Photo courtesy of UBC

Billed as the most innovative high-performance building in North America, the Centre for Interactive Research on Sustainability (CIRS) at the University of British Columbia is expected to be the university's first LEED® Platinum building, and is on track to receive Living Building Challenge recognition. The building was envisioned as a new baseline in sustainable high-performance buildings, and incorporated regenerative design—an emerging alternative to current green design practices that seeks not merely to reduce harmful environmental impacts, but to actually improve both the natural environment and the lives of their human inhabitants. Mass timber played an important part in achieving these goals. CIRS features a simple structural design, comprised of a combination of glulam members, dimensional lumber, plywood, and a minimal amount of concrete. The moment frame structure was designed to create an open, column-free floor plate for flexibility of use and interior arrangements, and to allow for large openings in the walls that maximize daylight and views¹¹. The members' size and solidity make the structure non-combustible heavy timber construction under British Columbia Building Code—a designation that simplifies the building design.

In order to reinforce external charring in case of fire, designers sized all members slightly larger than required. A building-wide sprinkler system and on-site water supply and water pump were also incorporated to enable the heavy timber wood structure to meet the requirements for non-combustible construction required by code.

Designers opted to size the structure to support a live load of 100 pounds per square foot (4.7 kilonewtons/square meter), double the requirements of the British Columbia Building Code, to achieve an increased capacity that allows for additional equipment and future changes in use. Structural members were larger where larger loads required more support, notably in the auditorium where beams and columns were sized to handle both a long span over the seating and the load of the green roof. “From a structural point of view, the modern engineered materials...have increased the strength of wood so that they have a much greater structural capacity,” says Paul Fast, managing partner, Fast+Epp.