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 Frame 122).

This would suggest that whatever their development model is, it is working for them. My assumption is that they want to both make our cities more sustainable and own high-quality rental assets for the long-term (possibly forever).

If you'd like to see how 122 Waverly was assembled, here's a short video that Joanne recently posted on her blog:

It is an overwhelmingly positive thing for cities when you can somehow figure out how to turn a site like this (which looks to have been a single-family home):

Into 13 homes and new ground-floor retail that looks like this (non-Google street view images can be found here):

This particular example is at 752 High Street in Thornbury, which is an inner suburb of Melbourne. Designed by Gardiner Architects, the build has 4 floors of residential, a 5th floor rooftop amenity, and a single elevator with a single wraparound staircase. It was also constructed out of cross-laminated timber.

For more about that process, here's a short video:

If you watch the video, you'll hear the architect talk about how his firm had been working on this project for about 8 or 9 years. I have no idea the backstory and I'm not about to speculate, but clearly 8-9 years is far too long for only 13 new homes. And the reality is that we often don't make it easy to build this kind of infill housing.

Broadly speaking, if you're trying to encourage this scale of housing, I think at a minimum you want to look at 3 things: (1) the planning permissions need to be flexible and as-of-right, (2) you need to look at the local building codes to see if there are any obstacles in place that don't necessarily make sense for this typology, and (3) you want to look at the impact fees being levied.

It's hard not to imagine our cities being better off having more apartments like High Street.

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]