An 18-storey timber tower could rise over Granville Island, Vancouver, after Arno Matis Architecture and Urbanism revealed plans for a 175-foot hotel to be built over land acquired by the city from the Canadian Pacific’s Arbutus railway corridor.
Taller than the University of British Columbia’s 174-foot Brock Commons Tallhouse student residence -which for a time was the world’s tallest mass timber building, the scheme calls for a hotel with 168 rooms, which Arno Matis Architecture and Urbanism said would become North America’s tallest built out of wood.
Speaking to Daily Hive, the firm said the design and details, which are subject to change, will help the city address a chronic shortage of room nights and include very preliminary conceptual artistic renderings depicting a slender building with an exoskeleton-patterned facade inspired by organic forms, active ground-level hotel spaces, and indoor and outdoor hotel amenities on a landscaped tower rooftop.
The new scheme comes after Canada’s third-largest province changed its construction code to allow British Columbia developers to build all-timber buildings up to 18 storeys – a 50% increase permitted under the old code.
The British Columbia Building and Fire Codes (BC Codes 2024), which came into effect in March last year, is part of a sweep of programs aimed at reducing embodied carbon and decarbonising construction – and comes as Canada, in 2023, became a signatory of the coalition of countries that will incentivise wooden construction to meet net-zero.
- To read more about the push to grow mass timber construction in Vancouver, click here for Wood Central’s special feature.
