This week, our team toured a new 9-storey mass timber residential building going up at 230 Royal York Road in Toronto. The developers are Windmill Developments and Leader Lane Developments. The construction manager is Oben Build. The mass timber company is Vancouver-based Intelligent City. And when it's completed, it is expected to be the tallest residential building in Toronto. But I suspect it won't hold this title for very long. Building out of wood is destined to become a major part of how we build in this city and country. So here are a bunch of photos from the site walk. I tried to include as many detail shots as possible so that you can all get a sense of how it pieces together.
At the end of 2020, I wrote about a cross-laminated timber apartment building that Joanne and Fred Wilson were building in Brooklyn at 383 Greene Street.
Well, that project is now complete and stabilized, and it turns out that it was the first CLT apartment building ever built in NYC, which is quite an accomplishment.
On her blog, Joanne describes the project as being a "labor of love", and that certainly sounds right. But they are now also onto their next CLT apartment building at 122 Waverly Avenue (called
Over the past few years there’s been growing interest in using mass timber for high-rise buildings (now colloquially referred to as “plyscrapers”).
One project that got a lot of attention last year is Brock Commons (student residence) at the University of British Columbia. It is an 18-storey hybrid mass timber tower.
The first and second floor (slab) and the two cores are poured-in-place concrete. After that, the other 16 floors of the tower consist of 5-ply cross laminated timber (CLT) panels and glue laminated timber (glulam) columns running every 10 feet. The roof is steel and metal decking.
Below is a great time lapse video of the building under construction once it had switched over to timber. The wood construction portion started on June 6, 2016 and finished on August 10, 2016. So 2 floors per week.
The video is well-annotated so that you know what week of construction it is, how many wood installers are on-site, which structural members are going in (along with their dimensions), and so on. The CLT panels are only 169mm thick.
