Decoding Timber Towers is the fourth ideas competition presented by Urbanarium to foster dialogue and encourage design investigations that promote housing affordability and address the effects of climate change. Entrants are asked to consider design solutions for mass timber residential and mixed-use buildings that, as with the earlier Missing Middle, Mixing Middle, and Decoding Density competitions, also explore how housing innovations and higher densities are constrained by building code, zoning, and other regulations. 

The Decoding Timber Towers ideas competition highlights the challenges facing designers, builders, and developers in implementing designs that emphasize modularization, prefabrication, and standardization in the delivery of low-carbon buildings. Increasingly, the ability to rapidly address affordability and climate change depends on the industry’s capacity to deliver high quality, low carbon buildings at an unprecedented scale.

While the technology to build large wood buildings has developed considerably, these projects tend to take longer and cost more to deliver than their industry-standard concrete counterparts. 

The competition asks: how can we streamline the system of delivery of large-scale low carbon buildings to unlock their potential to address climate change and housing unaffordability?