Four storeys of office space at 80 Atlantic are built from glulam beams and columns, with nail-laminated timber floors. The building has a conventional concrete parking garage, ground floor and core.
PROJECT 80 Atlantic
ARCHITECT Quadrangle
TEXT Javier Zeller
PHOTOS Bob Gundu
Can a building material have moral weight" The way architects have associated morality with material over the past 100 years seems almost quaint in view of our current situation, where a human-caused planetary transformation is underway?much of it precipitated by the way we build.
It seems faintly ridiculous to tout the virtues of steel and rubber, like Hannes Meyer, or to bemoan falseness of surfaces, as Adolf Loos did. Our current imperative focuses on thinking about embodied carbon and energy use intensity. We are in a moral moment around materials again?but this time, the anxiety is less about capturing the Zeitgeist than avoiding Gotterdammerung. Wood will be the future for Canadian architecture and construction. It doesn?t take any boldness to make this proclamation. Like moving to a plant-based diet, wood construction?and particularly mass timber construction?has an apparently unassailable logic. Any leftover prejudices against wood as un-modern or poorly suited to contemporary programs has been demolished by designers across the world, led by the pioneering work of Canadian architects and engineers, such as Michael Green and Fast + Epp.
Their projects and advocacy for the use of mass timbe...