Decoding Timber Towers: What a 44-Team, 7-Country Design Competition Tells Us About the Future of Mass Timber
- Aug 12
- 4 min read
Housing affordability and climate change aren't problems any single building can solve — but they're exactly the challenges Urbanarium set out to tackle with its latest design competition, Decoding Timber Towers. As mass timber suppliers and fabricators, we've been watching competitions like this closely. They're a window into where architects, engineers, and developers see this industry heading — and this year's results didn't disappoint.
A Competition Built for This Moment
Decoding Timber Towers is the fourth in a series of Urbanarium competitions (following Missing Middle, Mixing Middle, and Decoding Density) aimed at sparking dialogue around housing innovation, density, and the regulatory hurdles that stand in the way. This edition asked entrants to go a step further: design mass timber residential and mixed-use buildings in the 8- to 20+ storey range that could realistically replace concrete high-rises — without sacrificing comfort, sociability, or a genuine connection to the land the buildings sit on.
That's a tall order. Concrete has a century of institutional muscle memory behind it — codes, cost models, contractor familiarity. Mass timber has to earn its place building by building, and this competition pushed teams to think beyond a single elegant tower and toward systems-level thinking: how do you optimize BC timber, prefabrication, and modular construction so that low-carbon buildings can compete on cost and speed, not just on sustainability credentials?
By the Numbers
The response was significant:
44 teams from 7 countries
$50,000 in total prize money awarded to winners from Canada and the US
Prizes spanning First, Second, and Third overall, five Honourable Mentions, and a dedicated Digital Award for innovation in systemization and standardization
That last category is worth pausing on. Urbanarium didn't just want beautiful buildings — they wanted proposals that tackled supply chain efficiency, fabrication technology, and labor, the unglamorous infrastructure that determines whether an idea can actually scale.
The Winners
1st Place & Digital Prize Winner (tied) — Timber Commons (MT3), a Toronto-based team, took home top honors, a rare double win that signals their proposal wasn't just architecturally strong but also offered a genuinely scalable, systemized approach to delivery.
2nd Place — KAPLA (Team Softwood), a Canada-wide team, and 3rd Place & Digital Prize Winner (tied) — Culture House, from Vancouver, rounded out the podium — Culture House also earning recognition for its digital and systemization approach.
Five additional teams — spanning Burnaby, Vancouver, and even Brooklyn, New York — earned Honourable Mentions, a reminder that this challenge resonated well beyond BC's borders even though the sites and code framework were rooted in the Lower Mainland.
Timber Commons by MT3 - 1st Place & Digital Prize Winner (tied) KAPLA by Team Softwood - 2nd Place Culture House by 637427 - 3rd Place & Digital Prize Winner (tied) Fluvial Formwork by Adjacent Brick Rows - Honourable Mention TwoUp by DIALOG - Honourable Mention Timber Town by Studio Oh Song - Honourable Mention FAM-1 by Family and Friends - Honourable Mention AWR by RWA - Honourable Mention
Why the Jury's Makeup Matters
Urbanarium assembled a jury that mirrored the interdisciplinary nature of the problem itself: structural engineers from Arup and Fast + Epp, architects from Michael Green Architecture and LWPAC, planners from UBC and the City of New Westminster, a housing developer and CEO of the BC Indigenous Housing Society, and Indigenous community leadership from the DTES Community Land Trust. That's not a jury assembled to judge pretty renderings — it's a jury built to stress-test whether a proposal could actually get built, financed, and embraced by the community around it.
The Regulatory Reality Check
What stood out most in reviewing the competition's Q&A rounds wasn't the design ambition — it was how much of the conversation centered on the unglamorous realities that actually determine whether mass timber towers get built:
Cost normalization. Teams were pushed to show their work on cost-per-square-foot calculations, with professional cost estimators on hand during deliberation specifically to "check the math." Urbanarium was explicit that direct cost comparison between teams is a known challenge — which tells you a lot about where the industry still needs standardization.
Hybrid structures were explicitly welcomed. Entrants didn't need to build 100% mass timber structures to compete, reflecting the practical reality that most tall timber buildings today are hybrid systems.
Zoning and code were treated as a starting point, not a constraint. Entrants were encouraged to work with — or deliberately push against — existing guidelines, provided they could justify the rationale. That's a meaningful signal: the industry knows current code frameworks weren't written with 20-storey timber towers in mind, and forward movement will require design teams willing to make the case for change.
Why This Matters for Timber Suppliers and Fabricators
Competitions like Decoding Timber Towers aren't just academic exercises — they're a preview of the specification conversations we'll be having with architects and developers over the next five to ten years. A few takeaways stand out:
Systemization is the next competitive frontier. The Digital Award's focus on supply chain, fabrication, and labor efficiency underscores that the winning argument for mass timber won't just be embodied carbon — it'll be speed and cost predictability at scale.
Hybrid approaches are the near-term path, not a compromise. Suppliers who can speak fluently to hybrid mass timber/concrete or mass timber/steel assemblies will be well positioned as more towers move from competition boards to construction sites.
Tenure and affordability innovation are now part of the design conversation. The brief explicitly asked teams to consider legal mechanisms for ownership and financing alongside physical design — a sign that affordability isn't an add-on consideration anymore, it's baked into how these projects get evaluated from day one.
Looking Ahead
The winning entries will be showcased at the Woodrise Congress and featured in Urbanarium's upcoming publication, giving the broader industry — including glulam and mass timber producers like us — a detailed look at how these teams solved for cost, code, and carbon simultaneously. For anyone specifying or supplying mass timber for mid- and high-rise residential work, it's worth downloading the full submissions PDF and studying how these teams approached the systems-level challenges that stand between a great rendering and a buildable, financeable tower.
Interested in how our glulam and mass timber products fit into scalable, code-forward tall timber design? Get in touch with our team to talk through your next project.
Comments