Urbanarium launches Decoding Timber Towers competition

Urbanarium has launched Decoding Timber Towers, a global ideas competition which aims to have real-world impact.

This marks the Vancouver organization’s fourth installment in its affordable housing competition series, which addresses the impact of climate change on housing and offers winners international portfolio recognition and cash prizes totalling $50,000.

This year’s competition is asking participants to consider residential and mixed use design solutions that use mass timber and to design creative solutions to some of the challenges facing mass timber construction today. These include unfamiliarity with the resource, steep upfront costs, the requirement for specialized consultants, insurance coverage, and the design issue of creating all-wood balconies.

“Urbanarium has always been a platform that fosters discourse around the urgent issues we face in housing, community building, and urban planning,” says Amy Nugent, executive director of Urbanarium. “As Canada faces US tariffs on steel, Decoding Timber Towers looks for innovative solutions with BC timber that will shape the future of low carbon construction, and stimulate the domestic construction market with design ideas that also maintain a high standard of comfort, livability and connection to land.”

Registrants will be assigned hypothetical sites based on a fictionalized Transit-Oriented Area (TOA), or an area within close proximity to rapid-transit such as SkyTrain stations and bus exchanges. Four individual sites have been distributed across the fictional TOA based on typical BC conditions, and have been formed with the input of First Nations and Indigenous housing developers.

There is one mass timber high rise in Vancouver, Brock Commons, which is known as the “Tallwood House” at the University of British Columbia. Other projects in development or under construction include the 25-storey residential structure at Main and 5th Street to be completed in 2027 and the Main and Cordova rental building to be completed in 2026.

The winners of the competition will have their proposals showcased in a publication, on various websites, in the “About Here” series by Uytae Lee and in the upcoming international conference, Woodrise 2025 in Vancouver from September 22 to 25, 2025. The biannual congress is hosted by three nations: Japan, France, and Canada, and focuses on mid- and high-rise timber construction. Urbanarium will host an exhibition and stage presentation on the competition results, and share the winning designs with more than 2,000 industry professionals in attendance from more than 25 countries.

This is in addition to the cash prizes which will be $15,000 for first place, $10,000 for second place, $5,000 for third place, and $2,000 each for five honourable mentions.

New this year is the $10,000 Digital Award, presented for innovative use of digital technologies and processes in the team’s approach to repeatability, funded by DIGITAL’s Housing Growth Innovation Program.

Registration is open until May 2, 2025, and submissions will be due August 25. Winners will be announced at an awards event on September 15.

To learn more about Decoding Timber Towers and to register, click here.

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