern British Columbia (UNBC) will lead a symposium on the state-of-the-art in Wood Prefabricated Buildings. It will bring together architects, engineers and fabricators who are interested in the future of prefabrication in wood. The future of design in prefabricated buildings necessitates the integration of disciplines and thus the symposium will have industry leaders present in these areas. The conference will be focused around three key themes; Architectural Innovation, Structural Engineering considerations, and Integrated Manufacturing Processes and Technologies.

Construction is well underway on the new 650-metre elevated wooden pathway that is being built just north of the Malahat Summit. Ken Bailey, general manager of the approximately $15-million Malahat Skywalk project, said the sky walk is expected to be completed by late this spring or early summer, in time for the upcoming tourist season …A.Spire by Nature, a company led by two of the founding partners in the successful Sea to Sky Gondola near Squamish, and the Malahat Nation have partnered in the Malahat Skywalk project that intends to combine nature-based tourism with a cultural tourism experience. The sky walk will see an elevated wooden pathway constructed through an Arbutus forest leading to a gentle, accessible spiral ramp climbing up to a 40-metre high sightseeing lookout where visitors will witness magnificent views of the Finlayson Arm and distant coastal mountains.

Allright Ladder has been making wooden ladders in Vancouver for a century. But on Oct. 31, they stopped.  “To me a wooden ladder is the best ladder you could ever want,” said Jim Norris, who co-owns Allright Ladder with Stuart Evans. “But it’s used by a certain (older)-age demographic. Young people have no idea what a wood ladder is. They go to the Home Depot and buy a fibreglass ladder when they have to be non-conductive or an aluminum ladder if they don’t have to be.”  ….“The best wood in the world to use is Sitka spruce, which we have here,” said Norris. “Hemlock is No. 2. In the past we used to make every ladder out of Sitka. Recently, about 50 per cent were Sitka, 50 per cent were hemlock, depending on what you could find in the marketplace.”

In April 2019, John Horgan, then Premier of British Columbia, announced a new program to incentivize the use of wood in public buildings in an attempt to mitigate the impact on the forest industry of climate change-related phenomena as the rising population of mountain pine beetles and the increased frequency and severity of forest fires. For public projects, as for other types of buildings, new engineered mass timber products, supported by new legislation, make wood an economic and functional choice in both rural and urban areas. Two recent projects illustrate this point. This article, based on a newly released case study by Wood WORKS! BC and the Canadian Wood Council, examines two recently completed civic buildings in British Columbia using wood.