Setting a new standard in Canada’s tallest mass timber structure, Soprema Insonomat system provided an ideal balance of sustainability, safety, and superior sound insulation.
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Setting a new standard in Canada’s tallest mass timber structure, Soprema Insonomat system provided an ideal balance of sustainability, safety, and superior sound insulation.
Discover the world of timber construction through a series of exclusive offsite tours during Woodrise. Explore Vancouver and beyond as you visit groundbreaking commercial, community, and residential projects that highlight the beauty, sustainability, and ingenuity of wood in modern architecture. Presented by CWC’s WoodWorks program.
Mass timber construction offers speed, sustainability, and design flexibility – but it also requires a higher level of coordination than traditional structural systems. Its prefabricated components and tight tolerances call for early planning, clear communication, and a shared understanding across the project team. Ensuring that all partners – including those less familiar with timber construction – are aligned on these unique requirements helps avoid costly delays and, more importantly, positions the team to fully capitalize on the benefits mass timber has to offer.
OTTAWA, ON, 23 APR 2025 – The Canadian Wood Council is accepting submissions for the 2025 Wood Design & Building Awards. Now in its 41st year, this annual program invites architects, designers, and project teams from across North America and around the world to submit their most inspiring wood projects for consideration.
“At its core, this program is a celebration of architectural excellence,” says Martin Richard, VP Market Development & Communications at the Canadian Wood Council. “Each year, we’re inspired by the many ways designers harness wood’s versatile beauty—from bold, expressive forms to quietly transformative spaces.”
Over the decades, we’ve seen the creativity and talent of hundreds of project teams bring important changes to the built environment—elevating wood from a niche material to a sustainable, mainstream design ambition. While the awards program has always shone a light on architectural excellence in wood, winning projects in recent years also frequently demonstrate innovation, technical achievement, and a strong commitment to sustainability.
Submissions will be reviewed by a distinguished jury of Canadian and American architects. Projects will be evaluated based on creativity, design excellence, and the innovative and appropriate use of wood to achieve project objectives.
Award categories for 2025 include:
The program also includes several specialty awards:
Winners will receive a custom wood trophy and be recognized through a media announcement, social media, a feature profile on the Wood Innovation Network, and editorial coverage in Wood Design & Building Magazine (digital edition).
Key Dates
Early Bird Deadline: May 31, 2025
Final Submission Deadline: June 27, 2025
For more information and to submit your project, please visit: https://cwc.ca/wood-design-and-building-awards/
OTTAWA, ON, 1 APR 2025 – The Canadian Wood Council (CWC) is pleased to announce the release of five new Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) for Canadian softwood lumber, oriented strand board (OSB), plywood, trusses, and prefabricated wood I-joists. These EPDs provide comprehensive, transparent environmental data on the potential impacts associated with the cradle-to-gate life cycle stages of these essential wood products.
Developed as regionalized, industry-wide business-to-business (B2B) Type III declarations, the EPDs comply with the highest international standards, including ISO 21930, ISO 14025, ISO 14040, ISO 14044, the governing product category rules, and ASTM General Program Instructions for Type III EPDs. This ensures credible, third-party verified environmental impact data, supporting designers, builders, and policymakers in making informed, sustainable material choices.
“The release of these new EPDs reinforces our commitment to transparency and sustainability in the wood products sector,” said Peter Moonen, National Sustainability Manager at the Canadian Wood Council. “By providing robust, science-based environmental information, we’re equipping the industry with the tools needed to demonstrate the environmental benefits of wood and support low-carbon construction.”
The EPDs are available for download from the Canadian Wood Council’s digital resource hub: www.cwc.ca
| EPD | Link |
| An Industry Average EPD for Canadian Pre-fabricated Wood I-Joists | View Resource |
| A Regionalized Industry Average EPD for Canadian Softwood Lumber | View Resource |
| A Regionalized Industry Average EPD for Canadian Oriented Strand Board | View Resource |
| An Industry Average EPD for Canadian Softwood Plywood | View Resource |
| A Regionalized Industry Average EPD for Canadian Wood Trusses | View Resource |
Stakeholders within the building design and construction community are increasingly being asked to include information in their decision-making processes that take into consideration potential environmental impacts. These stakeholders and interested parties expect unbiased product information that is consistent with current best practices and based on objective scientific analysis. In the future, building product purchasing decisions will likely require the type of environmental information provided by environmental product declarations (EPDs). In addition, green building rating systems, including LEED®, Green Globes™ and BREEAM®, recognize the value of EPDs for the assessment of potential environmental impacts of building products.
EPDs are concise, standardized, and third-party verified reports that describe the environmental performance of a product or a service. EPDs are able to identify and quantify the potential environmental impacts of a product or service throughout the various stages of its life cycle (resource extraction or harvest, processing, manufacturing, transportation, use, and end-of-life). EPDs, also known as Type III environmental product declarations, provide quantified environmental data using predetermined parameters that are based on internationally standardized approaches. EPDs for building products can help architects, designers, specifiers, and other purchasers better understand a product’s potential environmental impacts and sustainability attributes.
An EPD is a disclosure by a company or industry to make public the environmental data related to one or more of its products. EPDs are intended to help purchasers better understand a product’s environmental attributes in order for specifiers to make more informed decisions selecting products. The function of EPDs are somewhat analogous to nutrition labels on food packaging; their purpose is to clearly communicate, to the user, environmental data about products in a standardized format.
EPDs are information carriers that are intended to be a simple and user-friendly mechanism to disclose potential environmental impact information about a product within the marketplace. EPDs do not rank products or compare products to baselines or benchmarks. An EPD does not indicate whether or not certain environmental performance criteria have been met and does not address social and economic impacts of construction products.
Data reported in an EPD is collected using life cycle assessment (LCA), an internationally standardized scientific methodology. LCAs involve compiling an inventory of relevant energy and material inputs and environmental releases, and evaluating their potential impacts. It is also possible for EPDs to convey additional environmental information about a product that is outside the scope of LCA.
EPDs are primarily intended for business-to-business communication, although they can also be used for business-to-consumer communication. EPDs are developed based on the results of a life cycle assessment (LCA) study and must be compliant with the relevant product category rules (PCR), which are developed by a registered program operator. The PCR establishes the specific rules, requirements and guidelines for conducting an LCA and developing an EPD for one or more product categories.
The North American wood products industry has developed several industry wide EPDs, applicable to all the wood product manufacturers located across North America. These industry wide EPDs have obtained third-party verification from the Underwriters Laboratories Environment (ULE), an independent certification body. North American wood product EPDs provide industry average data for the following environmental metrics:
Industry wide EPDs for wood products are business-to-business EPDs, covering a cradle-to-gate scope; from raw material harvest until the finished product is ready to leave the manufacturing facility. Due to the multitude of uses for wood products, the potential environmental impacts related to the delivery of the product to the customer, the use of the product, and the eventual end-of-life processes are excluded from the analysis.
For further information, refer to the following resources:
Fire performances of CLT fire separations with closure (door) or service (pipe) penetrations will be discussed.
Beyond the introduction of a new, 18 storey limit, you will:
Conroy Lum
Research Leader – Advanced Building Systems
FPInnovations
Conroy is a structural engineer by training and oversees the work of the research groups on structural performance, durability, and sustainability in the Advanced Building Systems department of FPInnovations. His research contributions have been in the areas of developing methods for evaluating wood products and structural adhesives, and implementing such methods in standards to support product development and manufacturing.
Melissa will discuss the role of the specialty structural engineer in glulam connection design for your project. Tips will be provided to help streamline the work of the project architect and engineer of record, and also highlight specific detailing situations to help construction run more smoothly. Glulam fabrication will be discussed: from chisels to CNC machines. Some examples will be given to see what is possible during this timber connection renaissance, made possible by 3D fabrication models and CNC machines.
Melissa Kindratsky, P.Eng., LEED® AP BD+C
Structural Project Engineer
ISL Engineering and Land Services
Melissa Kindratsky, P.Eng., LEED® AP BD+C, is a structural project engineer for ISL Engineering and Land Services. With 400 people in 14 offices in western Canada, ISL established a Buildings Group in 2012 with the acquisition of Cascade Engineering Group, and Melissa joined the growing team in the Canmore office in 2015.
Melissa supports the successful delivery of building engineering to a range of clients, from independent homes owners to internationally renowned architects, timber framers, and mass timber fabricators. With over 15 years of experience in design engineering and construction, Melissa has experience in commercial, residential, and industrial developments of various shapes and sizes. Her material of choice is timber and she focuses most of her time on both concept and detailed design of timber structures. These range from modern developments to repairs of heritage structures and even playgrounds.
She passionately believes that to engineer a structure in wood, one must respect the unique properties of this natural material and even use them to enhance the design, both structurally and architecturally. Close attention is paid to the contribution of the structure to the sustainability features of a building project and these are even more easily achieved when the structure is timber.
Mass timber has garnered a lot of interest in Ontario in recent years and with the recent adoption of the encapsulated mass timber construction requirements into the Ontario Building Code, the path to approvals for these buildings has become less onerous. Building with mass timber has many benefits vs. conventional concrete or steel construction from sustainability to construction time to occupant health. However, cost is often a deterring factor, particularly for developers. There are many considerations that need to be made to make tall mass timber buildings a competitive option and we will share some with you in this presentation using the recently completed Tallwood 1 building in Langford, BC. Tallwood 1 is the first 12-story mass timber-steel hybrid building in Canada and located in one of the highest seismic zones in the country. In addition to sharing lessons learned from this project, we will also discuss how this building may be different if it were to be built in Ontario.
Mehrdad Jahangri, P.Eng., Dipl. Ing.(Germany)
Principal
ASPECT Structural Engineers
Mehrdad is a principal at ASPECT and has more than three decades of international experience on notable, architecturally oriented commercial, educational, recreational, and residential projects. He is internationally recognized for his innovative approach and consulting with North American and international architects. He has a sound knowledge of building physics and sustainable design concepts that allow him to actively engage in sustainable design challenges and decisions. Mehrdad understands the challenge of creating carefully detailed yet efficient structural designs and provides an unparalleled level of service to all his clients.
Eva Chau, P.Eng., M.Eng.
Associate
ASPECT Structural Engineers
Eva is an Associate at ASPECT and holds a Bachelor of Applied Science in Civil Engineering from the University of Toronto and a master’s degree in Structural and Earthquake Engineering from the University of British Columbia. Over the course of her career, she has worked on a wide range of residential, institutional, civic, and transit projects. Eva is proficient with all major building materials but has been strongly focused on mass timber building for the past 4 years. Eva is passionate about structural engineering and always strives to help clients realize their unique visions and achieve their project goals.
As society strives toward lower-carbon construction and increased operational efficiency of the built environment, we know that a building’s envelope significantly impacts a project’s overall environmental performance. This panel presentation offers attendees a glimpse into three different façade systems being employed in three important mass timber projects in Toronto.
Industrialized exterior wall system for the 1925 Victoria Park project in Toronto, Canada.
From local to global, global to local – the CREE building system is used locally in various markets and continents. 1925 Victoria Park is an example of how you can use this exterior wall system. Since 2010, the CREE building system is constantly evolving and adapting to different markets. Now it is reaching North America. This presentation will give you insights into the project developments, design processes, challenges, and details of the exterior wall of the 1925 Victoria Park project in Toronto, Canada.
Chris Ertsenian, Dip. Arch. Tech.
Associate
Moriyama & Teshima Architects
Case study presentation on the façade at Limberlost Place, Georg Brown College’s 10-storey, mass timber, net zero carbon emissions academic building on Toronto’s waterfront.
Chris Ertsenian, a long-standing MTA Associate and Senior Job Captain, facilitates competitive contractor bids, expedites construction, and minimizes change orders by ensuring that the firm’s contract documents optimize constructability and are clear, complete, and well-coordinated. He brings a breadth of experience on a wide range of project types and has been an integral member of the production and quality control team on many highly complex and exacting projects.
Chris is currently serving as Job Captain for Ontario’s first institutional mass timber building, Limberlost Place (formerly “The Arbour”) at George Brown College; managing the consultant team and monitoring construction progress. He is also the Senior Technologist on the University of Waterloo Faculty of Mathematics Academic Building.
Previously, Chris has worked with all of MTA’s partners to realize many major college and university buildings, including the Brian Mulroney Institute of Government at St. Francis Xavier University, Nova Scotia Community College’s Sydney Waterfront Campus, Toronto Metropolitan University’s Centre for Urban Innovation, and many more to name a few. He has also worked on several public and cultural projects, such as Place des Arts in the City of Greater Sudbury, the Government of Canada’s Visitor Welcome Centre Phase 1 on Parliament Hill, the City of Surrey (British Columbia) Civic Centre, as well as the Ismaili Centre and Aga Khan Museum in Toronto. With strong organizational skills and the ability to manage multiple complex projects at once, Chris’ impact on MTA’s portfolio is wide-ranging and highly influential.
He authored Moriyama & Teshima Architects’ CADD standards and user manual, as well as more recently authoring MTA’s Drawing Standards and assisting in BIM Standards which exemplify his organizational abilities, attention to detail and comprehensive knowledge of building technologies.
Kelsey Saunders, M.B.Sc., CPHD, LEED® AP BD+C.
Project Manager and Building Scientist
RDH Building Science Inc.
Case study presentation on the façade at the University of Toronto’s new 4-storey, 346-unit, mass timber student residence at Trinity College.
Kelsey Saunders is a Project Manager and Building Scientist at RDH Building Science and has been in the building science field for nearly 10 years. She holds a Bachelor of Architectural Science and a Master of Building Science degree from Ryerson University. She is a Certified Passive House Designer and a LEED AP in Building Design and Construction.
Kelsey’s work is focused on early-stage building enclosure consulting on new construction projects across North America with a particular specialty in low carbon buildings both in terms of operational and embodied carbon. She takes an enclosure-first approach to low carbon design and has worked on many Passive House, Net Zero Carbon, mass timber, and prefabricated panelized enclosure projects.
Kelsey has also been involved in numerous public and private research projects, including a current study of the embodied carbon impact of building enclosure systems in whole life carbon emissions to support early-stage decision making for low carbon design.
Tim Steffinger
Structural Consultant specialized in Engineering and System Design
CREE Buildings
Case study presentation on the façade at 1925 Victoria Park, an 11-storey, 154-unit mixed-use rental apartment building with ground floor commercial.
Tim Steffinger is a civil engineer from Germany specializing in Engineering and System Design. He studied at the University of Stuttgart and received his master’s degree in civil engineering with a focus on structural design. At CREE Buildings, he is our expert in exterior wall systems and is constantly improving the CREE System with his expertise and ever-expanding know-how through practical experience and exchange with the international network. As Structural Consultant at CREE, he supports our license partners in the realization of timber hybrid structures and coordinates CREE projects worldwide.
From local to global, global to local – the CREE building system is used locally in various markets and continents. 1925 Victoria Park is an example of how you can use this exterior wall system. Since 2010, the CREE building system is constantly evolving and adapting to different markets. Now it is reaching North America. This presentation will give you insights into the project developments, design processes, challenges, and details of the exterior wall of the 1925 Victoria Park project in Toronto, Canada.
In 2021, YW of Kitchener-Waterloo (YWKW) obtained funding from the federal Rapid Housing Initiative (RHI) to construct supportive housing for homeless women in the community. The 41 compact yet accessible 1-bedroom transitional housing units on a narrow parcel of surplus land were designed, constructed, and occupied within 1-year of contract award.
The optimized mass timber design resulted in time and cost savings during construction. These savings helped meet the financial constraints of project while maximizing the climate action response through mass timber’s reduced carbon footprint. Exposed mass timber elements also impart a sense of warmth and well-being rarely seen in austere supportive/affordable housing projects.
This presentation shares best practices and lessons learned from this first completed project in Kitchener along with several other similar projects in various stages of design and development.
Matt Bolen
Principal
EDGE Architects
Matt Bolen is a Principal at Edge Architects in Waterloo, On. In addition to providing professional consulting services, the firm has been involved in several innovative research/development initiatives.
Matt’s area of expertise is multi-res building design ranging from mid-rise supportive housing to high-rise market rate. His professional interests include mass timber, modular/ prefabrication, and high-performance design.
Matt is a licenced Architect with the OAA and a certified Passive House Designer. He is a graduate of the University of Waterloo School of Architecture program & has worked as an adjunct professor at the school since completing his master’s degree in 2009.
55 Franklin in Kitchener, Ontario, is a four-building complex of mid-rise residential buildings that the project team is using as an opportunity to explore new and different strategies for delivering quality affordable housing to our Region. Each of the four buildings will be designed as a prototype exploring different construction methodologies and solutions tested against their sustainability impacts. The first building constructed uses a combination of conventional wood framing and mass timber.
Mike Maxwell
President
Maxwell Building Consultants
Mike was drawn to Waterloo for his degree from Laurier University and has seen local real estate development potential ever since. A combination of zoning bylaw rules, site data chart statistics and construction knowledge produce unique results for projects that he is involved with. He loves the math and the problem solving. In an advisory position with local governments, not-for-profit organizations, and CMHC, Mike has created strong partnerships to move the cause of affordable housing forward.
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