Resilient and beautiful: wood is winning hearts

Commercial and industrial buildings are incorporating more wood into their construction. Along with the strength needed to last in heavy duty applications, wood has its own unique advantages.

Wood’s warmth makes it perfect for adding a cozy feeling to retail and office spaces, and the speed and efficiency that prefabrication offers is perfect for manufacturing buildings with a repeatable floorplan. Modern mass timber buildings arrive at the construction site in components prefabricated off-site in a climate-controlled environment to be easily installed when they get to their destination.

Wood was a natural choice for the construction of StructureCraft’s facility in Abbotsford, BC, which was built from a simple kit of parts composed of glue-laminated timber columns and beams, tall wood walls, and wood roof panels.

“It gives you a warmth you just can’t get with steel and concrete. In a workplace it feels at home, in an office you can pin things into it, it curves easily, it’s inherently natural, it’s a familiar material to us.”

– Gerald Epp, president of StructureCraft and former partner of structural engineering firm, Fast + Epp.

The company’s facility was erected in just five days. In the past, industrial types of buildings have been built with tilt-up concrete walls and steel roofs; however, StructureCraft designed theirs with wood, which cost around the same as a tilt-up building, only with increased energy efficiency and more appealing aesthetics.

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