A mass timber building. Photo courtesy of Element5.
Once seen as a niche product, mass timber is now gaining traction as a mainstream solution for sustainable building across Canada’s residential, commercial, and institutional sectors.
“We’ve been building with wood for thousands of years,” says Lee Scott. “Then we shifted to concrete and steel—but the rise of mass timber marks a return, a rediscovery.” As Director of North American Sales at mass timber manufacturer Element5, Scott has a front-row seat to wood’s resurgence as a prominent construction material.
Both ancient and cutting-edge, mass timber is now engineered using advanced technologies that make it safer, faster, more sustainable, and more adaptable than traditional materials like concrete and steel.
As is so often the case in green building innovations, the first real breakthrough in mass timber happened in Europe. In the late 1990s, engineers in Austria and Germany developed Cross-Laminated Timber (CLT). Comprising layers of dimensional lumber glued together at perpendicular angles, these new CLT panels were exceptionally strong and dimensionally stable. In Europe, the construction industry began to recognize CLT’s potential: massive, pre-fabricated panels could be created with precision. These panels serve as walls, floors, and ceilings, replacing traditional concrete and steel components.
Early adoption in North America was initially slow, largely due to entrenched construction norms and limited production capacity. But mass timber is increasingly recognized both in Europe and North America as an ideal building material: renewable, low-carbon, and beautiful.
“For architects, it’s a beautiful product to work with,” says Scott. Designers are drawn to its warmth, texture, and biophilic benefits—studies suggest that people are happier and healthier in wood-rich environments.
Builders appreciate its lightness: wood is five times lighter than concrete and 16 times lighter than steel, reducing the strain on foundations and allowing construction on sites that wouldn’t support heavier materials.
Developers appreciate the streamlined construction process made possible by mass timber’s prefabrication. Panels are manufactured in factory settings under ideal conditions—dry, clean, and precise.
Panels are built based on a digital twin—a highly detailed 3D model that accounts for every beam, screw, and pipe. This planning reduces errors, simplifies installation, and speeds up coordination with other trades like electrical and plumbing. It’s like assembling Lego blocks at full scale.
Vienna House, a Mass Timber Passive House affordable housing project in Vancouver, BC. Photo by: Andrew Latreille
Moisture management is a crucial concern in wood construction. CLT is designed to be dimensionally stable and is less susceptible to water damage than earlier products like Nail-Laminated Timber (NLT). During both factory production and on-site installation, strict moisture control plans are in place to ensure the durability of the wood.
Once manufactured, mass timber components arrive on-site ready to assemble, reducing the need for tradespeople and minimizing the time spent on-site.
“With just a crane and a crew of four or five, a building’s structure can be erected in days instead of weeks,” says Scott.
In the early days, mass timber construction came at a premium, but Scott says that today, on a well-designed building, a mass timber build can cost 20 to 40 percent less than cast-in-place concrete. The savings come not just from materials but from reduced labor, less waste, and fewer delays.
Interest in mass timber is also driven by its significantly lower embodied carbon footprint compared to steel and concrete. While Passive House standards have historically focused on operational energy, attention is now shifting toward embodied carbon — the emissions associated with producing and constructing building materials. Mass timber stands out in this area. This is especially true when considering biogenic carbon, the CO₂ that trees absorb during growth. Though current Life Cycle Assessments (LCAs) often overlook this metric because of assumptions about end-of-life disposal, the potential for long-term carbon storage remains a compelling benefit.
Another strength of mass timber construction that few are thinking about now, but which may one day become industry standard, is the idea of design for disassembly.
“If our needs for the building change, if we want to take things apart and reuse them separately, can we take it apart with a screwdriver?” says Caroline Buchart. “Can we trace what each section was made from?”
The Sustainability Lead and Senior Engineer at ASPECT’s Vancouver offices, Butchart is a passionate advocate for building re-use. What if, instead of demolishing an old building and taking the rubble to the dump, that building was made of QR code-labelled, bolted sections that could be easily taken apart, sorted, and then reused?
“In mass timber, there is a greater level of precision in the design and the connections — sections are cut and pre-drilled in a facility, and a lot of the connections are bolted, rather than welded,” explains Butchart. These components could be labelled and then disassembled and sorted with relative ease.
This opens up the possibility of adapting buildings over time — for example, removing part of a structure and rebuilding it elsewhere, thus extending the life of the materials and locking in their carbon content for decades or even centuries. It’s a more future-oriented approach to architecture, where buildings can evolve with changing needs rather than being demolished.
A mass timber construction project. Photo courtesy of Element5.
Initially, the majority of mass timber projects were led by institutions—universities, colleges, and government agencies with a strong commitment to sustainability and the budget to support it.
But as the price of mass timber construction drops, things are changing. Mass timber is now used in affordable housing, student residences, warehouses, firehalls, police stations, and even high-rise towers. In Vancouver, the University of British Columbia’s Brock Commons Tallwood House is mass timber and 18 storeys tall. Globally, the tallest completed mass timber building is a 25-storey structure in Milwaukee, with another 32-storey Milwaukee building now underway.
Architects like Craig Applegath at architecture firm DIALOG have even conceptualized a 105-storey mass timber tower. While such ambitious projects currently require hybrid construction—incorporating concrete for structural flexibility—the trend is clear: taller and more complex mass timber buildings are becoming increasingly viable as building codes evolve.
Provincial policies are also helping. British Columbia’s “Wood First Act” mandates government buildings to consider wood as the primary material. Organizations like the Toronto District School Board are exploring mass timber for schools, backed by life-cycle studies showing its cost-effectiveness over decades.
The secondary market is also developing. Companies can now buy raw CLT billets and design their own projects. As the cost of production drops and design knowledge spreads, single-family homes could soon be built from mass timber.
“Imagine post-World War Two prefab housing kits, but for the climate-conscious age,” says Scott. “It’s an exciting space to be in. You’re doing something with a tangible effect on global warming while creating a warm and inviting place for someone to live. There really is nothing that mass timber is not touching.”
