A few people have now sent me this TED talk by architect Débora Mesa Molina. But I watched it for the first time today. I guess my personal brand is pretty closely associated with architecture and design.

In it, she talks about her firm's approach to using overlooked and/or standard building materials in unconventional ways. For example, here, she used stacked precast beams to assemble a house in Madrid (c.2008). The entire structure came together in only 7 days.

My first reaction is that I like the idea and approach -- which is really quite interesting -- more than the final designs. I am also curious if there were any cost savings as a result of using "standard" materials. What are your thoughts?

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.

Click here if you can’t see the video below.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHtdnY_gnmE?rel=0&w=560&h=315]