Rod Sweet writes in the Global Construction Review to tell us that something unique is under construction at UBC. It’s an 18-story, $C 51.5 M student residence tower made mostly of timber — an ambitiously tall timber structure for the industry. Called Brock Commons, its architects are aiming for LEED Gold status when it opens in September 2017.
Earlier this year the provincial government of British Columbia passed a new regulation that allowed UBC to go over timber-structure height limits if the building met rigorous health and safety standards. The architects, Acton Ostry, and UBC building officials helped draft the regulation.
“When we introduced BC’s Building Act this year, one of our goals was to encourage innovation by creating an approval process for groundbreaking projects like this one,” said Rich Coleman, the province’s minister for housing. “As a result, we have been able to approve UBC’s tall wood building, while ensuring it meets rigorous health and safety standards.”
Apparently, tall timber buildings are starting to rise, and are referred to as “plyscrapers” (Ouch).
A detailed description and report from the architects (Acton Ostrey) is HERE.
Another University mandate for the project is to investigate the potential use of a hybrid mass wood and concrete structure and to assess the technical and financial viability for the project to demonstrate the applicability of wood in BC’s development and construction industries. The hybrid structure is proposed to be 17 storeys of mass wood combustible construction above 1 storey of noncombustible concrete construction at grade level, with two concrete exit stair and elevator cores serving all floor levels.
The challenge and objective for the Project Team is to determine if a project utilizing a hybrid mass wood and concrete structure can be constructed for a cost similar to that for a building using a typical concrete or steel structure. If determined to be viable, the project is to be a Living Laboratory in which UBC faculty and engineering and forestry professionals will collaborate with operations staff and industry partners on the design, development and construction of the project. UBC intends to monitor and evaluate the project to provide reference knowledge for possible changes to the 2020 Canadian National Building Code for mass wood structures.
Great initiative and positive change by UBC who in the past virtually banned any structural wood use or innovation. I believe an even taller wooden highrise is being planned in Norway.
How delightful that they even call it “combustible” and are going to put students in it – other people’s children, our youth and “our future” to experiment on. Kids who will be a bit stuck for alternative housing and will live there for lack of choice, held over a barrel by their desire for an education.
I hope in Norway they are at least putting such an experiment where consenting adults with alternatives will choose to live in the building of their own free will.
I lay it down to the Great Trek 1915.
Thanqu Acton Ostry Architects for laying it all out: your proposal for a new Brock Commons Student dormitory at UBC.
Yes, dormitory! Please indulge me: your presentation describes Brock Commons as hardly a unique place on campus. Indeed campus is still laid out as 1950’s sprawl. I’m sure, as I remember, UBC students would much prefer residences to dormitories, but my time there was long, long ago!
I refer to the Great Trek as being the greatest miss-judgment an immature over enthusiastic, collection of faculty, administration and students made in 1915 by romping off to Point Gray to stake out their new territorial claim of, I suppose, “virgin land”!
But then things were different in those heady, weren’t they. Real estate, then as now, was the only game in town after HRMac and his later Austrian buddies Bloch-Bower lumber barons came to town and wiped the forests clean.
But I digress!
Your student cubicles remind me of a poultry battery I designed in Abbotsford a long time ago. Surely UBC students deserve better than that!
You have been relegated to a site that is hardly the fairest of them all! To the North, a magnificent view, but blocked by the ubiquitous off-the-shelf towers and to the south the debilitating Sun that tinted glass gives no relief. Your tower is isolated and removed, across Walter Gage, from what should be its courtyard.
As you point out with file-pics of the BC Electric tower, among others, that towers are seldom unique although ubiquitous to a fault in this age of density over footprint!
I am not against appropriately sited towers: let it be understood! Towers on UBC campus, however, are not appropriate given UBC’s lackadaisical land planning.
With regard to the art of designing urban space, what the hell happened to the party wall?
May I suggest, now is the time for UBC to make a complete break from the developer/realtor profit motivated tower/cum/carriageway layout that has, and is, destroying so many urban environments, the consequences of which we bemoan but do nothing about: i.e. declare UBC campus a pedestrian/cycling only campus with limited access for emergency, commercial, public transit and pets.
Since UBC is my old alma mater I would be most pleased if I saw, before it is to late, some semblance of creative planning and building design practiced as art.
So thanqu, Messrs Acton Ostry, for exposing the chaos that is UBC campus. Not unlike the chaos to which it is appended!
PS Timber? I don’t get it.Trees, especially first growth, are are an endangered species!