Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 1154

Over the past few years there’s been growing interest in using mass timber for high-rise buildings (now colloquially referred to as “plyscrapers”).

One project that got a lot of attention last year is Brock Commons (student residence) at the University of British Columbia. It is an 18-storey hybrid mass timber tower.

The first and second floor (slab) and the two cores are poured-in-place concrete. After that, the other 16 floors of the tower consist of 5-ply cross laminated timber (CLT) panels and glue laminated timber (glulam) columns running every 10 feet . The roof is steel and metal decking.

Below is a great time lapse video of the building under construction once it had switched over to timber. The wood construction portion started on June 6, 2016 and finished on August 10, 2016. So 2 floors per week.

The video is well-annotated so that you know what week of construction it is, how many wood installers are on-site, which structural members are going in (along with their dimensions), and so on. The CLT panels are only 169mm thick.

Click here if you can’t see the video below.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHtdnY_gnmE?rel=0&w=560&h=315]

Andrew Chen recently delivered a keynote at StartCon in Australia called: What’s Next in Growth? You can find his entire talk, here , on his blog. 

One of the themes of his talk is that, “technology changes, but people stay the same.” I like that. See above.

But more specifically, his presentation focuses on 3 techniques for growing businesses and products: customer referrals, viral content, and bootstrapping marketplaces. All of it is interesting, but I’m particularly fascinated by the last one.

Marketplaces are all around us. Uber is a marketplace that pairs drivers and riders. Bars are a marketplace that try to pair people together. Finding, trading, and transacting (whatever that might mean for the marketplace in question) seems so fundamental to humans. And cities really empower that.

The challenge with marketplaces is that they’re hard to start. There’s always a chicken-and-egg problem and so one side of the marketplace usually needs to be “hacked” at the beginning.

Uber is a perfect example of this. At the outset, it didn’t have enough liquidity in its marketplace to compete with incumbent taxis. That is, it took longer to get an Uber than to get a taxi. 

So instead, the value proposition was not about speed (or cheapness); it was about luxury. Uber was “everyone’s private driver.” That made waiting acceptable. You were getting a different level of service. The first Uber I ever called in Toronto took 20 minutes to get to my place in midtown.

But obviously as liquidity increased, Uber was able to move downmarket and capture more (most) of the taxi market. Marketplaces are powerful once they get going. Network effects.

I say all of this because, as many of you know, I have spent a lot of time wondering about the future of  real estate marketplaces . 

At the same time, I also think that many of these seemingly tech-focused lessons could be applied to cities. Starting an online marketplace is difficult. So is building a new neighborhood from scratch. In the end, it’s always about people.

This morning while I was having a bowl of cereal and fruit, I came across this floor plan from 75 Portland Street, Toronto by CORE Architects :

It’s a 2-storey unit with a den and double height living room on the main floor and 1 bedroom and 1 media lounge (that could act like a 2nd bedroom, but doesn’t have a window so it can’t be called that) on the second floor.

This floor plan is a perfect example of what I was getting at with my post: The long and narrow of property affordability . 

Rough rough, the overall dimensions look to be about 4.3m wide x 12m deep. It’s a fairly deep plan, which means you have to be careful how much “frontage” you give it. If the apartment gets too wide, then it could quickly become too big and potentially unaffordable.

With the above dimensions, and if you didn’t go 2 storeys, you’d be forced to do an inset/recessed bedroom. The living room would get all of the windows. And if you made the apartment wider to accommodate that main floor bedroom, then you’d likely end up doing an inset/recessed 2nd bedroom, anyways, because of how big the unit had become. So there are trade-offs to consider.

I’ve seen this layout first hand and I like it a lot. I think it’s an elegant solution to the challenge of deep floor plates. 

But what do you think? It may not suit everyone’s needs, so I would be really curious to hear your thoughts in the comment section below or on Twitter .