How would Gehry do it? What we forget when we talk about “Tall Timber”
Frank Gehry embraced the messiness of humanity and spoke of architecture as a statement about people. Amidst a mass-timber arms race, we should focus on building community, not performance metrics.
We are in a mass-timber arms race. If we’re not careful, we reduce our architecture—and every other timber project—to a structural stunt plus a carbon statistic. Most architects are stuck in this dilemma, fixated on statistics and performance-related acronyms and equations while forgetting to tell the story of a building’s true purpose: the people. We need to ask ourselves, “How would Gehry do it?”
It took me a long time to read through the many obituaries for Frank Gehry, who passed away on December 5th. There was one passage written by Nicolai Ouroussoff which stood out for me:
[Gehry’s] emotional ferocity could feel empowering, as if architecture had rediscovered a part of itself that had been lost after decades of dreary functionalism and postmodernist clichés. And the widespread focus on his buildings’ dazzling exteriors could distract from Mr. Gehry’s deeper goals: to create an architecture that was not just affecting but democratic in spirit and evocative of the messiness of human life.
The messiness! The humanity. Buildings are about us. Or at least, they should be.
As 2025 winds down, I keep noticing the same pattern in client conversations, pitch decks, and awards submissions: architects are pouring enormous energy into the technical half of their projects, and barely touching the other 50%—the people and communities we’re ostensibly designing for.
I don’t mean that performance doesn’t matter. It does. Embodied carbon, operational energy, low-carbon materials, airtightness, mass timber, Passive House—it’s all critical if we’re serious about climate. But somewhere along the way, the numbers and buzzwords started to eclipse the lives being lived in and around these buildings. Metrics mean something but speak to an economist, or a technocrat. We’re getting very good at describing what a building is made of, and strangely quiet about what a building actually does for its city, its neighbourhood, its users.
The grocery list
You know the script: a mass timber structure with a high-performance envelope. LEED Gold or Platinum? Depends on whether we want to spend the money on certification. It’s Passive House-ready (a technicality). We also have low-embodied-carbon concrete and net-zero operational energy.
These lists show up everywhere. We find them in RFP responses, slide decks, press releases, and LinkedIn posts. They’re reassuring. They signal competence, responsibility, and attunement with the climate agenda. They’re also easy to copy and paste. Generic.
The problem is that this “grocery list” approach does almost nothing to explain why the project matters to anyone outside the project team. For clients, it becomes a checklist: “Do we have the right acronyms? Are we hitting the right targets?” For architects, it becomes a defensive tactic: “Look at our numbers. We’re doing the right thing. Approve this.”
What’s missing is the people and who gets to use the building. Who doesn’t get to use it? How does your project change daily life on the street, not just the skyline? Or what about this: does it feel welcoming to a 7-year-old, a newcomer, a worker on the night shift?
If we don’t celebrate how a project supports community, not just compliance and technical compliance, we’ve blurred out the messy, relational reality of the place.
Frank Gehry is already rolling in his grave.
The Total Energy Use Intensity (TEUI) of a building is difficult to visualize. (And it is maybe 42.5% more exciting than visualizing a BTU, for that matter) Describing one TEUI unit (i.e., one kilowatt hour/m²/yr is the equivalent of a toaster running for 1 hour a year for every square metre of your building) is neither sexy nor important, unless you want to impress somebody with a spreadsheet. It fulfills a client requirement, but doesn’t make for an exciting headline. While some design awards require it in the submission package, it represents only a fraction of the building’s overall value, especially to the users.
The timber arms race
Mass timber is the current lightning rod for this tendency. We’re in a kind of arms race to proclaim the latest: “Tall timber” building, “Innovative mass timber” prototype, “First-of-its-kind” timber church/mixed-use/academic tower/grocery store, or LEED Gold Passive House timber-whatever. There’s always a qualifier: “tallest,” “first,” “most advanced,” “net-zero,” “all-Canadian wood.” Everyone wants their project to be the benchmark.
Take Limberlost Place at George Brown College on Toronto’s waterfront. Designed by Moriyama and Teshima Architects with Acton Ostry Architects, it’s genuinely a benchmark: a 10-storey mass-timber academic building, designed as a low-carbon, net-zero structure, that helped unlock code changes in Ontario and symbolically kicked open the door for taller mass timber across the province. As much as it is all of that, we as a profession are most guilty of talking about its performance rather than the beautiful messiness it holds. What makes Limberlost interesting isn’t just that it’s a “tall wood” building; it’s that it’s a public, educational, civic building that puts students, educators, and community life at the center. It houses the School of Architectural Studies, childcare, Indigenous space, fitness, shared learning landscapes; it’s meant to be inhabited and loved, not just measured and photographed.
If we’re not careful, we reduce it—and every other timber project—to a structural stunt plus a carbon statistic. In truth, some architects are just plain jealous; they didn’t build a Limberlost. Or, when you hear of an architect claiming to have designed the first tall timber net-positive Protestant Church in Manitoba that is Passive House-ready, prefabricated envelope (east facade only) with 54% of materials locally sourced? We’re in arms-race territory.
We’ve been here before (remember LEED?)
If you’ve been practicing long enough, this should feel familiar. There was a period when LEED plaques became the dominant measure of virtue. Clients asked: “How many points?” “Can we get Gold?” “Can we do Platinum if we add bike racks and a green roof?”
The underlying intentions weren’t wrong—LEED raised the bar on a lot of bad habits. But we also watched buildings chase credits that had little to do with the real needs of their users or neighbours. The plaque on the wall often meant more than the experience at the front door. Now the same dynamic is playing out with mass timber, embodied carbon, operational energy targets,
Again: these metrics matter. They’re non-negotiable in a climate emergency. But as soon as they become the only story, we’re back to building for the resume, not for the people living, learning, or recuperating in a hospital bed.
The other 50%: people and community
Here’s the part clients often underestimate, and architects sometimes undersell. Half of the real work of a project lives outside the technical specifications, answering questions like. Who is this building for? What kinds of everyday rituals—arrival, waiting, learning, grieving, celebrating—will it host? How does it change the street? Does it make room for those who are usually pushed to the margins (care workers, low-wage staff, elders, kids, newcomers)? How does it strengthen the local economy for small businesses, cultural organizations, and informal networks? What does it signal to the community about who is welcome and whose stories matter?
A technically flawless, low-carbon building that feels cold, exclusive, or hostile to everyday life has failed, no matter how many EPDs, LCAs, or TGS Tier 4 checkboxes you can attach to it.
Architects need to stop hiding behind the list
Architects are partly complicit in this imbalance. We’ve learned that leading with technical features can: de-risk approval processes, impress juries and committees, and fit neatly into municipal policy frameworks.
But when we default to a string of performance metrics and technical adjectives, we reduce our own role to being providers of upgraded specs. We let the work be framed as a commodity: “this many tonnes of carbon saved,” “this many storeys of mass timber,” “this certification level.” We’re capable of more than that.
Our unique contribution isn’t just knowing which product or structural system to specify; it’s the ability to connect material choices to human outcomes—to articulate how mass timber, or a passive ventilation strategy, or a carefully calibrated façade actually changes lived experience and supports community life.
This is the story that endures.
A different kind of brief for 2026
So as we move into another year of “world’s tallest timber,” “first-of-its-kind,” “net-zero flagship” announcements, I’d love to see both clients and architects ask a different set of questions at the start of every project:
Who will be most affected by this building, and how do we hear from them early and often?
What forms of belonging, care, or public life will this project make possible that weren’t possible before?
How do our technical decisions (mass timber, low-carbon materials, ventilation, daylight) directly support those human goals—not just the spreadsheet?
What will this project feel like in 20 years, when the novelty of the structure and the certifications has worn off? Will people still love it enough to fight for it?
If we can hold those questions alongside the carbon counts and engineering models, we might finally get the balance right.
By all means, keep designing ambitious tall timber buildings. Celebrate the innovations. Cite the numbers. Just don’t let the structural diagram and the sustainability checklist become the whole story.
Because the other 50%—the people who will live, learn, work, pray, play, recover, and protest in and around these buildings—is where the real legacy of our work will be decided. I think that’s part of the messiness Frank Gehry fought hard to achieve. And that should be part of the effort that should drive us to produce better architects.
In the News…
Chodikoff & Ideas empowers architects, developers, and civic leaders. I help clients position themselves as thought leaders who shape more resilient, equitable, and sustainable communities. Connect with me if you want to improve your relevance in today’s market and learn how to cultivate leadership within your organization to stay competitive in our current economic and political reality.
Bring Canada’s pension funds back home to build our own economy (Policy Options) When it comes to running pension plans, Canada punches well above its weight. As of the end of 2024, Canadian funds were managing an estimated $4.5-trillion (US$3.267-trillion) in pension assets. This places Canada third globally in assets under management, trailing only Japan by less than $35 billion. Canada ranks second globally for pension fund assets relative to GDP, behind only Switzerland. Ottawa should introduce targeted incentives that bring more of this investment power back home. If Ottawa were to incentivize pension funds to double their investments here at home — across real estate, public equities, private equity, credit and infrastructure — it would inject nearly one-third of a trillion dollars into the Canadian economy. That would be the most significant influx of investment capital in Canada’s history. It would also help reverse the $350 billion in cumulative net outflows that have left Canada since 2016. Presently, the bulk of Canadian pension fund investments end up overseas, helping build ports in Dubai, railways in Europe, tunnels in Australia, highways in Mexico, nuclear power plants in the U.K. and renewable power in India.
Frank Gehry, Titan of Architecture, Is Dead at 96 (The New York Times) Frank O. Gehry, one of the most formidable and original talents in the history of American architecture, died on Friday at his home in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 96. Mr. Gehry’s greatest popular success, and the building he will be most remembered for, is the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. Set in what had been a dying industrial city on the northern coast of Spain, this wildly exuberant, titanium-clad museum was an international sensation when it opened in 1997, helping to revivify the city and making Mr. Gehry the most recognizable American architect since Frank Lloyd Wright. For some, his work was more sculpture than architecture. Others saw it as emblematic of a global culture that reduced architecture to mere branding. But his work’s emotional ferocity could feel empowering, as if architecture had rediscovered a part of itself that had been lost after decades of dreary functionalism and postmodernist clichés. And the widespread focus on his buildings’ dazzling exteriors could distract from Mr. Gehry’s deeper goals: to create an architecture that was not just affecting but democratic in spirit and evocative of the messiness of human life.
Tracing Mass Timber’s Full Life Cycle (Metropolis) Barely a decade ago, mass timber was anointed as the sustainable alternative to building with steel or concrete. Those who initially doubted the engineered material’s tensile strength or fire resistance were assuaged by the International Code Council’s significant gesture of recognizing mass timber in the 2015 International Building Code. When it comes to carbon and its overall emissions impact, mass timber has left a few questions unanswered. Design firm Corgan recently unveiled its Mass Timber Carbon Calculator. This free, open-source tool enables design teams to more accurately quantify the embodied emissions of specific projects. Typically, mass timber’s climate benefits are framed in terms of its capacity for carbon storage and its lower manufacturing emissions. Corgan has effectively repositioned the goalposts, using slash-related biogenic carbon and transportation emissions as integral metrics in the larger question of mass timber’s carbon impact.
Inside Bioregionalism’s Tech-Driven Revival (Noema) A growing ecological movement sees the solution in bioregionalism: the idea of reorganizing social and economic life around the natural boundaries of the ecosystems that host and sustain us. Rather than accepting the abstract placemaking of property or state, bioregionalists look to watersheds, biodiversity, human culture and other aspects of physical and social geography. Well-known bioregions in North America include Cascadia (reaching roughly from the southern tip of Alaska to northern California) and the Ozarks (primarily encompassing southern Missouri and northern Arkansas). After emerging some 50 years ago, bioregionalism lost steam around the turn of the century. Today, however, it is in the midst of a resurgence. In light of the escalating pressures of the Anthropocene, many in the movement are now embracing bioregional finance (BioFi) — new financial systems and decentralized technologies to establish the technical, institutional and cultural bases for bioregional forms of economics and governance.
Fast track to where? Carney’s major projects list stirs up emotions, and not much else (The Narwhal) Instead, the government only referred 11 projects — including an expansion of the Port of Montreal and wind-powered energy generation in the Atlantic — to the newly created Major Projects Office for consideration as nationally interesting “major projects” worth fast-tracking. Which means no real projects have actually moved forward, despite the rhetoric around the announcements. That lack of clarity and tangible action only adds to the sense of disorientation over the intense reaction in Alberta after a new pipeline to the West Coast wasn’t part of the latest announcement. Emotions were pretty intense, considering there isn’t an actual pipeline project being discussed — there’s no route, no budget, and no company currently interested in building it. The most tangible thing about it so far has been vocal opposition from B.C. and the Indigenous communities this imaginary pipeline would theoretically pass through.
Sustainability the second-fastest growing sector globally (Semafor) Businesses aimed at reducing emissions and adapting to climate change impacts are the second-fastest growing sector of the global economy after tech, and are on track to be valued at more than $7 trillion by 2030, a Boston Consulting Group study found. Steeply falling costs for renewables, electric mobility, and other key technologies have made sustainability-related investments increasingly insulated from shifting political winds; more than half of global emissions can now be addressed with technologies already cost-competitive, the study found. This is a long-term trend that is worth betting on and probably risky to bet against. For many years, the biggest obstacle to decarbonizing the global economy was the dreaded “green premium,” which pitted environmental and financial sustainability against each other. Basically, it doomed the prospects for big companies to make long-term green investments without major government support, which was never very reliable. The green premium still exists, but there is growing proof of the opposite, what one might call the “brown” premium: Companies that don’t find a foothold in sustainability-related ventures risk missing out on significant financial upside.
A Housing Complex Designed to Tackle Loneliness Wins Britain’s Best Building (Bloomberg) Britain’s best new building is more than just a senior living center. The Appleby Blue Almshouse, which won this year’s prestigious Royal Institute of British Architects Stirling Prize, brings one of the UK’s oldest forms of social housing to the modern era by incorporating designs that tackle loneliness and social isolation among older adults.
Critics say B.C. housing bill takes aim at local governance (The Globe and Mail) A B.C. bill is raising the ire of planners and other housing experts who say it will erode local governance – and give project approval power to developers. If Bill M216 passes, a housing project submission approved by certified engineers and architects who’ve been hired by developers would get rubber-stamped without city staff review. If the bill passes, local governments would be required to accept architectural drawings as meeting design guidelines. Rezonings commonly involve planners who ensure a proposed zoning change fits with policy and community guidelines. The planner's role could be lost. Developer, planner and retired architect Michael Geller says the proposed bill is too broad and overreaching. “What this bill is saying is, let’s allow the equivalent type of certified professional to get involved in approving all aspects of the development approval process – rezonings, development permits, and so forth. Right down to reviewing the design and determining whether the design is in accordance with the official community plan,” he said.
Ottawa’s spending on housing set to drop by more than 50% over next three years, PBO says (The Globe and Mail) Why am I not surprised? Federal spending on housing is projected to drop by more than half over the next three years, according to a new report by the Parliamentary Budget Officer. The government’s Nov. 4 budget followed through on a campaign promise to launch a new agency called Build Canada Homes, setting aside $7.3-billion over five years. However the PBO points out that overall federal spending on housing is set to decline to $4.3-billion in 2028-29, down from $9.8-billion in the current fiscal year – a 56-per-cent reduction. The PBO estimates that about 26,000 units will be created over five years, representing a 2.1-per-cent increase in housing completions relative to the PBO’s baseline projection.
Montreal’s New Rail Line Is the Future (Maclean’s) The opening of the REM has vaulted Canada’s second-largest city from a transportation laggard to a frontrunner. It’s also provided a low-cost template of quick-to-build rapid transit that every Canadian city struggling with gridlock, long commutes and inflated transit costs can, and should, emulate. Next spring, a new branch will open to the island’s western suburbs, and another is slated to reach Trudeau airport in 2027. By that point, the REM will span 26 stations and 67 kilometres. The REM is being built for a fraction of the cost of comparable projects in North America. In Toronto, the Eglinton Crosstown has swollen to $13 billion, or $684 million a kilometre. The second phase of New York’s long-overdue Second Avenue Subway may cost $3.7 billion a kilometre, and current rail expansions in San Francisco and Los Angeles have gone north of $1 billion a kilometre. The construction of a five-station extension to the all-underground Blue Line, which has just begun in Montreal’s east end, has a similar price tag. The REM is being built for $140 million a kilometre—an astonishing bargain.
Growing pains: An Ontario city’s urban agriculture efforts show good policy requires real capacity (Building) Canadians are paying more for food than ever. Canada’s Food Price Report 2025 estimates that a family of four will spend up to $801 more on food this year, with overall prices expected to rise three to five per cent. In response, more people are growing their own food. Municipal governments have taken note, developing food and urban agriculture strategies that promise more green space, better access to fresh food, stronger communities and sometimes climate benefits. But do they actually change conditions on the ground? Research points to several concrete steps they can take. Task a specific department, name a lead staff person and allocate ongoing funding. Create accessible one-stop web pages and guidance documents that spell out what’s allowed, what permits are needed, how to access land and who to contact. Secure space for growing. Map underutilized land, integrate food production into parks, and use long-term leases or land trusts to provide greater security for community-led projects. Treat community partners as co-planners and develop strategies alongside practitioners. Urban agriculture won’t fix food insecurity — the most significant determinants remain income, housing, social supports and broader food-system policy. But our findings from London indicate that it can still deliver public value.
‘Already-dire’ housing situation could worsen before improving (Building) According to a new report done for the Residential Construction Council of Ontario (RESCON), the state of new home starts and sales across municipalities in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) and Greater Golden Horseshoe (GGH) is going to “get worse before it gets better.” The analysis revealed that housing starts in the first nine months of 2025 are down from the same period in the previous three years, while industry job losses continue to grow. “The findings of this report are alarming but confirm what the residential construction industry and our builders have been experiencing and saying for some time now,” said RESCON president Richard Lyall. “We are staring into the abyss. The new home market has tanked. It is a particularly dark time for those who work in residential construction. There have been significant job losses across the board. Projects are being shelved, and this will have a significant trickle-down effect on Ontario’s economy. We must act quicky to stem the bleeding.”
The Big Collapse: New Condo Sales Down 89%, Ground-Oriented Down 65% (Missing Middle Initiative) Ontario’s housing engine has stalled. Condo starts are down 51%, ground-oriented homes are down 43%, and overall starts are down 34%, with only rental apartments keeping the sector on life support. Pre-construction sales have fallen off a cliff, condo pre-sales down 89%, ground-oriented pre-sales down 65%, guaranteeing an even deeper downturn in 2026 and beyond. On the positive side, purpose-built rental starts are up 42%. Ground-oriented housing. Housing starts are a lagging indicator, as the CMHC only considers a unit “started” when a building’s foundation is 100% complete, so they often reflect market decisions several years prior, when the decision to build was made. Pre-construction housing sales are a better indicator of the market’s current health and are indicative of future housing starts. Read the full report here.
B.C. government ‘dashes’ out digital tool to help build homes faster (Building) British Columbia is launching a free, new digital tool aimed at helping developers and non-profit organizations design and build prefabricated homes more quickly and cost-effectively. The platform features a range of wood-frame buildings, and an architect can select a design, position it on a lot, then use software to optimize the blueprint. Boyle said the tool can save about 50 to 60 per cent of design time and 20 to 25 per cent of construction costs. Helps said design processes that would take an architect 2 to 3 weeks can be completed in 3 to 5 minutes with DASH.
New major projects list has some Indigenous buy-in, Carney says OKs still needed (Building) The list of projects earmarked for fast-track approval includes the Crawford nickel mine in Ontario, the Ksi Lisims LNG project on B.C.’s northwest coast, and the North Coast Transmission Line to power projects in the region, including the Ksi Lisims LNG facility.