Taking Mass Timber Architecture to New Heights

Nick Boever:

Before we get into it, Craig, I’d like to let you introduce yourself first.

Craig Applegath:

Yeah, sure. Nick. Well, happy to be here and give your listeners some idea of who you’re talking to. I am an architect and designer and I focus on zero carbon buildings and buildings that are meeting the challenges of climate change impacts. I trained as a biologist before going to architecture. And then I also did a degree in urban design at the GSD at Harvard. So I bring all that together in my current practice. As you said, I’m right now leading a group of integrated disciplines, architecture planning, landscape design, mechanical, electrical, structural for a hybrid wood prototype tower that you mentioned. And part of that tower is a new patent pending, timber floor system. And we can talk about both of those if you like. And I’ve been practicing now for over 25 years. My typical area of practice is post-secondary education projects, mass timber projects I get involved in because I’m passionate about mass timber because of its implications for locking up carbon and reducing embodied carbon. So that sort of gives your listeners some sense of who you’re talking to.

Nick Boever:

Great. Yeah. It’s kind of interesting that you started off in biology before moving over into the architecture. Was that kind of passion for biology sort of what guided you towards the sustainability later on down the line?

Craig Applegath:

Well, I started out of high school. I was interested in design and making and building things. I’ve always been building projects [inaudible] my whole life but I have always been really, really interested and attracted to things, natural systems, biology, botany, and so forth. I had aquariums when I was a kid, I hatched ducks and geese, all sorts of things. And so when I got into biology, I enjoyed it but I realized I wanted to be a 19th-century biologist and sort of discover the world of natural systems as opposed to fight for research funding to write papers. And the life of an academic, I looked at it when I was there and thought, “Oh, I don’t think this is for me.” And so I started thinking, “Okay, what are some of the other things I was interested in?”

Craig Applegath:

And making things and designing things was one of them and a friend of mine from high school, who’s now a well-known Canadian architect, Brigitte Shim, I bumped into her in the cafeteria and we got talking and she just gotten into architecture school. So it sounded really interesting and the more I looked into it I said, “Why didn’t I know more about this?” So I went into architecture school and it was like dying and going to heaven. It was just wonderful. I enjoyed every second of it. And I’ve enjoyed almost every second of my career, I won’t say every second because there’s always some [crosstalk]-

Nick Boever:

That’s how you know you love a career though where it’s like there’s those… It’s not butterflies and sunshine all the time.

Craig Applegath:

No, no, no, no, it’s definitely not. But you know what? I think if you like designing and if you like making things, and if you like working with people to make things happen, architecture, engineering planning are wonderful careers to have. It’s challenging, every career is challenging because you’re working with people and people have their own points of view and their own directions. And as an architect, you’re pulling people together to try and make things happen but it is a wonderful, wonderful opportunity. You know what’s really weird, Nick? When I started interviewing architects to see if I want to go in architecture school, I would say that at least five out of six or seven of them told me it was a terrible career to have. And I thought, “How weird is that? What are you doing?” And when you’re in your 20s, you know everything and it doesn’t matter how experienced a person is, you figure you know better than they do.

Nick Boever:

Oh, yeah.

Craig Applegath:

So fortunately I didn’t listen to them and I went into architecture. Anyway, so actually this, what I’m doing right now, the buildings I’m doing, the hybrid wood tower and we’re working on a building that’s literally being constructed right now, the Centennial Block A building, which is a mass timber, not hybridist, a mass timber building, zero-carbon. These are all buildings that required all the skills that I’ve learned over the last 20 or 30 years not only in architecture but also in biology. And so I think now things are starting to come together just as the world’s coming a part of the scene.

Nick Boever:

That’s really curious because I kind of my career path was on a similar trajectory just to kind of get off topic a little bit just in the terms of the sciences, going into the arts. I originally started off in chemical engineering and then kind of shifted over into English and-

Craig Applegath:

That’s your [inaudible].

Nick Boever:

Yeah. But kind of owing to what you said, it’s interesting where I wasn’t too, I really liked the sciences. I really liked all of the innovations that were going on in the sciences but it was something where the kind of academic sitting at an office wasn’t really too much for me as I got deeper into it. And eventually later on down the line, I had the same reaction, just “Oh, well I always liked writing so maybe I can get into writing.” And just everybody was telling me, “Yeah, it’s going to be very hard.” I’m like, “You know what? I’ll just do it anyways. It’s fine.”

Craig Applegath:

If you love it.

Nick Boever:

Yeah.

Craig Applegath:

It is funny you mentioned chemistry. I have really not good memories of chemistry for two reasons. One was everyone in science except three of us were trying to be doctors. So it was hugely competitive. And in chemistry class, the numbers of the students, so these are people that you’re going to want to trust with your life later on were sabotaging other people’s assignments. It’s like, “No, this is not right. This is terrible.” At least that was in organic chemistry. Anyway, so you’re probably better in English.

Nick Boever:

Yes. And it turns out that later on down the line the position that I’m in currently talking about these different types of innovations, talking about building sciences in general, that kind of science analytical background has definitely helped me out a lot in that in being able to cover these different types of topics. But with that being said and not to get too far off-topic, I figured we can jump on into basically the tasks that you guys have at hand and I think it would be beneficial for somebody who’s not too familiar on mass timber design to know what has prevented mass timber from being used in these super-tall structures to this day.

Craig Applegath:

Okay. So I just back up a little bit, back the question a little bit because I’ll bet some of the listeners don’t actually know what mass timber refers to. So why don’t I just give a little primer in what mass timber is?

Nick Boever:

Yeah, go ahead.

Craig Applegath:

Way back in the 19th century when they were building buildings, typically the structure was timber frame construction. The early 19th and 18th century and then masonry wall construction. So the outside walls were like two, three, four, five feet thick and they went up and then they supported big, huge timbers like beams and then there’d be big columns. And they were made from big trees. Like in Europe they’d be big Oak trees here, here they might be Douglas fir trees. And so then in the later 19th century, they started using steel as columns but they typically continued to use the floor as timber. So that would be what’s called nail laminated timber. They take the two by sixes on their end and they lay them down across the beam and they nail them together. So they became a complete solid floor system, nail laminated timber.

Craig Applegath:

So that was pretty much how all buildings were built until the early 20th century where they started to use this amazing stuff called concrete which was amazing because you put rebar in it and it had great compressive strength and also great tensile strength. And they could either support the concrete floors with steel columns or concrete columns, reinforced concrete columns. So that became the modern construction methodology. And it is still the standard construction technology. The tall, tall buildings are typically steel construction with a concrete core, core being where the elevators and fire stairs are, exit stairs. And medium, tall buildings are often concrete, all concrete. So timber disappeared because it was more artisanal. You could move faster with steel and concrete and more importantly, you could go taller because of the capacity for concrete and steel to take compressive load. So if you went up really, really tall with a wood building, most of the ground floor would be wood because the cross-section of timber required to hold that load above it is huge whereas concrete or steel, it’s very, very small in comparison.

Craig Applegath:

So it disappeared basically as a building material system until recently where we’ve started to look at the embodied carbon attributes of building materials because of climate change and embodied carbon for your listeners that don’t know is all of the carbon dioxide that’s released in the process of getting the materials from wherever they’re manufactured, dug out of the ground, whatever, transported, CO2 released during transport, CO2 released during construction, that’s considered embodied carbon. Operational carbon is the CO2 released when you’re heating a building or cooling a building. So, wow, buildings are filled with a lot of concrete steel and those are both really, really intensive carbon efforts, right? Concrete releases a lot of carbon dioxide when the cement is made, steel releases it when the steel is made. So it’s like, “Okay, well, timber is this amazing stuff.” Because A, it locks up carbon, stores it, and B, to get the same amount of strength out of timber it’s a lot that’s carbon. So how do you do that?

Craig Applegath:

Well for the last 10 years or so you’ve been hearing a lot about mass timber. Well, mass timber it means that you take smaller pieces of wood. So imagine two by fours and you glue them together. And to make a column you’ve probably heard of blue laminated columns while it’s a number of pieces of two by four, two by twos, whatever glued together under pressure and then milled to make the shape. And that gluing together allows you to create much bigger section by section. I mean, the width by the depth of the member. So the other thing that’s just happened to be really started to evolve over the last 10 years is what’s called CLT, cross-laminated timber. So your listeners imaginably, you lay out a series of two by fours on the manufacturing deck, and then you pour glue on them.

Craig Applegath:

And then you lay two by fours at 90 degrees to them, make a layer, and then lay glue on them. And then again, 90 degrees to that and back and forth five, six, seven, eight times and you build yourself a section that’s like giant plywood, right? It’s got these layers all glued together. So the layers allow you to have the tensile strength as well. So here’s the thing. You can make at the outset about 30-foot span of CLT, cross-laminated timber floor, but office buildings, commercial office buildings have a span that real estate folks want for leasing purposes of about 40 feet, 40 to 45 feet so you can’t use CLT unless you have intermediate columns. Well, that gets in the way of how offices are laid out and so tenants don’t want it. So there’s this, personally, I think it looks great, but it’s an issue.

Craig Applegath:

So about four or five years ago, my partners and I were just in the process of finishing up doing a low-rise CLT building, zero carbon CLT building. Really cool. And I said to them, “Hey, I think we need to do a really tall building.” And they said, “Yeah, but you can’t do tall wood, Craig.” I mean, they’re engineers, right? So they know the problem with wood. I said, “We can figure it out.” And they’re really polite. So they didn’t say, “You’re just a dumb architect.” Which is probably I could see in their face like if I only understood. No, I get it. But so I said, “No, no, no.” I said, “What is it with this culty religious nonsense about pure wood?” Everyone’s trying for the tallest mass timber building right now around the world. And you’ve got 20 stories somewhere in Norway, right?

Craig Applegath:

And you’ve got a few proposed buildings that are all wood that are much taller than that, but it’s like, why all wood? They’re not all wood. They’re like the joints, the connections are stainless steel and they’re built on concrete foundations. So it’s not all wood really. It’s we know you’re using how much steel, it’s this question of how much of it. So I said, “Well, look, let’s look at analyze a building.” And in a building a tall building, what I didn’t realize until we did this and the light went bing and everyone’s head at the same time, Nick was 70% of a building’s material content is floor systems.

Nick Boever:

That is surprising. I was not aware of that.

Craig Applegath:

70%. I’m like, “That’s it. Why don’t we just do a standard tall building with a steel exoskeleton, and a concrete core, and we’ll figure out how to do CLT floor systems, duh.” And then it’s like, “Yeah, but remember the problem of the width.” So I said, “Well, what do we do? Is there a hybrid CLT system we can figure out?” So we got working on it and what we came up with as a solution and it’s now a patent pending solution is you take that CLT that I was telling you about, you flip it over and you basically route out a long strip from the what… The strips will run from the core to the exoskeleton. And in that slot, it’s like about two inches wide and two inches deep, you put rebar, post-tensioned rebar and concrete.

Craig Applegath:

And that basically provides tensile strength. So you’ve got the long panels, the tensile strength, same thing you do with concrete, right? Concrete would just fall apart if it didn’t have the rebar. When you put rebar in a floor system of concrete, it’s at the bottom two-thirds mark of that section. So we’re doing the same thing only we’re doing it with wood, done. So we could do and we said, “Well, how tall?” I said, “Well, no one is even going to pay attention unless it’s a hundred stories.” So we said, “We’ll do 105.” We started with 120 and said, “Well, do you know what? People will probably think it’s insane. So, okay. 105.” So we could go taller. But the point is that it’s a hybridization. It’s using the wood in a way that is not pushing the envelope really. I mean, that rebar system it’s not out of this world in terms of its realization.

Nick Boever:

I’m going to say it’s tried and true with this.

Craig Applegath:

We’re building it right now. We’re building the timber floor system right now in order to… You have to get code approval, you have to be able to test it in bending. So you span it between a rig in a testing factory and they put pressure down on the middle. So they test, is it going to bend the way you say it will, right? All the calculations are there. It’s been computer modeled. It should work. Let’s test it. And then there’s another one called creep. And creep is over time wood settles down a bit like the fibers move a bit, one against the other they stretch out a bit. So the creep calculations you’ve done are they reasonable? And then finally you burn it. And this CLT has what’s called a sacrificial layer of two inches of wood. And when a fire starts it chars and prevents the fire from getting higher. So that’s happening right now. So this is very doable.

Nick Boever:

Huh. Yeah. That’s really incredible. You honestly, the entire time running through it’s like I kept on having my questions pop up in my head and you kind of knocked them all out. That’s really incredible just the amount of-

Craig Applegath:

Well, I think it’s because the questions popping up in your head, Nick, were the same questions popping up [crosstalk].

Nick Boever:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Throughout the entire process.

Craig Applegath:

Well, what about this? Well, what about this? Well, what about, yes, exactly.

Nick Boever:

Yeah, exactly. I actually just got off of and the thing is I just recently got off of, I just came back from [inaudible] and the International Builder’s Show. So all of that’s kind of at the forefront of my mind already and a lot of that was really the talk of the town out in that section. Being able to come up with not just wooden cladding or just wooden building materials but finding out ways in which these wooden building materials, one of the primary concerns in a building is, “Well, what happens if fire gets started?” And.

Craig Applegath:

Yeah. And a lot of people are afraid of wood because of fire. And in fact, one of the great things about being part of an organization like DIALOG is it’s integrated. So I’m constantly working with structural engineers, mechanical, electrical engineers, material scientists, and so that you’re questioning and supporting one another. And the ideas develop together. They don’t develop in isolation of one another. So one of my concerns immediately 10 years ago when I started to explore mass timber was, “Well, what about fire?” I have a fireplace. I burn logs. Is it going to… Well, then there’s the whole reality of charring and how that is accommodated.

Craig Applegath:

And most people don’t understand that steel is actually really dangerous in a fire because it loses its tensile strength. It sags. So steel buildings will fall apart very, very quickly in a fire. I mean, after the fireproofing has burned off then the steel collapses. So right now with a steel building, you have X number of minutes to get out that the fireproofing is for safety for getting people out. It’s not to stop the building from collapsing. I mean, granted, you’re trying to put a fire out with fire suppression but in terms of the actual, I mean, you saw what happened with the World Trade Center.

Nick Boever:

Yeah. Yeah. So I guess kind of following it up with some of the questions about the general process itself when it comes to building this new technology, part of what I read on this project was that you had a construction partner, EllisDon, working with you.

Craig Applegath:

Yes. Yes.

Nick Boever:

And I was very curious about what it was like working with them because I actually have, personal anecdote here, I have a father who works in construction and he is constantly complaining to me that he wishes the architects would talk to the construction crews a lot more on these types of projects. So I was wondering what your collaboration with EllisDon was like.

Craig Applegath:

So first of all, let me speak to why your father would say that. Because when I was a very, very young architect, the world of construction and the world of architecting were very separate and architects saw themselves as being superior to constructors. And the constructors were there to service the architects’ desires, architectural desires. And typically, it’s because the construction world was not typically a sophisticated educated world. There were very sophisticated people in it but it wasn’t. That was not the sort of nature of the beast. Today it’s different. If I look around the room in a meeting say with EllisDon, every person there, every man and woman has an Iron Ring. In Canada, I don’t know if they do it in the States, but engineers get rings when they graduate.

Nick Boever:

Oh, interesting.

Craig Applegath:

It’s to represent a bridge that fell down and the responsibility. They’re engineers, they’re MBAs, they’re material scientists, EllisDon has 50 people in its construction sciences group. It’s a totally different world. In fact, EllisDon has a hundred people writing code. They develop their own software. It’s like working with the university, right? Like it’s a different game altogether. So when we were starting with this tower, EllisDon was working on another project I was working on in mass timber. And I said to them, “Let’s take some of the knowledge we’re developing together as a group and apply it at this incredible level here. This is going to be something that will make some waves.” And so their contribution, and it was totally collaborative, we took the idea as a very basic idea was about logistics and constructability.

Craig Applegath:

Like not will it go together, but what’s the most efficient way of putting this on the site? So what are the size of the panels? Because you got to lift them up in the air with a crane and you got to truck them from the manufacturing site to the construction site, and you got to do it in a way that works with all the trucks and stuff. So what are the size of the panels, what can they be? And they can only be of a size that the crane can lift them because that thickness of wood is quite heavy. So they were doing logistics. They were doing calculations in terms of what is the most effective way to build this, not just to get the structural specifications right but to actually make it so that it’s affordable.

Craig Applegath:

And because all of this is not going to make any difference if it just stands up, but no one’s going to build it. And that’s one of the beefs I had with the religious gang that want all-wood buildings is, “Fair enough, but who can afford it?” Why not have buildings where we really can get the wood into the buildings in a way that’s economically viable because otherwise, it’s just a dream? Or it’s going to be institutions that can do a small building like a four or five, six-story building that it makes sense, but tall buildings, it just won’t work. So EllisDon was right there and two young engineers, Mark Gaglione only and Vince Davenport sort of worked on our team. We were back and forth before COVID in each other’s offices and studios sort of developing the actual building. So this was a totally collaborative event for the building design but then when we started to put the patent together for the floor panel system, it was a 50/50 partnership of developing this together.

Nick Boever:

Yeah. I really get what you’re saying with the finding out a way to build it efficiently on-site and keeping the cost within range because I mean, obviously when you’re talking about embodied carbon, the one thing that you really want is to make sure that it’s not too complicated to build because that’s one of the whole things that you’re trying to tackle in the first place. And then on the cost side, I actually just heard recently it was, I think Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory way back in the ’90s, you probably know what I’m talking about already.

Nick Boever:

They had developed just a very simple three-pane glass system for a window in order to cut down on heat transfer through the window. And for the longest time it was never used. And only recently it’s starting to get used again. And the reason being is that it was just way too expensive. Nobody wanted to produce it. But since we have all of this technology being used that uses this type of ultra-thin glass that the original design was using drove down the prices and now it’s a lot more affordable and now companies are actually starting to produce these types of windows.

Craig Applegath:

Yeah. I think what you’re talking about are economies of scale and by the way when we did the calculations for the hybrid wood tower, the tower itself altogether in terms of cost, it was around 10 to 15% more than a normal, like a steel tower. And when talking to developers, they thought that they could at least accommodate 5% because people wanted it more. This is with mass timber being totally new. Competition is going to drive down prices. So this is going to be cost-competitive in a heartbeat. It’s not going to be long.

Nick Boever:

Right. I guess, kind of moving forward with… We kind of discussed, you already went into a lot about what went into the testing for this type of product. But I guess the other aspect for it was the funding rounds. And I’m kind of curious as to what the process was like. And I’m sure people who are not really versed in having to get funding for these types of innovations they’d probably be a little interested too into what went into trying to secure funding.

Craig Applegath:

Okay. So we’re at the point where we’re just dealing with seed money. We haven’t done any series A funding. We have basically self-financed this up until right now for testing and testing is quite expensive. It’s hundreds of thousands of dollars. So we have gone to get grants from a number of granting agencies in Canada that are supporting the development of mass timber. So they’re going to be helping finance or pay for the testing, the burning, the bending, and the creeping. So that is like a pre-series A so it’s still a seed and DIALOG and EllisDon have self self-funded. And we did it not just because we’re thinking this timber product will be something that will be hugely marketable, which I think it will be, we did it in the beginning because we are always looking for ways to demonstrate to our clients that we can add value to them.

Craig Applegath:

And the only way to do that is to do innovative work. Work that involves research. Work that is sort of at the cutting edge. So you have to fund that research yourself. And as I said, the construction industry is now very sophisticated. They’re in the same business, they’ve got to demonstrate their sophistication. So we both teamed up and said, “Okay, this will make sure that when a mass timber project happens, we’re going to have an opportunity to go for it because guess what? We’re the world leaders in the tallest mass timber building in the world, right?” So, and we’re learning, and guess what, there’s another really amazing thing.

Craig Applegath:

Don’t you think every single architect or engineer wants to come to a firm or wants to come to a construction firm doing the coolest stuff in the world? Yes. And how do you do great projects unless you have the best people in the world? You don’t. It’s you constantly got to be doing the coolest, most innovative, most thoughtful, the most aggressively forward-looking work in order to have the best people and the best people will do the best work. So it’s like a virtuous circle. So that was the original incentive to do that it’s just to keep sort of ahead of the curve. And then out of it came this cool patent like, “Okay, this is great. Something’s actually come out of the cool innovation.” So as bonus.

Nick Boever:

Really does highlight just the power of partnerships in this day and age. I feel like-

Craig Applegath:

Oh, absolutely.

Nick Boever:

Yeah. Because the way you’re making it sound it’s almost like you probably wouldn’t have been able to do it without EllisDon.

Craig Applegath:

Absolutely. We were able to do the sort of conceptual structural design but we would not have been able to do it to make it a real thing, to make it something that you could bring to a developer and say, “We’ve tested.” Because if we walked into a developer with it they go, “That’s sort of interesting.” When we walk in the door with EllisDon and they lay out the logistics, then the developer’s like, “Yep. Okay. When do we start?” “Well, we can’t because we got to do the testing before we can get the code approval.” And so forth. But yeah. And I just think, by the way, Canada is not an exception, in the States and Europe too it’s the industries are completely integrating in terms of their competencies and intelligence abilities to collaborate, abilities to innovate. And the world of separation is something so far in the past now. And anyone that not understanding that it’s not good.

Nick Boever:

I was going to say, it’s definitely something that I personally I’m very glad to see in a lot of cases because yeah, just from having my own father as a construction worker and having multiple friends who are in the trades and I even have one that’s super into building sciences alongside me and passive house building in general, where it’s like, you have all these different ideas that are kind of like entering into different spheres at any given time. And then there’s also just a matter of you can have the very lofty ideas like we were talking about earlier but then you kind of really need to get down to the ground level and say, “Okay. But what’s the practicality of this?” And it’s always great to be able to have these different firms that are working on construction communicating with one another so that it’s almost like a checks and balance system in a way.

Craig Applegath:

Yeah. And also I think, and by the way, mass timber is special also because there is a craft there as well that it’s sort of completely new, but it’s very ancient at the same time. Have you been in a mass timber building recently?

Nick Boever:

I honestly don’t think I have.

Craig Applegath:

So poke your nose in because what you’ll realize is you can feel it, you can smell it. It smells wonderful. It’s like being in a forest. It’s just you like-

Nick Boever:

Oh, I feel like I would love that.

Craig Applegath:

You really you go… It’s wonderful. They’re just…

Nick Boever:

I mean, that just ties right into the whole biophilia craze that’s going on too.

Craig Applegath:

Absolutely. And this, by the way, caveat, caveat, caveat. If mass timber is made from sustainably harvested timber, and that’s another podcast worth of discussion, it’s good. If it’s from clear cut it’s a freaking disaster. So not that wood is good, it’s that wood sustainably harvest so it actually improves the ecology of the forest it’s taken from is good. And by the way, some really interesting you might want to talk to in a future podcast is a really fascinating work being done with blockchain and DNA to sort of figure out, “Well, how do I know that this mass timber’s coming from where they said it’s coming from, right? What’s a providence of this? What’s a chain of custody?” And so if you have blockchain and DNA you know where it’s come from. Anyway, so the most ancient of building materials transformed to the most sophisticated building materials. It’s a very interesting transition.

Nick Boever:

Yeah. That’s very interesting. I feel like we’re probably reaching the limit of our time here. I don’t want to hold you [crosstalk]-

Craig Applegath:

Any special wrap-up questions?

Nick Boever:

So, well, I figure I had one question that kind of popped into my head earlier on, and then I’ll hand it off to you for any closing comments if you have any. But one of the things that I was curious about is how long has the testing been going on up until this point? How long have you guys been kind of testing the prototype for this flooring system?

Craig Applegath:

Well, we’ve been designing it, testing it on computers because now everything gets tested through computer modeling for the last two years. The testing, the physical testing, where we physically build panels and [inaudible] them and creep them and burn them is just starting right now.

Nick Boever:

Oh, okay. So you’re just at the cusp of that.

Craig Applegath:

Yeah. I mean, the tip of the iceberg is sort of the testing though all the other research is below that. So once it’s tested, the next phase is then getting a code approval and doing the kind of work required in order to get this thing to be marketed. And by the way, you don’t have to have this in a tall building, you can have it in two-story building, right?

Nick Boever:

Right. So I guess the question then is if the actual physical testing is such a small component of it, and you’ve already put two years into kind of all of the research and development of that, barring everything goes according to plan, how long do you expect the actual, testing testing to take?

Craig Applegath:

That’s a good question. Probably somewhere in the range of about a year to get the results back. So it will vary depending on what because of COVID and because of the plants, I’m hesitant make a commitment right now.

Nick Boever:

I was going to say, are you running into…

Craig Applegath:

Yeah. Well [crosstalk].

Nick Boever:

Do you foresee there being any problem? Yeah.

Craig Applegath:

Yeah. Well, we don’t know, right? Who would’ve known there was going to be a trucker strike that would hold everything up and shut down the automobile plants near Windsor, anyway a yearish or so.

Nick Boever:

All right. Yeah. No, I was just curious about that. It was something that kind of popped into my head because I myself I’m not privy to the ins and outs of the testing process when it comes to something like this.

Craig Applegath:

It’s fun, make a good podcast.

Nick Boever:

Yeah, definitely. And I guess we kind of covered because the only other question that I had would be if you had any advice to give to people who were say they were working with their own firms and trying to do exactly what you’re doing just in terms of trying to push forward, innovate, come up with these new ideas, how you would kind of advice them moving forward just from either a partnership standpoint or from a funding standpoint?

Craig Applegath:

Well, from a sort of a process standpoint, I would say that innovation is a team sport. If they want to really get a great sense of how innovation works, there’s a wonderful book called Where Good Ideas Come From. And one of the things that was set out in it is that the history of innovation is almost 50/50 divided between individuals like Edison coming up with an idea versus groups of people coming up with an idea. I think the complexity of and if you’re talking about ideas like construction ideas and design, you’re going to have to be working with a sophisticated team. So you want to be in some sort of integrated team where you’ve got architects and engineers, material scientists, building scientists. I would team up with a sophisticated contractor, a constructor. So you really do want all those insights. That doesn’t mean you don’t start with some ideas and a doodle in the back of a napkin, classic architect thing you do.

Craig Applegath:

But in order for that to actually come to fruition, there has to be different kinds of insights brought to bear. My idea about the tower would not have happened if we didn’t have my partners, [Derrick Hachim] and Thomas Wu, structural engineers, and we sat down over a glass of red wine, oh three glass of red wine, and then talked about how you would actually do this. And the ideas went back and forth very, very quickly. And a sketch emerged, literally, that evening there was a sketch. And so I think that wouldn’t have happened if you had any one of us there but the insights coming together from a group of people is very, very powerful. And so I say if you’re a young architect or a young engineer start building what I call your neural network. Everyone talks about networking. Well, I think in our very, very complicated sophisticated world, you need to build a group of friends and colleagues that are your neural network to help create, build, give ideas some future. And that’s probably the most important thing to do.

Nick Boever:

Yeah. That sounds great. It definitely echoes a lot is because, at the end of the day, it’s all you’re designing something. It’s as you kind of described, it’s a bit of an art form in and of itself. And it’s a mixture of art and sciences almost. And I can say from the art community just going to English school for so, so many years, it is kind of all reliant upon building that connection of people there. And I can even say that with the limited amount of schooling that I did in chemical engineering too, all of it was based on any class that we had to do, it’s working with other people to build these designs. And so that’s really great. Before we head out is there anything that we missed that you would like to add?

Craig Applegath:

No, I think we’ve covered everything. Just to reiterate the power of collaboration for innovation is something that’s really, really important. And also I’d suggest the importance of trying to step outside current paradigms and really examine them carefully. If everyone’s saying we have to do an all-wood mask timber building, ask why. I mean the most magical question is why. And as Simon Sinek says five why’s. You ask why, and then when you get the answer, ask why again, and then ask why and why and you should sort of be able to boil it down to what’s the real reason here because I think if we just said, “Well, it’s got to be all wood.” We would never come up with the idea. But the real purpose is we want to lock up carbon and wood. That’s different. So ask why and examine the paradigms that we’re stuck in and it’s very hard to do because we’re stuck in them. So that’s what I’d say.

Nick Boever:

Right. Well, it was great getting a chance to talk with you today. I’m really glad that you were able-

Craig Applegath:

My pleasure.

Nick Boever:

…. to make time. And I’d like to thank everybody for listening in on this and I hope all of you have a great rest of your day.