Why mass timber feels good w/ Andre Lema

Jen Hancock: Wood is an ancestral material.

Modern humans have been building with it for over 10,000 years.

And before that? There’s evidence that Archaic Homo Sapiens built with it nearly 500,000 years ago.

Our longstanding relationship with wood exists deep in our biology. It contributes to the innate connection that human beings have to nature and living things.

This connection is called biophilia.

Biophilic design incorporates natural elements into the built environment. It can improve mood, decrease stress, increase productivity, and create spaces that people actually want to exist in.

Andre Lema:  It's scientifically proven that the biophilic action of wood  in our spaces makes us feel better.

Jen Hancock: This is Andre Lema.

Andre Lema: Hi, Andre Lema. I'm with Western Archrib and I do business development for them. They started in 1951,  by Cecil Fargey, his son joined quickly after, but, uh, yeah, real rich history. Seen a lot of change. Western's done a lot of work with codes and standards and that sort of stuff over the years. 

Jen Hancock: Their specialty is mass timber. It can be a great solution for capturing the biophilic effects of wood, without the drawbacks of using lumber.

Lumber is wood that has been milled and cut into uniform sizes. It’s great for things like framing and finishing. But it’s more susceptible to fire and has a lower structural capacity.

Mass timber is engineered wood. It’s stronger, extremely lightweight, and can be prefabricated, which can help accelerate construction timelines. It can be a low-carbon alternative to steel and concrete.

But what is mass timber, anyway?

Andre Lema:  You know, mass timber… sort of… it's not really distinctly defined because it's a bit of a new industry altogether. But where it's used is really the big distinction between lumber and mass timber. It has more capacity in its structural properties, as well as its fire-resisting capabilities. So, for example, with glulam, it starts for almost any size, a 45-minute fire resistance rating and up to two hours. They've tested it to higher than that, but that's as far as our built in code really goes.

Jen Hancock:  Glulam. It’s a type of mass timber made up of small pieces of wood bonded with adhesive.

Andre Lema: It's wood, pressed together with a waterproof adhesive  which creates a permanent bond between the wood and the glue and, in a nutshell, making small pieces of wood bigger.

Jen Hancock: Another type is cross-laminated timber, or CLT.

Andre Lema:  Similar process in as much as it presses wood with a waterproof adhesive, but it does it more like how plywood does it, where it crosses, so every lamination is perpendicular to the next one.

Jen Hancock: So, if somebody was out in a building where you could see wood, what would be the difference to recognize a piece of glulam versus maybe a CLT panel?

Andre Lema:  Yeah, so it would be in the application. So glulam is used for beams and columns, sometimes for decking as well, or for plates. And CLT is used almost exclusively for plates. 

Jen Hancock: Regardless of the finer manufacturing details, simply put: people like being around wood.

Maybe it’s our urge to play in the forest.

Or maybe, we can subconsciously sense that it’s good for us.

Because in addition to boosting our mood, it has significant carbon sequestration benefits, even after it’s cut down and used as a building material.

In fact, mass timber buildings are so good at it, they can store more carbon than soil and trees in mid-rise cities.

Western Archrib has been championing choosing local long before it became a movement.

Andre Lema:  Our favorite projects are always the ones we do close to home. We have great forests here. When we take a piece of wood, give it a value of one by the time we're done with manufacturing it and doing all our value adds everything included, it becomes a value of four or five.   So, as a province, as a country, as an industry, it's a really great way to optimize what we have as a resource that's growing every day.

Jen Hancock: I’m Jen Hancock and today on Building Good, we’re seeing the forest for the trees, and talking about the benefits of using one of nature’s only renewable building materials.

So, you have worked with Western Archrib for quite a few years, twenty-nine, somewhere in there?

Andre Lema: Twenty-nine, yeah.

Jen Hancock: What first inspired you to work with wood, to want to go work with Western Archrib, which is, you know, the primary focus of their work, and how did that translate into working specifically with mass timber?

Andre Lema: Okay, so the story I like to tell Jen, it's a long one, but I'll try and get to it as quick as I can. So my best friend needed a house. My best friend was my dog. I was about twelve years old.

Jen Hancock: Love it.

Andre Lema: So I built my dog a dog house, but my dad said, you can't use these power tools. You have to use hand tools. So I used the hand tools and I built the dog house. Actually, I still have it in my yard. It doesn't look that great anymore.

So that was my first foray into carpentry. Did an apprentice carpentry shift for a while. Then I went to NAIT and I got an engineering technology degree and then started working in the truss business. I did a lot of work with Chandos Construction when they were very young, so that's kind of funny. We did work with Western Archrib and then one day, uh, the manager there said, hey, come on over. Twenty-nine years ago.

Jen Hancock: And has the work that Western Archrib has done, has it changed significantly from inception to now, or has it sort of been the same style of work most of that time?

Andre Lema: Some market segments we are still into this day. We still do potash storage buildings. We've done schools for since… I think the first one we did was 1952 and still work on schools to this day.

So those have remained the same. What we didn't do in the day was multi-story residential or office buildings. And that's one of the market segments that's really grown in the last little while. And of course, rec centers have gone bigger. And we do a lot of those. What they were before compared to what they are now are quite different, but still the same market segment, if you will.

We were restricted at one point to[1] , I think it was depending on building type, but it was three or four stories vertically with the recent past four or five code changes. Now, we can go to eighteen stories without an alternate solution to the building code. The one that we're doing right now at the University of Toronto is fourteen stories.

At the time, it was an alternate solution. Today, it wouldn't be, but that's the tallest we've done to date. Some other alternate solutions, one in Milwaukee that was done, I believe it was twenty-five or twenty-eight stories, so…

Jen Hancock: Wow. You know, I've been in a number of buildings that have mass timber in them, so I've got some thoughts on this, but what are, from your perspective, what are the benefits of building with mass timber?

Andre Lema: I've yet to have anybody disagree with me on this, is they’re a beautiful building. We do some glulam for industrial purposes, but people want to see it. Even these big potash storage buildings that we do, once they get filled with potash, they look like the Titanic underwater, with all the dust hanging off them. But, before they're commissioned, they're fantastic buildings. So, I think that's probably one of the big benefits.

Leads to the second one. It's scientifically proven that the biophilic action of wood in our spaces makes us feel better. Tye Farrow's written a book on this about how it changes how fast people heal and recover from surgeries and cancer and stuff like that in hospitals.

That's why it's one of the reasons he always likes to put it in his hospitals. So that's fairly well understood and quantified. And then more recently, carbon sequestration, taking care of our low carbon building materials, wood, of course, is growing every day, so it's our only renewable building material out there for structure.

The other thing that's sort of happened in the last few years with technology as an industry, we're much more efficient on how we can design with our CNC technology and just from your side of it, too, on the design side, how that technology is really advanced. And that's changed a lot of how we can connect.

We're much more efficient on our connections. We use a lot less steel, use a lot of wood to wood connections that are again, beautiful, efficient, more importantly, and much easier to do when you're using high precision equipment.

Jen Hancock: I wanted to touch on, you talked about carbon sequestration. I know in the last couple of years, there's been a little bit more discussion, I mean, around the actual sustainability of wood as we harvest forests and there is carbon sequestered in the wood, but there's been a lot more forest fires. What about responsible harvesting of wood; growth of trees? We know we're going to need to reforest a number of areas due to mass forest fires. Any thoughts on how you sit, Western Archrib sits and your product sits in relation to some of the new sustainability discussion around carbon impacts?

Andre Lema: You know, we've spent a lot of time over the past hundred years suppressing forest fires. That in combination with our changing climate has sort of set us up for some real catastrophes, I'd say, there's really no other way to describe it. We definitely as a society need to get our heads around how we manage our forests and, you know, thinning and Jasper being a perfect example where they had the infestation and all that standing timber. It was going to burn at some point or something was going to happen. And it did, so we're probably not done with that situation yet.

A tree has a lifespan. It's like a crop of wheat. At the end of its lifespan, it dies and it falls to the ground and rots or it catches on fire. At some point in its life, it gets eaten by bugs. Maybe that knowledge piece… that people need to think of it more as a crop than as something that takes reforest, right? An 80 year cycle on a white spruce tree from seedling to full maturity is its timeframe.

Jen Hancock: That's interesting. I never thought about some trees more like a crop. Do you get most or all of your wood from Alberta? Where do you get most of your supply of trees from?

Andre Lema: We get our spruce pine from our owners, Northland Forest Products. They're in Fort McMurray. And the other forest that's harvested for glulam is in the interior of BC, so sort of think Kamloops to Radium, Invermere. And that's interior fir is what they call it.

Jen Hancock: The fact that it comes from Canada, we're right in in a time where there's threats of tariffs coming to Canada. So what's your take on having Canadian supply in a world where many industries are internationally connected with supply chains?

Andre Lema: I’ll tell you Jen, our favorite projects are always the ones we do close to home. Whoever listens to this that is further away, I'm sorry, but we have better interactions. They're easier to manage. We feel close to them and a lot of our workers will live in those communities. If we didn't have to export anything, we wouldn't. You know, industry doesn't work that way. We don't have that high of an acceptance of mass timber in Western Canada, so we have to go further in order to keep our factories going.

Jen Hancock: And from a Canadian standpoint, for sure, any project in Canada that's looking at using mass timber, the supply chain is a lot more contained. There should be less variation in pricing and any of that just because you've got access to local resources.

Andre Lema: Correct.

Jen Hancock: Yeah. If a building is being demolished or deconstructed, how many years, what's the lifespan on that anyways, from a building standpoint, and then what happens at the end of its life or what could happen?

Andre Lema: In December, I was at a conference in Austria called Holzbau, and that was very much the European conversation as well, as they talked a lot about deconstructibility, and they were touting the virtues of how mass timber is easily deconstructible.

You know, we get the call, Jen, after a building is deconstructed, we'll get a phone call and say, “Hey, I've got these glulams that I picked up from an auction, uh, someplace or another. What can I do with them?” So it is kind of funny. So they do get reused again. A lot of that though, does rely on good design at the outset so that it can be taken apart, cause sometimes it's just dangerous to do. One material is bonded to the other, it just doesn't come apart.

Jen Hancock: We'll be back with Andre Lema after this.

At Chandos, building is about more than concrete and steel, drywall and windows. It's how we build, and who we build with, that determines the legacy we leave behind. Our commitment to a more diverse and sustainable future is built into every aspect of our business. The people, the processes, the projects, and every community we're part of. Let's build better together. Find out more or join our team at chandos. com. That's c-h-a-n-d-o-s-dot-com. What are some of your favorite projects that you've worked on?

Do you have any that really stand out to you as amazing examples of use of glulam or CLT?

Andre Lema: We've done some just iconic recreation facilities with hcma out of Vancouver. Here in Edmonton is Meadows Rec Center. Grandview Aquatics comes, sorry, I'm giving you like 10 of my favorites.

Jen Hancock: No, that's fine, yeah.

Andre Lema: And my soon to be favorite is Toronto Academic Tower because it's so tall.

Jen Hancock: Why do you think rec centers in particular have gravitated to glulam?

Andre Lema: This is my theory: when an architect does a rec center, they know everybody's going to see it. Everybody comes and goes from it, so they want to make it look really good. And wood delivers on that every day. So I think that's part of the reason why we get first glance at it, at least in wood.

To that end, you know, we did a track and field stadium for the University of Oregon and how they get a lot of their funding is through a fellow named Phil Knight. He owns that little shoe company called Nike. His words were, “I want something that's going to look good for a long time. Looking good brings people into this stadium who want to do track and field at this university. And that's number one, what we want. So if it costs a little more, we're not worried about it.” So, yeah, I think when they do a rec center, they know people are going to see it. They want it to look good.

Jen Hancock: Yeah, and it's resilient and it's got a long lifespan and those facilities need to have resilience built in for sure. Speaking of resilience, now that mass timber can be used in taller buildings, there's parts of the world and parts of Canada where seismic concerns are an issue. How does wood perform in that space, especially as you start to get taller? Thoughts on where mass timber lands in that?

Andre Lema: It doesn't matter what the material, the building design is agnostic when it comes to that. It has to meet the same standards as everything else. So there's a lot of different methods we can use. We'll often incorporate a lot more steel.

Jen Hancock: Thinking about putting together a wood building, are there advantages? What are some of the benefits and or disadvantages to using mass timber as you're erecting a structure?

Andre Lema: A couple of significant ones. All the components come prefab to the site. So with that, a couple of things happen, is when it goes up fast because everything theoretically fits together like a glove. The other thing that we've heard in some of these tighter sites is that the sites are very quiet. If it's in a downtown area, they've found that they get way less complaints about noise, which, you know, if you're on the site for a long time, that means a lot to people that are living in the area.

Jen Hancock: Interesting. And do you think productivity can then potentially go up on a job site, in theory?

Andre Lema: Yeah, it goes together much quicker so then you can start working on your lower floors as you're still going up with the building. The one thing that wood is different, it does need protection as you're going up because it's exposed to the elements for a longer period of time than maybe what it normally would. The example I'm thinking of the fourteenth story for Toronto Academic Tower, they made some provisions on some of the higher exposed wood to cover it with plastic wrap to sort of preserve it

Jen Hancock: When you put a building together, how do you ship it out? Do you ship all the pieces at once? Do they need to be protected when they get on the job site? Or do you do it in bits and pieces as the building's going up?

Andre Lema: Yeah, so actually both. And we've seen this on more job sites as we get into taller structures and as our cities are densified and they're, you know, rebuilding in a core, very limited site access. So even when we send it to the site, it has to be on the truck in the order that it goes off the crane. University of Toronto’s a great example of this. Every piece that we put on. The first piece you're going to install, of course, the last piece we load, so it's the top of the truck, goes and it's site installed as they're going up. So each piece is being put in place by the tower crane as it's coming off the truck. So they're not exposed on the truck for very long. They do come usually factory-wrapped as well as factory-sealed, both for protection.

Jen Hancock: And would you say most of your stuff is shipped then truck, rail, how do you do, does it depend on?

Andre Lema: It's a hundred percent truck. It would be great to send it by rail cause it's less expensive, but reliability is not even close.

Jen Hancock: As you calculate. sort of the carbon footprint of your pieces of wood, I assume you would think a little bit about that transportation piece.

Andre Lema: In terms of cost and how much carbon is actually used transporting, it's relatively low. And I guess as the mass timber industry grows, we will be transporting less. We'll have more regional projects and transporting them less. That'd be ideal.

Jen Hancock: Are there any interesting changes coming to your industry that you see, or is it still kind of business as usual? Any evolution of the product at all?

Andre Lema: There's lots of going on across Canada. They did a coalition with the universities and they're doing a lot of research right now. A lot of it's centered actually out of the University of Alberta here in Edmonton through Dr. Chui. They're looking at different underutilized species and that sort of thing that they might not have used in the past that we can make glulam out of our mass timber. So we're kind of investigating a number of different tracks. Our engineering services across the board are getting better every day. The engineers that we have on staff are learning a lot. Other engineers that do that sort of work are getting better and better as well. So they're learning a lot more all the time.

Jen Hancock: From a sustainability standpoint, is there anything that you're working on in the manufacturing space that is changing up the productivity on-site or maybe just the general sustainability measures that you're taking on in your site?

Andre Lema: Yeah, we're building a new nearly two hundred thousand square foot factory north of Edmonton. From what we can do now in our facility, it will triple what we're able to manufacture, as well as be way more efficient on all aspects from heating the building to reducing our waste of the material that we're manufacturing with, as well as our ability to CNC manufacture the manufactured pieces. So kind of all aspects. Yeah, it's a huge investment for Northland Forest Products, our owner.

Jen Hancock: One of the projects that I'm familiar with, they actually took some of the cutoffs from the glulam and used them for furniture. Have you seen that on other projects where you're able to use some of those cutoff pieces and waste pieces and really give them new life in some way?

Andre Lema: I know the project you're thinking of where some of the furniture even matches the building. I think it's kind of a neat, uh, I'm not an interior designer. I'm not going to go there, but it is kind of fun to see that. And they did a good job on that one too. One of the best.

Jen Hancock: Is there anything else that I haven't asked you that you'd like to talk about?

Andre Lema: Well, I'm glad you covered the new manufacturing facility because that is very exciting for us. It's a nearly one hundred million dollar investment. So we're very excited about that. And honestly, we hope it inspires more competitors to come to Alberta and do the same because it can be lonely sometimes.

Jen Hancock: Yeah, there's not many of you in Canada, actually, there's a limited number of companies who do what you do.

Andre Lema: Yeah. The growths have definitely been more in eastern Canada. But honestly, Jen, we have great forests here. And when we take a piece of wood, give it a value of one, by the time we're done with manufacturing it, and doing all our value-adds, everything included, it becomes a value of four or five. So as a province, as a country, as an industry, it's a really great way to optimize what we have as a resource that's growing every day.

Jen Hancock: Yes. And especially if it's part of like, a healthy forest management system as well, right? Is there a specific standard that you have to abide by or that you shoot for from a forest management standpoint?

Andre Lema: I'm not an expert on that, but I do know, and this is province wide, this is not just Northland, but Alberta has a really robust, uh, reforestation plan and program. They base their knowledge on a two hundred year cycle. So it's almost three cycles of harvesting and planting trees. And I know some people would say, “Well, we haven't even gone through one.” Yes, we have actually, for a good part of the province. We have that knowledge and that planning piece is well established in Alberta and arguably Canada, much more so than many other countries and probably one of the best of any country that does forest harvesting. It's just, I think we think of always a forest in terms of our lifespan, right? Well, you cut down a tree now, I gotta wait 80 years. Which, you know in the big scheme of things, our life is not that long, but for a forest, it's yeah… that's pretty normal!

Jen Hancock: That was Andre Lema, the Manager of Business Development at Western Archrib.

Thanks for listening to Building Good. If you want to keep hearing conversations about the future of architecture, engineering and construction stay subscribed on any podcast app.

Building Good is a Vocal Fry Studios production in partnership with Bird Construction and Chandos Construction.

The producers are Jay Cockburn, Katie Jensen, and Sabrina Brathwaite, with production assistance from Jessica Loughlin and Joanne Hignett.

I’m Jen Hancock. Thanks for listening