There are just a few small problems standing in the way.

TreeHugger loves tall wood construction, and we have always been big fans of Peter Busby of Perkins+Will. Busby is now working for the Delta Group in Vancouver, proposing a 40 storey tall wood tower. Busby is quoted in an article by Kerry Gold in the Globe and Mail:

© Perkins + Will, Delta Group

Busby explains that timber structures are safe and fire retardant because they are designed with a sacrificial layer that turns to carbon, insulating the wood. This is well documented, the way heavy timber buildings have been engineered for a century.

Mass Timber Code Coalition/via

But there are issues. The building codes have just been revised to permit wood structures up to twelve storeys with wood elements exposed, like they are here, and up to 18 storeys when the wood is all enclosed in gypsum board, like it was at the Brock Commons towers. It took years of work to get the codes to this point. There are “peer review” processes that permit variances from the code, but I suspect that 40 storeys with exposed wood is a serious stretch.

There are also zoning issues on this site; it has a height limit of 14 storeys. Sean Pander, the city’s green building program manager and a big supporter of wood construction, says, “Sustainability and low carbon is a city-wide priority, so any application for a project like that is great; it needs to look at that, but also the neighbourhood fit and affordability piece has to be there. That’s the single biggest challenge.”

Globe and mail/ Lloyd Alter/CC BY 2.0

Really, between the building code and zoning approvals, we could be talking years here. I can’t help but think this is a bit of a stalking horse for the developer, Bruce Langereis, who is certainly getting a lot of publicity like this page in what’s called Canada’s National Newspaper, and who is not putting all of his eggs in one basket.

He’s referring to the Vancouver model building, where there is a base that fills the block at street level and a tower above. I wonder if it is really suitable for wood, which I think lends itself to forms like you find in Paris or Vienna. Even Brent Toderian, who was chief planner and proponent of the Vancouver model, has written that there are different ways to approach these things.

As I have said before about tall timber, I can’t help but think that 40 storeys is too much of a wood thing.