Exterior rendering of office and residential levels of Proto-Model X, Sidewalk Labs? prototypical timber building.  | Michael Green Architecture and Gensler

A ?pure timber? proposal from Sidewalk Labs might make building homes cheaper and more climate-friendly One of the centerpiece ideas in Sidewalk Labs? plan to build a high-tech neighborhood in Toronto is for mass-produced, mass-timber towers to rise 12 stories above the former industrial waterfront. Now the project?s design team is claiming it can build an all-wood structure that?s 35 stories tall?double the height of any mass-timber building under construction today.
Mass timber is a major component of the Google-affiliated $1.3 billion vision for Sidewalk Toronto, a brand-new affordable, sustainable community that?s meant to test innovations that can be used in other cities. In addition to using the renewable, attractive, climate-friendly material in many of the structures in the 12-acre development, the proposal includes building a factory nearby to kick-start the manufacturing process. Since last year, a Sidewalk Labs team that includes well-known mass-timber architect Michael Green, the global architecture firm Gensler, and other engineers and consultants, has been working on how exactly those wooden buildings would manifest themselves in the Toronto development. The team has come up with a ?digital proof-of-concept? they call Proto-Model X, or PMX, which would triple the height of the buildings origin...