BCBusiness

14 I n t e lli g e n t C i t y B C B U S I N E S S . C A A P R I L 2 0 24 by Frances Bula Frances Bula is a long-time Vancouver journalist and the 2023 recipient of the Bruce Hutchison Lifetime Achievement Award from the Jack Webster Foundation tion. Builders can be working at two sites simultaneously with a single project: the actual place where the housing is going to sit, where they'll pour the foundation and prep the land; and then the Intelligent City factory, where the walls and floors are assembled, later to be popped into place on the prepared land. Because everything has to be figured out to the centi- metre in advance, there can't be any change orders during construction—a practice that routinely happens on custom sites, adding anywhere from hundreds to millions in extra costs. "It's plug and play on site," Lang explains. Benefit Number 2: Eventu- ally, those components will be pre-approved so that cities don't have to send out their electrical or building inspec- tors to check things routinely, as happens with custom-built homes. Benefit Number 3: It's a more environmentally friendly kind of building because the company is working with mass timber, which in B.C. is cur- rently allowed for structures up to 12 storeys, with promises Oliver Lang and partner Cindy Wilson had successful careers with their architecture firm designing thoughtful, creative buildings. Their condo projects on Vancouver's west side, in particular, have been praised for their livability, with their interior courtyards, flexible spaces and natural- light-filled rooms. Their firm, LWPAC, has won many awards over its storied history. But Lang could see he wasn't going to change any- thing about Vancouver's (or Canada's) increasingly dire housing universe with one cool project here and another one there. The practice of produc- ing one custom building at a time, in fact, started to seem like a weird anachronism from the pre-industrial era. In the modern world, even the most expensive cars or shoes or glasses are not custom pro- duced, with a different design and individual set of builders for each one. So now he and Wilson and his architectural team of almost 50 people work at a giant former shipyard in the wilds of industrial Delta. That airplane-hangar-sized building is dominated by two massive robotic machines that can be programmed to construct vari- ous types of standardized floor and wall panels. The panels, fabricated out of mass timber and with wiring, insulation and windows built in, will be clipped together like giant Lego pieces to form the shells of basic housing units that can range from a fourplex to an 18-storey apartment tower and everything in between. "Now you can change the paradigm at scale," says Lang as he talks with evangelical passion about all the benefits that this kind of mass produc- tion—"productization" as he repeatedly calls it—can bring on multiple fronts. "We can move away from building one layer at a time. It allows us to create systems that you can't make by hand." It means new housing developments could be built approximately 38- to 58-per- cent faster, according to Lang. That's not only due to automa- SMART PARTS The housing crisis won't be fixed overnight, but the brains behind Intelligent City think they can make a dent L A N D V A L U E S

• Cover