WARREN FREY — The “Innovative Solutions and Paths to Success: Shaping the Skyline with Mass Timber at the Woodrise 2025 conference held recently in Vancouver featured Urbem sales director Ana Belizario (left), Steven Ware, an architect at Paris-based design firm Artbuild (middle), and Waugh Thistleton Architects director Andrew Waugh (right).
A panel of international experts see a wood-based-future that departs from traditional building beyond use of materials.
Jarrett Hutchinson, the executive director of British Columbia’s Office of Mass Timber Implementation, moderated a panel titled Innovative Solutions and Paths to Success: Shaping the Skyline with Mass Timber at the Woodrise 2025 conference recently in Vancouver.
The panellists, Brazil-Based Urbem’s sales director Ana Belizario, Steven Ware, an architect at Paris-based design firm Artbuild, and Waugh Thistleton Architects director Andrew Waugh all detailed innovative wood design from an international perspective.
Belizario said termites were in a way an impetus for mass timber adoption in Brazil.
“Technical literature at the time was spare, mostly ‘keep your mass timber dry,’” she said. “Architects would then come to me with projects in sauna-like conditions, with constant rain and green roofs which are an obsession for Brazilian architects.”
She noted since the 1940s Brazil has used pressure treatments to protect wood from termites and when Urbem designed its own facility it decided to bring the pressure treatment in-house and apply it to mass timber construction.
“We didn’t invent anything new, it’s standard technology in Brazil. What we did was refine and bring it to the contemporary mass timber world,” Belizario said.
Ware said he sees timber as a way to “push things a little further,” and stressed the importance of recycling to the timber lifecycle.
He added office buildings are built in such a way that they last 20 to 30 years before a refit or demolition, “which is absolutely absurd.”
“Can we not look at timber and find beautiful ways to recycle it?” he asked.
Ware said Artbuild has worked on ways to bring curvatures to recycled cross-laminated timber (CLT) structures in order to give the material a “transformable quality.”
“Ultimately we’d like to see this integrated into bigger buildings and instead of simple curves we could have three-dimensional curvature,” he said. “As architects we hope buildings will be like the pyramids and last millennia but we should approach it knowing it will be recycled and repurposed.”
Waugh cited design’s obsession with tall buildings as part of the problem.
“Skyscrapers are emblematic of the culture that gave us climate change. The notion that the tallest buildings are somehow the best is something we have to confront,” Waugh said.
He added a more holistic approach is necessary with more thought put towards the larger purpose of building with wood.
“The social impact of our architecture has to be about innovation and research not just building timber building after timber building,” Waugh said.
“As a profession we got a little bit lost over the last few years, we aren’t confronting issues important to our age. So how do we confront climate change, how do the buildings we build reduce our industry’s contribution to climate change?
“It means using different materials and how we value architecture and the process of design,” Ware said.
All three panellists agreed an increased emphasis on biophilia, the human tendency to connect with nature, is a natural match with wood-based building.
“There’s an evidence-based aspect to biophilia and there’s so many different indices as to how your body reacts to the presence of wood which reminds you of nature,” Ware said.
“In Brazil governments connect the idea of biophilia with the dignity of the population and align it with public buildings like schools and hospitals,” Belizario added.
“From an architectural standpoint It’s more than just celebrating the form, it’s celebrating the people using that space,” Waugh said. “How will it allow them to feel happier and healthier, live richer and more wonderful lives? That’s a fabulous opportunity for architecture.”