The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - Is There a Mass Market for Mass Timber?

Episode Date: May 21, 2024

Ontario will soon permit tall wooden structures up to 18 storeys, giving encouragement to the province's burgeoning mass timber sector. A look at the potential and practicality of pre-fab wood construction, including its possible impact on Ontarios' economy if the sector continues to grow. Guests include: Christoper Williams of Timber Systems; Philip Silverstein of Moriyama & Teshima Architects; Steven Craft of CHM Fire Consultants; and Anne Koven of Mass Timber Institute.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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They are eye-catching and often spectacular. We're talking about mass timber buildings. They're mostly used now in public structures such as community centers, universities, and health care facilities. But our guest tonight will tell us that mass timber buildings could also help this province and country fill its affordable housing gap. And with that, we're joined by, in our nation's capital via Skype, Steve Kraft. He's principal with CHM Fire Consultants. And here in our studio, Philip Silverstein, principal at the architecture firm Moriyama Tashima. He's also coordinating construction of Limberlost Place at George Brown College in Toronto. Christopher Williams is here. He's the vice president at Timber Systems. That's a Markham,

Ontario-based manufacturer of mass timber. And Anne Coven, a forester by training, now director of the Mass Timber Institute, also here in Toronto. And it's great to have you three here at our table. And Steve, thanks for joining us on the line from the nation's capital. And just, I think we've got to start, Christopher, to you first. There will be a lot of people who have no idea what we're talking about here. So let's just start with how mass timber is made to begin with that ends up building a building. Certainly. Well, mass timber, just as a general concept, is large sections of timber that are made from smaller members of timber. So not like

plywood or strand board, but two by fours and two by sixes that are engineered and glued together in a fashion that allows us to make larger pieces that are more predictable from an engineering and strength perspective that allow us to have the predictability that we need as engineers and designers to build larger and more complicated structures than we traditionally have. Hardwood, softwood, doesn't matter? It's all softwood. Technically, you could do it with hardwood, but all of the construction material that's done for timber construction in Canada is usually softwood lumber, primarily spruce pine fir or Douglas fir.

Okay, and I gather the technology behind all this started in Austria, which may be a bit unusual because you would think of a place with massive forests as being the place where this started and they don't there. So how did that happen? Yes, it's a curious question, but I think it really has to do with innovation. And the Austrians are very small land base, could easily fit many times over into Ontario, very little wood, wood's expensive. And so really, I think their first motivation for innovating, exploring, developing mass timber products is really sustainability. They wanted to use every scrap of wood that they could for an engineered wood product. And so when you look at sustainability, the less wood you can use and optimize its sustainability

by way of its cost, by way of, with respect to climate change, sequestering CO2, there are many ways to be sustainable. And I think the Austrians have done a good job in introducing it to us. And I'm excited because we've been making wood products, lumber and pulp and paper for 250 years. And we've been doing the same thing over and over again. So I think this is a wonderful opportunity to innovate our forests and our supply chains. This is new, no question about it. All right, let's talk about from an architectural perspective. What's the appeal? The appeal? Oh, there's probably 100 things I could talk about from an architectural perspective. What's the appeal? The appeal? Oh, there's probably a hundred things I could talk about.

It's beautiful. It smells great. But really the appeal is the sustainability, the sequestering carbon nature of the material. It can be regrown. Concrete doesn't grow in trees. Neither does steel. But to have a material you can use as your structural system that can be grown, harvested, it sequesters carbon.

It's a miraculous material. It's a fifth the weight of concrete and has the same structural properties or similar structural properties to concrete and steel. So it's a miraculous material and the speed of construction, the labour force is lower than most traditional construction methods. So the appeal is really the sustainability. Let's go to Stephen Ottawa because we want to bring our fire expert in at this point. And I know we've only been talking for a few minutes, but I can imagine people watching this or listening to this saying, wait a second, what about fire?

So what if people are going to ask, can't this stuff go up in fire? Can't it go up in flames? Is it as safe as steel and concrete? You've been doing the experiments. What do you know? Yeah, so for the last 15 years, we've been doing fire tests on mass timber, both fire resistance tests. We've been doing tests on evaluating how it contributes to a fire in a building.

And at the end of the day, we can design a mass timber structure to perform from a fire resistance perspective, so the ability to stay standing and in place for the same durations as we build steel and concrete buildings for. for the same durations as we build steel and concrete buildings for. And we've also looked at, from a fire perspective, the performance of how the mass timber impacts the fire. So at the end of the day, we want to see that if we build a tall mass timber building, that it's going to perform similar to traditional materials, concrete and steel. And so what we're looking for is we want to see that in the event that the sprinklers fail to control the fire in the building, we want to see that the building's

not going to be adversely, or it's not going to be impacted beyond what a steel or concrete building would happen. So we want to make sure that that building's not going to, for example, burn until it collapses, like we commonly see with perhaps a single-family home. Let me just clarify this, Steve. Let me just clarify. Is a building out of wood intrinsically more flammable than a building made out of steel and concrete? Intrinsically, yes. It will contribute to the fire, but at the end of the day, what we're looking for is we're looking for performance that would be comparable to a steel or concrete building.

So these buildings are sprinklered. And so it's rare that we would see in a high-rise mass timber building a fully developed fire. But in the case that we do, we want to make sure that the building's designed such that that fire can burn out on its own and not challenge the structure. Gotcha. And that's what we expect from traditional construction, and that's what we design mass timber buildings for. Gotcha. Okay, Christopher, take us back 10 years. We know the amount of timber construction that was taking place then to today.

Where are we today compared to then? Well, traditionally, like we've been doing timber systems, mass timber structures for over 40 years. And I think most of your viewers will be familiar with community centres and schools and churches and seeing timber in those kinds of contexts. The last 10 years, the real change has come in the typologies of the buildings that we're looking at.

Tall structures, you know, for instance, in 2017 at the University of British Columbia, they built an 18-storey timber building for a residence. And that was really groundbreaking in Canada to have a building that tall. And to use the material in that kind of typology was quite groundbreaking. Now in Toronto, there are multiple buildings,

either completed or under construction, that are 12 stories or taller. You know, the Limberlost project that Phil's working on is a tall building. We're working on one right now, a 14-story building at U of T. So those kind of markets just weren't open to the industry 10 years ago. So while we do continue to do the more traditional buildings,

the ability to expand the range of delivered projects in the built environment has greatly expanded. Philip, can you do like a 60-story condo out of timber at this stage of the game? It's possible. It's technically possible. It is. And there's actually a systems dialogue, and Ellis Don have developed a system.

They think the sky's the limit. Now, would you want to do that? I don't know. Wood's very light, like I mentioned before, a fifth the weight of concrete. So a light building doesn't do well with lateral. So you have to put dampeners at the top. There's, I think the tallest timber building right now is in Milwaukee, 24 story, the Ascent Tower. And what is that? Is that an office building? It's a residential. Residential. Residential, yeah. And, you know, so 24 storeys, it's doable and it's happening.

In Toronto, I think the tallest right now will be the U of T Tower, the U of T Tall Academic Tower. But really the sweet spot is once you go above six storeys, there's six to 18 is the sweet spot for mass timber. How come? Well, once you go below, it's all about efficiency of material. And I think that once you're, you know, one, two story multifamily, multi-unit residential, light wood frame still is the most economical material. You can build a six story residential building out of stick frame. And I mean, you can do it out of mass timber,

but it may not be as economical. And what would be the obstacles in place that would be preventing us from diving truly headlong into this kind of operation? Well, certainly from the forestry point, and I am a forester, which, and recall that the supply chain begins with forests. It begins with trees, so I have a slightly different perspective.

And as I tell my students, I teach at the University of Toronto, the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design. Because we've been doing the same thing with our forest products for many, many years, it's very difficult to do something different. You know, and Harold Innes, a great political economist from U of T, criticized our extractive industries for doing the same thing over and over again, and really having us become a stapled economy, overly dependent on the extraction of resources. I have found in my 35 years of observing forest management in Ontario,

that we have a very, very wonderful system. The forest industry around the world would criticize what we do in Ontario as being overly expensive and overly burdensome and difficult for the forestry industry to comply with. But I think as a result of our regulations and legislation since the early 1990s, we in fact have a plentiful and sustainable forest supply chain for a new product. That's the key, isn't it? Yes. Sustainability. Sustainability, but also innovation.

I don't even think we have to look at being additive to the amount of wood that we're shipping towood lumber with much highly more valuable mass timber products, which are seven times the value of lumber. Well, let me ask Philip about that. Do you have a sense yet, I know we've been at this 40 years, but do you have a sense yet whether these buildings made of mass timber, as opposed to concrete and steel, hold up longer? Do they need less maintenance? Are they as strong, etc.? Well, no mass timber building has gone through end of life yet. So it's still that new that we haven't seen cataclysmic failures or end of life. But the building I'm in right now, the building our office is in, is a 100-year-old heavy timber building. So it's not mass timber, it's heavy

timber. There's a distinction there. It'll last forever. There's no maintenance required. There really isn't much needed for concrete either. Steel, if there's fireproofing on it, you may have to touch it up if it gets damaged. But there's very little maintenance that's required and it could last indefinitely. It's inert. The material is essentially inert once it's installed.

What about the cost? The cost of building a mass timber building versus concrete and steel? Generally speaking, on the material side, there is a bit of a premium on timber building versus concrete and steel? Generally speaking, on the material side, there is a bit of a premium on timber compared to concrete and steel in the cost of the structure itself. The other side of the equation is in most of the structures, you want to conceal the concrete, conceal the steel. They're not really used to express the aesthetic of the building, which in a wood building is almost always part of the sale.

So people are looking to express the structure. And then also in a lot of the buildings that we do, they tend to be architecturally ambitious structures. So by their very nature, they tend to be somewhat more expensive buildings to build than a bog standard rectangle. So really the future, and I think a lot of these items, is to get into the more mainstream economical and talking about affordable housing units where the accent is not so much on the exceptional, but more on the standard to sort of bring that sustainability and that product more into the mainstream. Steve, can you talk to us about how the building code has changed over the years in order to accommodate more mass timber being used in construction? Absolutely.

So in 2020, the National Building Code changed to allow for mass timber construction. So at that time, for the first time, it recognized mass timber construction to be different than light frame wood construction. And it allowed buildings up to 12 stories and we're just nearing the end of the next building code cycle which the next building code national building code will be published in 2025 and the the heights will still be 12 stories but there will actually be more exposed mass timber permitted. So based on testing that we've done, it's demonstrated that we can have a little bit more exposed mass timber within the building and it still be safe. Christopher, is the demand for this yet there? Certainly. And the demand at this point is higher than the capacity domestically to meet

it. There are European companies that are bringing in mass timber products into Canada, even though Canada does produce our own. As the popularity of the material has grown, the domestic capacity, even though we do quite well meeting it, can't meet all of the demand right now. But there is growth within the Canadian marketplace, for sure. Philip, there's definitely a look about this that is distinctive, right? I walk by that building at U of T every now and then, and it sticks out. It's the wrong expression to say sticks out like a sore thumb, because there's nothing sore about it. It is beautiful, but it is absolutely different from everything else around it. So it kind of takes your breath away when you look at it. But I wonder when people decide they want to build these things, how big a part of the

argument is sustainability, carbon sequestration, climate change, all of those kind of things in deciding to go this route? Right. You know, actually, I love this question because I'd say 10 years ago, we had a fight for it. We would push for it. And we have one of our senior partners in the office, Carol Phillips, has been a proponent of sustainable architecture and mass timber for a long time. But we don't have to anymore.

A lot of our clients are coming to us saying, we need to decarbonize. We know that the construction industry is responsible for about 40% of the world's carbon emissions, greenhouse gas emissions. They know that they're part of the problem. As architects, what we design gets built, so we have to decarbonize. We have to build these buildings.

And it's no longer clients come to us saying, we want a low-carbon structure. Give us a mass timber building. And so now we've pivoted. We are a timber first company. If timber makes sense for the structural component, we will start with a timber solution. If it doesn't, like we have many buildings in our office right now that are steel or concrete,

because that's what makes sense for those buildings. But we do start with a timber solution and our clients know that and they want that. Steve, we talked about sprinklers a little earlier in the conversation, maybe pick up on that. Is the sprinkler system that you would put in a mass timber building different or the same or what compared to a steel and concrete building? So generally, the sprinkler system is going to be the same

for a co-compliant mass timber building. So for a 12-storey mass timber building that meets the building code, then the sprinkler system is the identical to what is designed for into a concrete or steel building. Where we deviate is when we have projects like the two projects that have been mentioned, Limberlost Place at George Brown College and the Academic Tower at University of Toronto. Both of those projects are designed by alternative solutions, which means that the design has to be demonstrated that it is as safe as what the building code allows.

And by taking that pathway in both of those structures, there's much more mass timber exposed than what the prescriptive requirements in the building code allows. And in that case, we introduce mitigating features into those buildings to offset the risk. And in that case, we might upgrade the Sprinko system. We might, for example, pressurize stair shafts, things like that to increase the fire safety of the building so that it's demonstrably performs as good or better than a steel or concrete building. Gotcha. You know, this is a couple of times now we've heard about Limberlost Place near the

waterfront in Toronto. So, Philip, this is your project. We've got some video of this. Why don't we take a look? Sheldon, I'm at number 16 here. Why don't you roll the video? And Philip, just again, for people listening on podcast who maybe can't see this, tell us what we're looking at. This is a level nine. It's a sloped roof. These are long CLT panels. CLT means what? CLT, cross laminated timber. So it's where, I don't know if we want to get in the definition of that maybe later, but this is a sloped roof. We sloped the roof at limber loss because it became the armature for the solar PV panels. It's angled south, 37 degree angle,

the ultimate angle for solar PV collection. And what is this gonna be eventually? This building is the School of Architecture and Computer Studies for George Brown College. It's an academic building. Level nine is the office of the president and all the senior VPs and all the admin staff. That's why it looks so good.

All the suits have got the best floor, right? That's right. Okay, that was pretty cool. Now it's got the best floor, right? That's right. Okay. That was pretty cool. Now, it's all, I mean, it's wood and glass. That's what you see. That's what you see. Luckily, through Steve's assistance, we were able to expose all the wood.

The building codes say you have to encapsulate it with drywall, mainly for flame spread. But in this case, we were able to expose most of the wood. We've got some more of this here. Tell us about this. What are we looking at here? Now we're up on level 10. This is an event space. Huge, soaring ceilings.

Again, it's all exposed mass timber. Large windows. One beautiful aspect of this building is the natural ventilation system. So we're also using daylight harvesting. So large, open, tall harvesting, so large open tall windows allowing the light to flood into the space. We're trying to meet Toronto Green Standard Tier 4 in this project. So we had to reduce our energy use for heating and cooling, but we also had to hit many other targets that no other

building in the City of Toronto had ever met. So we had to pull out all the stops, left nothing on the table in terms of sustainability. But one thing that isn't really factored into buildings like this is the carbon sequestering nature of the wood. One misnomer about wood is that you think that a tree's volume gathers its size and volume from the minerals extracted from the ground. Well, that's not the case. It's actually from the air. Through the process of photosynthesis, the tree takes the carbon dioxide, stores the carbon in the fibers, and the byproduct is oxygen. So it's a carbon sequestering material that we've now placed into our building. We're holding onto that carbon, and we're regrowing those forests for future use of more buildings. How much steel is in any of what we just saw?

Actually, there's quite a bit of steel limber lost. There's no true full mass timber building. They're all hybrid in some nature. In this case, the lateral system, meaning what's resisting the wind loads, is steel. So the elevator cores, stair cores in the centre of the building are steel. We're hoping to go with wood. We weren't allowed to. It was one more alternative solution we weren't willing to go for.

But there is quite a bit of steel in the building and a lot of concrete too. I want to ask the forester this question. What could this, I mean, if this really catches on in a major way, what could this do to the forestry, the timber industry in the province of Ontario? Well, the industry would have to speak on its own behalf. I've never worked for the forest industry. But I think that they are very excited about it as an innovative new product. And certainly our concern economically, I would think, is that we're sending our lumber, we export lumber to the U.S., that's our major wood export,

and we're going to be buying back mass timber products from the U.S. rather than manufacturing and fabricating them here in Canada. Which I think we should be doing. Absolutely. We should be doing that here. We should be using our own wood because we continue to send, not on process, but we need to build our own manufacturing. So the mass timber sector is really the opportunity to use also in a sustainable way low and medium quality wood and develop our own mass timber industry in Canada, not send our wood off for other countries to do it for us. I get you, but what's stopping us from doing that right now? History.

Tradition. It's a big country. As I said, we've done very well exporting lumber and pulp and paper, and that's changing. Markets are changing. The industry has less area to operate on and will, I certainly think, have a big incentive to be pursuing mass timber wherever it can. On your projects, where do you get your wood from? Almost exclusively from Canada. Now, the mass timber products are sort of a family of products.

Glued laminated timber, which is primarily used in beams and columns. Cross laminated timber, which we'd mentioned earlier for panels. Nail laminated timber, which a lot of people will be familiar seeing in historic buildings. But depending on the product and where the product is manufactured, sometimes that influences which trees and which forests they come from. So if the manufacturing plant is in Western Canada, for instance, it's more likely that those trees are going to be from BC and Alberta, and more likely that they'll be Douglas fir. Ontario, when we're making something from an Ontario product, we're usually using spruce pine fir from Ontario forests and sometimes into Quebec as well. This is a bit of a facetious question, although maybe not entirely, Philip. well. This is a bit of a facetious question, although maybe not entirely, Philip. Do the floors squeak? Luckily, no. You're sure? Oh, these are, yeah, I mean, no, they don't. They're

solid, rigid panels. They're incredibly dense. Okay, because you know, I don't know a house that's made out of wood where the floors don't squeak, right? At some point, the floors squeak. They do. Well, the beauty of cross-laminated timber is it's a miraculous product. It gets its strength from crossing the lambs like plywood would, and it becomes a floor system. So you're using these panels for the floor. You could use it for walls as well, but traditionally they're used for floors. And you can use little pieces of wood, and they get finger-jointed together to make these massive panels that can be as long as 60 feet, joined together to make these massive panels that can be as long as 60 feet, 12 feet wide. That's it. And it's when you drop that down, you've just put in a massive amount of floor plate in one single lift. And that's where this becomes an interesting point, Steve. There's

actually very little in mass timber construction that relates to what people traditionally are used to as carpentry and house building. The materials are different. The techniques are different. The structural systems are different, even though it all comes from trees. So almost none of the comparisons between house building, whether it's from fire, whether it's from squeaks on floors, whether it's from an understanding of the connection strategies, applies to mass timber building. So there's a public perception gap in a lot of ways, because when people hear about a mass timber building, as you alluded to earlier, sometimes people say, oh, isn't it going to set on fire? But the way that those buildings behave

in every way is completely different than house building. Good. And how about mass timber and the potential role, more broadly, it can play in the whole affordable housing question, which, of course, we're obsessed with right now everywhere. What do you think? I think the gentleman I'm on the panel with have a better sense of that. But certainly it's an opportunity to use a sustainable wood product. And I think in all our imaginations, we would like to see building cities

become huge carbon sinks, collecting CO2, greenhouse gases out of the air. And as we build, really being able to improve. That includes affordable housing, and affordable housing should be designed to be beautiful and useful, and mass timber certainly provides that opportunity. Philip, a word on that? Yeah, there's like the Brock Commons project you're talking about. They were building- Where's that?

Oh, in UBC, British Columbia. It's the 18-story student residence. They were doing two floors a week. No other construction can match that. So if you want to build housing fast, fast and up out of Vancouver, structural engineers, they're looking at, they're pioneering point-loaded systems,

small little steel columns, but the floor systems are CLT. And they are going like rapid fire. They're beautiful. They go up fast. The labor force is actually quite small. At Limberlost, six men built the wood structure. As compared to-

How many square feet you got there? It's about 240,000 square feet. Amazing. Six men. It's about a floor every 10 days. Why is it called Limberlost? Oh, we had a donor,000 square feet. Amazing. Six men. It's about a floor every 10 days. Why is it called Limberlost? Oh, we had a donor, Jack Cockwell. He owns a forest south of Algonquin Park called the Limberlost Forest.

He didn't want to name the building after himself, so he named it after his forest. Nice. Very fitting. That's nice. To follow up, I would just say that with respect to affordable housing, that I think we really need to have a national strategy about this. We have had no national strategy and very little support with respect to developing a mass timber sector. It's been left to the provinces to carry on in their own diverse ways. And so I think affordable housing is really an opportunity

for the federal government to step in. They provide essentially no investment in research, education, or business development for mass timber. Steve, let me go back to you and the nation's capital. Would you have any concerns if this really were to catch on and there were much, much more significant adoption in the future? Well, certainly, as our building codes evolve, you know, they, as I mentioned, the 2025 building code is changing to allow a bit more exposed mass timber in these buildings. But it generally still tends to be relatively conservative. So as this is adopted, I think these buildings will be safe.

Of course, there's a learning curve for designers, whether it's structural engineers, architects, and fire safety engineers to be able to detail and build these buildings so that they will perform as we expect. But that's evolving along with codes and standards that are being updated yearly. And Steve, in your travels, which type of people, which groups of people are the hardest to convince that this is all actually good? Yeah, so that can be a challenge, absolutely. Of course, for these projects within the City of Toronto

and in other municipalities to be approved, we have to be able to convince the building department that the building is designed and is fire safe. So to that end, we conducted a very large scale test program that was funded by the federal government and provinces. In 2022, we built a full scale, two-story mass timber structure. And we were able to invite over 200 attendees to witness the biggest of the five fire tests we conducted on the structure. And within that 200 people, we had building officials, we had the insurance industry, we had fire service. And these are all groups that have been relatively difficult to reach in the past,

just because in the past we've done fire testing in a laboratory. And other than the research scientists that are there and perhaps some industry representatives, it's very difficult to share those results through a 100-page report, for instance. And so being able to invite those people to witness the fire test was really valuable. In our last 20 seconds here, Christopher, what would you say to the skeptics to try to get them on board? Well, I think, as I said earlier, to try and understand the difference between just a wood building that's a house and mass timber and understanding that they're completely different materials

with respect to how they can be used in the construction market. But there's a bright future, and people want to be around wood. They want to be in a wood building. They feel good around wood buildings. And all the arguments, whether it's economic development, whether it's sustainability, whether it's construction speed and access, all of them point towards wood being a future building material. They really are beautiful, aren't they?

Absolutely. Yeah. That's Christopher Williams from Timber Systems Limited. We've also got Phil Silverstein from Moriyama Tashima Architects and Coven from the Mass Timber Institute, Stephen Kraft in the nation's capital from CHM Fire Consultants. Great to have all of you on TVO tonight. Thanks so much. The Agenda with Steve Paikin is made possible through generous philanthropic contributions from viewers like you. Thank you for supporting TVO's journalism.