Walk past a construction site in cities across Canada and the chances are better than ever you’ll see workers and cranes hoisting giant mass timber beams into place.
Mass timber is turning into a mass movement. Once considered mostly an experimental construction technology, the use of glued, laminated wood beams (called glulam) is taking hold in the design and construction of larger, commercial, industrial and institutional buildings.
“Ontario is taking to mass timber in a big way,” says Patrick Chouinard, vice-president, market strategy and communications at Element5, which designs timber projects and has a 137,000-square-foot factory in St. Thomas, Ont. The factory provides glulam and cross-laminated wood used for walls, floors and floor separation.
Many Northern Ontario towns have had lumber mills close over the last few decades and encouraging investment in this new construction technology could help revitalize a key industry.
— Mike Yorke, president, Carpenters’ District Council of Ontario
“We’re seeing it happen more and more. Contractors are now asking us: ‘Are you sure you have enough people to do the work [with mass timber]?’ " says Mike Yorke, president of the Carpenters’ District Council of Ontario, the union representing more than 30,000 workers across the province.
“We’re looking at as many as 12 mass timber projects running in Toronto right now, and others in the Greater Toronto Area and other cities,” he says. Mass timber is not only good for carpenters, Mr. Yorke notes, it’s also good for the environment and for reducing carbon emissions.
By the end of last year, the federal government’s State of Mass Timber in Canada report noted that there were already nearly 500 mass timber projects across the country, with 412 completed, 52 under construction and another 12 planned.
They range from prominent projects such as the 251,000-square-foot T3 Bayside office building going up at Toronto’s Waterfront to another project by the same firm in Toronto’s West End called T3 Sterling Road. The first phases of both projects are expected to open next summer, and another mass timber project by the developer, Hines, is getting under way in Vancouver.
“We built our first mass timber building in Minneapolis in 2016 and up to then, no one had built anything of this size [with this material] for 100 years,” says Syl Apps, senior managing director of Hines’s Toronto office.
Hines has been focusing on mass timber construction for two reasons, Mr. Apps says.
“One is that people like to work in those brick-and-beam buildings with lots of wood, but the old industrial buildings don’t perform well as offices,” he explains. “They’re hard to heat and cool and often have bad acoustics.”
The second reason is sustainability, he says. Mass timber is carbon neutral, while concrete produces up to 8 per cent of human-made greenhouse gas emissions. Each of the two T3 buildings offset the equivalent of 17,200 tonnes of carbon emissions that would go into a conventional concrete and steel office building, he says.