Urbanarium‘s Decoding Timber Towers competition marks the Vancouver organization’s fourth instalment in its affordable housing competition series, which addresses the impact of climate change on housing and offers winners with international portfolio recognition and cash prizes totalling $50,000.

This year’s competition asks participants to consider residential and mixed use design solutions that use mass timber — an engineered wood product that is sustainable and low-carbon, but considered an expensive alternative to concrete and steel as the forestry industry catches up to demand. In recent years, mass timber construction has grown in popularity around the world, from France to Sweden.

Decoding Timber Towers asks participants to design creative solutions to some of the challenges facing mass timber construction today: unfamiliarity with the resource, steep upfront costs, the requirement for specialized consultants, insurance coverage, and the design issue of creating all-wood balconies that have a high potential for trapped moisture and rot. The benefits of mass timber construction are manifold: In addition to being a high-quality and environmentally friendly resource, it is well-suited for pre-fabrication, which means more efficient construction.

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 in order to increase the applicability and repeatability of proposal ideas.

Awards

The winners of Decoding Timber Towers will have their proposals showcased in a publication, on various websites, in the popular About Here series by Uytae Lee and in the upcoming international conference, Woodrise 2025 in Vancouver from Sept. 22–25. 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, sharing 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: $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.