“I did them from a sketching,” said Wu, whose portfolio includes Vancouver projects such as the Fairmont Pacific Rim Hotel, the Shangri-La Hotel, and the Shaw Tower.

It was 2018 and Wu’s engineer and architect colleagues at Dialog Design architecture firm in Vancouver were asking how mass timber could be used in super-tall buildings in a way that is economical and sustainable enough for it to be more widely considered.

Building codes currently allow for mass timber to be used in structures that are up to 18 storeys high.

One approach to building taller mass-timber buildings would have been to stack 18-storey blocks on top of one another and connect support columns and beams. But Wu and others at Dialog took a different approach once they zeroed in on the fact that the cost of building materials for a whole project is concentrated in its flooring systems.

Later, teams in Dialog’s offices across Canada peer-reviewed Wu’s ideas, which led to the company forming a 50-50 joint venture partnership with EllisDon Construction in Ontario.

Together, they have developed and patented a hybrid timber floor system that combines the usual cross-laminated timber (or CLT panels) with steel and concrete. Wu says the system could potentially be used to construct a building of 105 storeys that has zero carbon footprint.

Starting last year, they have been testing smaller versions of these to see how they might fare in a fire or under certain weights.

The full-sized versions of what Wu envisioned are thinner and incorporate steel tendons so each can be much longer than mass-timber has allowed for in the past.

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