Architects and developers can now test hybrid mass timber systems within minutes rather than weeks of consultant coordination, a shift its backers say is critical to moving engineered wood into mainstream mid-rise housing. That is according to Ricardo Brites, director of engineering and VDC at Mercer Mass Timber, one of North America’s largest mass timber producers, who has built his career on making timber buildings cheap enough to compete with concrete and steel.
BuildSpec, a free digital platform developed by Mercer with ZGF Architects and Fast + Epp, generates real-time structural and carbon-impact data for mid-rise housing projects. Brites told the Vancouver Sun it lets teams compare hybrid systems at the earliest massing stage, work that until now took weeks of consultant coordination to complete.
The barrier BuildSpec aims to remove, Brites says, is timing: project teams rarely have enough information to weigh a timber system before a design has already hardened around conventional concrete and steel. By the time cost estimates and engineering assessments are in hand, many projects are locked into assumptions that leave little room for an engineered wood alternative.
For Brites, the structural case for mass timber is settled, and the open question is now price, the measure he says will decide whether engineered wood becomes a mainstream housing material.
What drives me is cost competitiveness, he said.
Engineered products such as cross-laminated timber, or CLT, are made by layering wood panels into components strong enough for multi-storey buildings, increasingly built alongside steel or concrete, where each material performs best.
Brites is candid that the strongest projects rarely rely on timber alone, with each material used for what it does best rather than treated as an all-or-nothing structural choice. That thinking has pushed Mercer toward hybrid systems, which draw on timber’s speed and warmth while leaning on the proven economics of steel and concrete.
Beyond the calm of exposed-wood interiors, Brites points to prefabrication as engineered timber’s decisive advantage, with structural components manufactured off-site through precise digital modelling and delivered ready for installation. That moves problem-solving away from the building site, resolving co-ordination issues digitally before fabrication begins and cutting both construction timelines and costly on-site surprises.
The City of Vancouver estimates that mass timber can cut a building’s embodied carbon by 25 to 45 per cent compared to conventional concrete and steel, one of the metrics BuildSpec is built to surface while a project is still on the drawing board. That carbon performance has become central to the material’s appeal in jurisdictions tightening emissions rules for new construction.
Canada, and British Columbia in particular, has become one of North America’s most active mass timber markets, a result Brites attributes to acute housing pressure and supportive policy, backed by expanding manufacturing capacity. Demonstration projects such as the University of British Columbia’s Brock Commons Tallwood House helped establish early confidence in tall timber construction, whilst newer policies are encouraging more standardised mid-rise development.
Brites sees North America moving through a stage Europe passed years earlier, having worked in the United Kingdom on projects for Lendlease, Mace and Berkeley Homes as mass timber shifted there from a niche product toward a near-commodity. The current phase, he says, is a transition from early demonstration projects toward broader market adoption.
Brites argues the housing shortage will not be solved by better-designed individual buildings, but by repeatable delivery systems that produce good housing predictably and at a workable cost, a benchmark for the construction sector now expected to help deliver the 430,000 to 480,000 new homes a year that the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation says the country needs by 2035.
