Building the home of the future
GTA’s progressive builders are turning challenges into new opportunities
“With an infill site in the GTA you are dealing with some high-end townhouses on such a small pieces of land, basically on the property line on three sides of the property.” JULIAN BATTISTON OBEN FLATS
Challenging situations tend to inspire ingenious solutions.
That could explain why the reputable homebuilding industry in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) continues to thrive despite the limits of a short build season and a premium on available land. All across the city we’re seeing chic infill dwellings pop up — notably stacked townhouse projects, even in the suburbs — for an urban population that’s expanding faster than any other in the developed world.
Here, ideas are being generated, shared and developed into innovations that will impact how we live for generations to come. And that makes it an exciting — and challenging — time to be an architect in the GTA.
“It’s a great place to be right now,” says Julian Battiston, president of Oben Flats, a boutique developer that prides itself on creating designdriven, livable spaces.
“There’s a lot of opportunity, a lot of potential and development going on,” he says, noting the spread of thriving neighbourhoods like Leslieville and St. Clair West, with idyllic walks and easy access to amenities such as parks and stores.
“Whether we like it or not, the condo boom has really brought in a lot of younger people to the city, and that’s shaped the city,” says Battiston.
“It’s becoming more difficult to find places to build, but there aren’t too many cities in the world right now that are as active or innovative as we are in this market.” Hidden progress Innovation isn’t always on view. Often most advances not only buck convention but also take place behind the scenes — or, more accurately, behind the walls: processes that go largely unseen by the public. Take roof trusses, for instance.
For years, trusses, the triangulated wood structures that carry the load of a home’s roof to the outside walls, were built on-site along with the rest of the house. For the last decade, however, at least 80 per cent of trusses have been built with optimal precision in factories, then shipped to the construction site and installed by crane, ensuring high quality and saving construction time and cost.
Arguably the most logical progression of this approach is to build the entire house off-site and assemble afterwards on site. And that’s been happening in various forms, particularly in Europe, for decades. But before you think “prefab” homes, which have long been available in Germany, Scandinavia and the U.S., not all factory-built housing is created equal.
In Canada there are about138 firms identified as CSA-certified builders of factory-constructed buildings and structures, according to the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation. The latest data shows 16,000 factory-built single-family homes were started in 2013, up about 15 per cent from the previous year. A variety of building systems — with varying degrees of completion in the factory prior to assembly on site — range widely in quality.
One type of factory-built construction known as panelization, in which timber floors and walls are factoryassembled, is being taken to a new level in the GTA. H+ME Technology, one of the panelization leaders in Canada, has spent 10 years developing innovative processes at their 200,000-sq.-ft. facility in Toronto and built more than 5,000 homes. For this firm, with highly sophisticated machinery from Sweden and a team that includes automotive-industry expertise, building a home the conventional way — on the site where it will stand — is akin to building a car on your driveway. That is, it doesn’t feel quite right.
“We’ve found that the most effective way to ensure quality of your home is to physically construct it in a controlled environment,” says Nick Zicaro, business development manager at H+ME Technology. “It’s not that conventionally built houses aren’t structurally sound, or that the workmanship is poor, but the performance of the homes’ finishes are greatly impacted by how the materials are exposed and handled on-site for long periods of time, and then fully assembled.”
What’s the potential impact? The elements, notably humidity, can change the integrity and properties of even the best wood. That’s when problems start. “When you lay nicely finished hardwood or ceramic tile floors and see these materials moving away from the wall at an angle, that simply shouldn’t occur in a brand new house,” says Zicaro.
For Marco VanderMaas, an architect with Quadrangle Architects Ltd., the advantages of a controlled environment go beyond material preservation. “Having the opportunity of the main structure to be built in a controlled environment impacts the framers in a positive way,” he says. “Because now they can spend a little bit more time without freezing their fingers off (in winter) or having to invest in complicated ways to keep the process going.” Precision pays What happens within the controlled environment of the factory? Using 3D Computer Animated Design (CAD) — specifically, software called Building Information Modeling (BIM) — designers explore spatial relationships, light analysis, geographic information and the quantities and properties of building components. There are millions of calculations required to design a complete home.
Those calculations are then sent to the highly automated machines on the factory floor.
“We’re sort of ‘extreme BIM’ because we need to know every nail location,” says Tony Tersigni, product design manager at H+ME Technology. “If our nail location is off by a millimetre, our machines will automatically stop until the location is addressed.”
And design goes deep. With 3D modelling, he says, moving a single piece of the puzzle can reveal how it’s going to affect everything else, and uncover a solution that would positively affect the rest of the building.
Oben Flat’s Battiston agrees: unwavering precision is crucial to home construction, particularly in this region. “With an infill site in the GTA you are dealing with some high-end townhouses on such small pieces of land, basically on the property line on three sides of the property,” he says. “There is no room for error, so accuracy and the thought process of how we’re going to frame the structure are very important. You don’t want to encounter issues once a frame is already up, as you might with conventional build.”
For Tad Putyra, founder of H+ME Technology, there is no better place than the GTA for innovation to grow. “The steady supply of skilled labour, a solid base of suppliers and a building code that raises the bar on a consistent basis have helped create homes that are sound and solid,” he says. “Historically, the quality of homes built here is high. And we are driven to take that to the next level.”
This challenge sits well with collaborating designers because they believe their efforts — and design integrity — remain in the project to its completion. “The panelization approach certainly resonates with certain architects familiar with the GTA,” says VanderMaas.
“I love these kind of projects because they’re more about finding patterns and figuring out ways to change. And as time and technology change, I think our design needs to change as well.”