Mass Timber Group Show: Sustainable Building Experts

Trending in Timber: Toronto’s Game Changing Waterfront & Mass Timber ADUs

• Brady & Nic

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How is Toronto's waterfront setting a new benchmark for mass timber construction, and what innovative projects are driving the global mass timber movement forward? Discover the latest breakthroughs in geometric ADUs, groundbreaking developments, and the impressive achievements of award-winning architects reshaping the future of sustainable building.

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Speaker 1:

So downtown Toronto, on the waterfront, it does not get any better than this in the entire world.

Speaker 2:

What these folks are doing. The concept behind this is smaller scale, adu, if you will, type buildings made with mass timber. It's not traditional, you know, square box frame type buildings. What they're doing is they're using these geometric patterns to maximize livable square space but minimize the foundational footprint. Today, we're going to talk about some pretty exciting stuff. Nick's got some projects geared up from some of the biggest that I've ever seen, so some of the most impressive. I've got some stuff that I'm going to talk about on, like, the smaller side ADU side of things. But before we get into that, guys, masked Timbers Group Summit 2025, august 21st and 2nd building tours on the 20th. If you guys want to get in front of experts community, find your next project team, head on over to masktimbergroup and get on the wait list. We're going to be doing tickets live soon and also a call for speakers. So, with that being said, nick, what are you looking at?

Speaker 1:

We're going to give people a taste of how quickly this whole mass timber thing is exploding throughout the world and we're going to talk about. They call it a super block. There's no other. There's no other way to say it. Like you have, these big, big, massive skyscrapers are called like superstructures. This is in downtown Toronto and I have a crazy situation on my screen. Let me exit. So downtown Toronto, on the waterfront, it does not get any better than this in the entire world. So when they call these super blocks or these superstructures, this is one of the, I don't know, I can't confirm this. I think it's the largest project in the entire world, but that Japanese you know project that we went over, that huge expo project, is also massive. So I just don't.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, this is different applications that may be like the largest quote-unquote structure, but this is like an entire development, like you said, a whole block and for usable stuff yeah, far, far bigger.

Speaker 1:

yeah, far bigger than blocks. These are like citywide conjoining blocks. All right, so Canada's mega project waterfront Toronto includes a new district called Quayside and all electric and climate neutral community. Its highlights are two acres, or are a two acre, urban forest and the residential timber house by architect David. I'm sorry, aj, yeah, I mispronounced that and we're moving on. So, uh, david, aj, ajay, adjaye, the. These are the photos that blew my mind so, if you can see, I'm going to try. Zooming in gets a little blurry. But all of these this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one I believe these are all the new redevelopment. So the Quayside District Urban Development Area, this is climate neutral community 800 affordable housing units in an urban forest timber construction of an impressive size. So if we're looking at, could you imagine walking?

Speaker 2:

through that. Yeah, I was going to say I wonder how that would look, so like those are pretty young looking trees. But you know, imagine 70 years down the line. Like you know, you go through like university boulevards and stuff, where you have 80 year old trees and they're just towering and massive, Like. Imagine having that inside of a city block.

Speaker 1:

That's a really good point. Yeah, yeah, I would tower over you. So here's some of the design teams. Three renowned architectural firms are involved in the new version for the Quayside. It's curved buildings and many rounded balconies, aptly named Western Curve In from London-based Allison Brooks Architects. Right next door is the Overstory designed by Danish architectural bureau Henning Larsen, with a stepped cubic structure. But possibly the most spectacular part of the sustainable neighborhood is Timber House by UK architects Ajaya Associates, or Ajay Keep scrolling through.

Speaker 1:

So 12-story projects and these are the renderings. It's just staggering Two acres of urban forest they started, of urban forest, they started. So if I'm gonna, I'm gonna pan over to the quayside toronto waterfront. So this is vincent cusack, a structural project manager, and he shared on linkedin and said happy to share some progress on the large glue lamb canopy for the quayside buildings. It will function as a hub for water tours and other water-based activities taking place on the river Liffey or Liffey. And because we live in Montana where we don't have dirt road or we still have dirt roads and barely any wifi, it's taken a while to render. But what this is is, it pans around the actual project. So it's pretty cool.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, if you guys are just listening to this on audio, head on over to YouTube so you can see some of the visuals that we're going to share. So the video that Nick's looking at right now is showing the entire overview, fly through, of this project, but then also here in a second he's going to share another video, dude, this is pretty cool, cool. I think this is like one of those projects that will serve as kind of like a landmark for other cities to emulate and to look at, as a test case for, like, when they're doing these major expansions. I know, you know, one of the ones that we talked about was the River Mile in Denver. You know that's kind of like the same thing, like a community within a community, not necessarily mass timber, but you know this is going to be one of those mass timber, climate friendly-friendly, all-electric type super walks, if you will, and so I'm excited to see how this pans out and then to take a trip up there and see it in person.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, the new story these days is walkable micro cities, the cities within cities, and it'll be interesting to see where this takes off. All right, so what do you got up next in the docket?

Speaker 2:

So we're going to take a complete pivot from the scope and scale that you just looked at and I was. Uh, I get an alert and I highly recommend everybody sets this up. You can set up a Google alert and just pings you with things that you're interested in, and I have one set up for mass timber and so this caught my eye. I'm gonna share my screen poly house. So what these folks are doing, uh, this was started by this gentleman right here, daniel Lopez Perez, and so the concept behind this is smaller scale ADU, if you will, type buildings made with mass timber, but they use it's not traditional, you know square box frame type buildings. What they're doing is they're using these geometric patterns to maximize livable square space but minimize the foundational footprint, and they worked with a bunch of different people to bring this together.

Speaker 2:

I believe Vaughan Timbers is the mass timber panel supplier, but you can see how wonderfully incredible these things look. And these guys are based in California and I think they're focusing very specifically on California because of the high cost of housing and construction. I think I read in here that one of these units could be half of the cost of a normal single family home in California, half of the cost of a normal single family home in California. And the cost per square foot, uh, from the outside look expensive. I think I read $550 a square foot, but when you're talking about in California it's actually much cheaper than you're looking at for other alternatives and I mean they're just gorgeous right.

Speaker 1:

Well, I love the more they sort of resemble like an a-frame structure, like a log. Have you been in a log cabin? A frame type thing? And that these incredible angles. It's, it's a, it's definitely a statement. I'll tell you that All right.

Speaker 2:

So here's kind of like their unique niche. So they talk about maximizing volume, so poly houses. Patented design design methodology leverages the geometric efficiency of truncated polyhedrons, maximizing living space with a minimal land footprint. They also enhance orientation and use flexibility due to their symmetry. They're rapidly assemblable. Its speed centers around a building system that significantly reduces time, labor and opportunity costs. The rapid assembly is achieved by robotically CNC milling the mass timber panels that, for example, in the case of the Tetra one model, resulted in 64 pieces that are assembled in just a few days.

Speaker 2:

Much like a puzzle, um, so I I thought this was super interesting.

Speaker 2:

One of the questions that I had while I was walking through this is you always hear about bottlenecks in factories being fabrication, and so it looks like a lot of these panels need a lot of fabrication time, and I wonder how they laid out the cuts on these panels. Maybe we should call Russ or Tom and figure it out, because you can see that they're cut at angles, and I wonder if they did the panel um optimization. So it's like, hey, if you cut a triangle out of this one, that triangle now goes over here in this other part of the building. Um, I feel like that would be the only way that this would work. Um, but it's super cool, it's super innovative. I thought it was a really interesting way to use mass timber for those smaller scale projects that even a couple of years ago, everybody was like it's never going to happen. It's never going to happen for single family homes, definitely never going to happen for 80 years. But like, here you go, like they're building them.

Speaker 1:

And I'm looking at the timestamps, I'm recognizing now that each picture is another day. Yeah.

Speaker 2:

And how quickly that was going up. Yeah, they, in the article that I read, they assembled everything in three days. And keep in mind, this is like the first project, right? So everybody's kind of like learning as they're going, uh. But you know, imagine once you get the, the system down and the right crews and more experience, I imagine it only gets faster. It's like everything's gonna be more expensive and take longer with the first one, you know, versus the hundredth. So yeah, that's. I thought that was cool. Shout out to Polly house for the work that they're doing. And yeah, I just figured mass timber community should know about that.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, vag, and timbers as well.

Speaker 2:

Yes, sir, so what else you got?

Speaker 1:

All right, all right, check this out. So we had a really good conversation on LinkedIn, so I'll try to like post projects that are really cool and everything. Obviously, the ascent in Milwaukee is one of the coolest because you know, it's coined the world's tallest mass timber hybrid structure and it's 25 stories and so a lot of people don't recognize, like what these real world costs can be, and so I created this post and all of a sudden we had this gentleman come in and ask about the different per square footage price and so just a little bit of eye candy of like what the ascent is. I believe this is six stories of concrete on 19 stories of mass timber, of concrete on 19 stories of mass timber. The let me. I'll just read this. So this is this is what blew me away. You can go to new land enterprise. Let me just double check, if can you double check. The new land enterprise that's Tim Gochman's oh yeah, it is right down here, you can see. So they were the developers of the project. It's a 25 story. The installation time was shortened by 40%, with a reduced and reduced the construction workers by 78%, which is absolutely significant and staggering for real world stuff, and that's what mass timber does. If you get the team in the very beginning to design everyone the architect, the engineer, the builder, the developer and you draw the plan out, then that's when mass timber can pencil. It's never an afterthought, and so I thought that these were just really, really cool numbers.

Speaker 1:

Here's another interesting one 25% of the residents in the Ascent. Interesting one 25% of the residents in the Ascent. They Ascent MKA cited that the beauty of the mass timber as a key factor in their rental decision. So one out of every four residents, the people that live there, said I'm living there because it's cool, it's mass timber. I want to live there because of this. 25%. That's enough to start telling people about it. So quick numbers 259 luxury apartments, 493,000 square feet of mixed use space, 7,000 square feet of street level retail and 20,000 square feet of amenities retail and 20,000 square feet of amenities.

Speaker 1:

So the but there was a conversation, so there was a gentleman that I'm going to scroll down real quick asked about some of these real world costs. It was Steven Sergelin. Sergelin said wow, what is? What was the cost per square foot? Obviously, I have no clue. So we had to call in the big dogs and I got. I tagged in Tim and asked you know what they're currently raising money for the ascent is? So this works so well that they're going to raise money now and they're trying to build the ascent in other cities throughout the U? S. So he popped in and said we were $130 million all in on 493,000 square foot, but that's a big parking structure and a lot of amenities about 30,000 square foot. All right, is that hard cost only or does it include soft and financing cost? All in development cost example, like all soft cost. So I thought that was some just really cool real world information about the largest mass timber project it just shows like there's lots of conversations happening online.

Speaker 2:

People are interested. Like the more you can get this out in front of the public, the more you can talk about it, the more you can share and tap in the teams working on it, like the more people are going to join the movement. So what's next on the docket?

Speaker 1:

what's wild is people are obviously interested. I mean, I posted this well, I guess, a month ago, three, four weeks ago, 437 people liked it. You know almost 30,000 people scrolled through this and saw this like almost 30,000 impressions. It just really kind of goes to show you that people are excited. People want to talk, people want to learn. Linkedin is one of the best ways to get connected. All right, what do you got? No, I'm going to pitch that back to talk.

Speaker 2:

People want to learn. Linkedin is one of the best ways to get connected. All right, what do you got? No, I'm going to pitch that back to you.

Speaker 1:

You got a couple more things you want to talk about. Yeah, let's wrap it up with. There's a really cool project that Hoffman Construction Company is working on. This is called the New House Building, has been part of the state's campus since 1934. And, due to several life, safety and seismic issues, it needs to be replaced. So what this is is the state of Washington Department of Enterprise Services, architect Miller Hall Partnership, location Olympia, washington, and it's a huge capital project. Here's kind of just some sketches, but here's the rendering, and they're using DLT, dow Laminated Timber, which I think is beautiful and a lot of people don't recognize because there are what would you call it I'm not the technical guy Rivets or flutes within here I'll show it to you.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, it's just the gap difference between using different width lumber, and so you create that visual channel, if you will.

Speaker 1:

Well, that visual channel is not only about aesthetics and being pretty. Acoustics, from what I was told, gets trapped within there and it becomes dampeners, like acoustic dampening, and so that's just a really good way. Acoustics is a problem with mass timbre. It has to be addressed. You know, it's just very echoey, and this is a way to do that, and so you can kind of see the rendering here. Um, integration into the capitol hill new house is a representative of a time-honored national process where legislation is made and state administration is carried out, and the design is aimed to emphasize this magnitude while also accommodate, accommodating the kind of functionality needed in any modern workplace.

Speaker 2:

So there's a video there. They talked about it too, yeah.

Speaker 1:

It's pretty cool. They're flying big panels into place. Well, just play it.

Speaker 3:

Out. Here at the Newhouse Project, we're building a hybrid building of steel and mass timber. Bringing the mass timber into a building gives it a whole new look, right, we're so used to seeing steel and concrete. This gives it that feel, when you walk into the building, like seeing the different grains in the wood, how everything's exposed. We had to get everybody involved on the front end to make sure that our mass timber was successful on this project.

Speaker 5:

So here in Olympia the biggest struggle is the relative humidity, working with that and keeping that in mind as we're erecting and then trying to get the timber up, erected in the building and closed and start conditioning the building to its operating temperature and conditions. Products the manufacturer recommended were not suitable for this project so we had to go outside of what was designed essentially and find something that would work for us. So we came to go outside of what was designed essentially and find something that would work for us. So we came up with the Slope Shield product so it keeps the water off, protects the product. So now we have these panels coming out wrapped in the Slope Shield already removing a whole step from our process, and we went from seeing about a hundred hour loss every week to a couple hundred hour gain every time we're setting panels. So it ended up being just a huge cost benefit to all parties in the end.

Speaker 5:

The Hoffman way is great how we handle things. So we do BIM in-house all our building information modeling. Hoffman has a BIM coordinator that we work really closely with out here and StructureCraft worked really close with. We were able to, through the modeling, lay out exactly where every single notch needed to be at every column. It's absolutely critical. Without BIM, this job would not be a success. Bim is a driver out here.

Speaker 4:

We embrace challenges and it's important for us to bring the vision that the designers and owners have to life. So having BIM capabilities in-house helps us fill any holes that we might have in our scope. We have no problem stepping in and modeling that scope and ensuring that we have all our bases covered when it comes to coordination and supporting the field. After working on the new house DLT, I feel like we are poised to take on more jobs with mass timber and we're much more comfortable and confident.

Speaker 5:

Having that relationship with the design team, the modeler, the MEP subcontractors and the manufacturer really helped us streamline any changes or alterations we need to make, and the manufacturer really helped us streamline any changes or alterations we need to make with the manufacturer and get them in before it hit the site. We're definitely a growing leader here. With Mass Timber we're leading the charge.

Speaker 2:

Hey man, that's pretty sweet. Shout out to the VaproShield guys. I actually just talked with Aaron and Matt this morning, so that's fun.

Speaker 1:

Yeah Well, I mean, it looks like a structure, craft, mass timber. In the background here you can see the emblems right here, exactly, I mean, if you're going to be installing in one of the rainiest parts of North America, you have to protect yourself. You know the, the staining, the of the bleeds and the and the wetness of. Yes, it's wood and it can be sanded, but how big's your wall? And you ever sanded one spot? Now, all of a sudden, you got a bigger problem it also protects, like you know, visual stuff.

Speaker 1:

That can be a pain, but you know you don't want, you don't want moisture trapped where it shouldn't be, in rotting, and then you have a whole, nother different type of product problem, so walking on it day by day, I the stuff is is tough as nails and it's perme problem that needs to be addressed up front and and and this it's not an easy problem but it can be fixed with proper, you know, rain mitigation totally what else you got last but not least, we have to give a special shout out to sugarubon for winning some very prestigious awards out there, and, and so it looks like about four weeks ago, sugar O'Ban Architects their three offices are celebrating winning two major international awards the Premium Imperial Honored Sugar O'Ban in the Architecture category at an award ceremony in Japan attended by Dean Maltz, and the Prix Versailles Recognilles recognized samos I'm probably pronouncing that right an art museum and 10 villages as the world's most beautiful museum, and that's what you see down here.

Speaker 1:

Sugar ruban is known for sustainability. He's known for his humanitarian go check out his website. I mean, he's done the swatch mass timber headquarters and the Omega um, you know the Aspen art museum in Colorado, uh, with Greg Kingsley and KLNA, and that's one of a hundred. You know timber projects that are just mind blowing. So special shout out to sugar bond and his team there. They, they pushed the envelope, heck yeah.

Speaker 2:

Well, we'll see you guys next week. Cheers.

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Brady Potts

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Nic Wilson

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