Toronto is a city of cranes and construction sites, so there’s nothing remarkable about the fact that a nine-storey housing project is being erected at the corner of Royal York Road and Drummond Street. It’s what’s inside that counts. The floors, walls, roof and envelope of this Etobicoke midrise will all be made of wood. Each piece of mass timber is being manufactured in Delta, B.C., then shipped and assembled here within the span of three months. The 58-unit structure, which is expected to be move-in ready by the end of year, will be the GTA’s tallest mass- timber residential building. (That is, until the title is claimed by future projects currently in development.)
“We need housing urgently, and prefabricated mass timber is the way to scale up construction,” says Oliver Lang, co-founder of Intelligent City, which uses AI-powered proprietary software and advanced robotics to design and manufacture its building components.
The company is working to address one of the key challenges facing the construction industry: expanding and accelerating production while reducing carbon emissions. The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) estimates the country needs to build 3.5 million new units by 2030. But traditional building materials, such as concrete and steel, are incredibly carbon intensive to produce. Each year, the built environment produces around 89 million megatonnes of carbon dioxide, accounting for 13 per cent of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, according to Natural Resources Canada, it’s the third most carbon-intensive industry after oil and gas and transportation.
“The way we’ve been building only makes the situation worse,” says Lang. “So the question is, how do we build well, build quickly, but keep our carbon footprint small?”
The Vancouver-based firm uses concrete only in the building’s foundation and core, a 75 per cent reduction compared to the volume that would be used in a traditionally constructed building. Instead of steel, the structure will be supported by glue-laminated timber posts and beams and cross-laminated timber (CLT) floor and wall panels. Each panel comprises several 100-120 millimetre layers of wood that create a structural load-bearing material so thick that in the case of a fire, only the surface would be charred, while the interior would be sealed and protected from damage. And yet, mass-timber construction is also flexible enough to bend (but not break) during an earthquake, giving it seismic performance equal to that of steel.
Beyond those beneficial qualities, mass timber, like other forms of wood, scores high marks for sustainability, says Dorothy Johns, an assistant professor of architectural science at Toronto Metropolitan University. “Trees sequester carbon during their lifespan. And when the tree is felled, it can only re-release that carbon if it’s burned or it decomposes,” she says. “With mass timber, we are essentially storing that carbon in the construction material itself.”
Along with storing carbon, it’s estimated that mass timber could cut embodied carbon emissions in buildings by up to 25 per cent. But certain challenges have hampered widespread adoption of the material within the Canadian construction sector. To comply with building codes, the first mass-timber structures were predominantly just one or two storeys high. Five years ago, the National Building Code of Canada raised the limit to 12 storeys, and Ontario is looking to allow construction up to 18 storeys. Natural Resources Canada reports there are now 19 mass-timber manufacturing facilities and 33 housing projects eight storeys or higher across the country. Those numbers might grow quickly with the federal government’s proposed plan to pump $25 billion into the prefab construction industry, with the aim of doubling Canada’s housing output, which would result in 500,000 new units each year. And the country’s 164 million hectares of sustainably managed forests could provide a big production boost for the mass-timber ecosystem.
Tackling the twin crises of housing supply and climate change was the goal for Lang and partner Cindy Wilson when they founded Intelligent City in 2008. The couple’s award-winning architecture practice, LWPAC, had just received the Governor General’s Medal for Roar One, a four-storey, mixed-use building on Vancouver’s west side. Ironically, it was this very triumph that prompted some professional soul-searching. “There was this realization that it would be just so difficult to repeat the success because the industry had no systematic construction,” says Lang. “Every single building was an individually engineered and individually designed solution.”
That’s when they decided to fully embrace the idea of industrialized construction, running the firm as “an R&D company,” he says. Lang and Wilson spent more than a decade researching mass timber and studying potential technologies, raising $35 million through a combination of private funding and government grants to develop an integrated design-and-manufacturing system that allows them to construct a mix of homes derived from the same foundational technology platform. Intelligent City president Oliver David (OD) Krieg, who joined the company as CTO in 2018, says the program can be leveraged for individual projects — the number of bedrooms, the facade patterns and the common amenity spaces can be adjusted depending on client specifications. “What we have is a scalable and customized technology so we can design different buildings that fit into different locations.”
The platform has been engineered to learn from each new building design. “By the second, the third, the fourth building, we’ll have improved by 50 per cent, because it’s a logarithmic curve. We’ll be able to go through the design process really quickly because we have our library of apartment layouts,” says Krieg. “In theory, we could have a finished building within minutes.”
For now, Intelligent City’s factory, a 15,000-square-foot former shipyard, is busy making more than 200 panels for the Etobicoke project. The factory is outfitted with giant robotic arms that lift and glue the nine-metre-long panels together, while other industrial robots cut door and window openings. All the insulation, cladding, windows and conduits will be installed before the panels are shipped. Once on the construction site, those panels will be snapped together like Lego, forming an energy-efficient seal. Krieg estimates that construction will be 25 per cent faster and 10 per less expensive than typical buildings. Plus, this precise approach can help reduce waste.
“This has been a nearly 20-year journey,” says Lang. “The vision we had and the technologies we developed have become robust solutions. It’s not just a dream anymore. It’s here.”
Intelligent City is one of six companies in Mission from MaRS: Better Buildings Adopting Accelerator, which was made possible by the Peter Gilgan Foundation. This special initiative aims to accelerate the adoption of Canadian innovations that help decarbonize existing structures and construct better ones.
Howard Akler writes about technology for MaRS. Torstar, the parent company of the Toronto Star, has partnered with MaRS to highlight innovation in Canadian companies.
