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What really happens behind the build?
This series takes you inside the complex, often unseen world of construction, urban planning, and development - where ideas move from concept to reality through a mix of vision, collaboration, and constant problem-solving. Across these episodes, industry leaders share real stories from the front lines, offering an honest look at the challenges, decisions, and innovations shaping the built environment today.
From the evolving demands of modern construction to the political and community dynamics behind urban planning, to bold new ideas transforming hospitality - this series explores every layer of the process. You’ll hear how buildings today are more complex than ever, why early collaboration is critical, and how navigating approvals and public expectations can make or break a project. At the same time, you’ll discover how innovation, like Canada’s first pod hotel, emerges from identifying gaps and rethinking traditional models.
At its core, Behind the Build is about more than structures - it’s about people. Their stories around relationships, leadership, and lived experience that turn challenges into opportunities and ideas into lasting impact. Whether you’re a developer, architect, planner, in construction or simply curious about how the spaces around you come to life, this series offers a deeper understanding of what it truly takes to build for the future.
Siegrist Architecture is a Vancouver-based firm led by Duane Siegrist and Andrew Martin, two leaders focused on turning complex ideas into real, buildable spaces. Their work spans everything from multi-family apartments and townhomes to high-rise towers, mass timber and concrete builds, senior living environments, and mixed-use communities that bring people, work, and life together. What sets them apart is experience, not just in design, but in delivery. Years of working alongside clients, consultants, and municipalities have shaped a practical, collaborative approach rooted in relationships and trust. They know what it takes to move a project forward, and get it built well. At every stage, the focus is simple: strong partnerships, clear communication, and thoughtful design that holds up in the real world.
The result? Projects that run smoothly, spaces that work beautifully, and communities that last.
Meet your hosts.
Duane Siegrist, Architect. Builder. Connector.
Duane Siegrist is all about bridging big ideas with real results that work. For over two decades he built a trusted reputation and strong relationships in the building industry. Now leading at SIEGRIST, he’s spent over 25 years shaping multi-family, mixed-use, and community-driven projects - navigating municipal planning and building departments, with a deep understanding of clients and developer needs: creating marketable, well-constructed buildings that are livable, community-focused, and, above all, projects we can all be PROUD of.
He’s known for being as comfortable on-site as he is in the boardroom meetings and presenting design and problem-solving, working alongside teams to turn complex visions into spaces that actually work. Passionate about mentorship and raising the bar in the industry, Duane is driven by one thing: getting great ideas built, and bringing people along with him.
Andrew Martins, Designer. Builder. Leader.
Andrew Martins pairs a sharp, practical mindset with experience in design and construction to deliver practical, efficient solutions. An award-winning BCIT graduate, Andrew has built a reputation for cutting through complexity and maintaining momentum on even the most intricate projects.
With over 15 years of industry experience, Andrew’s unique background—leading both architectural and construction firms—allows him to bridge the gap between design and execution. He is a natural leader who aligns teams, anticipates challenges, and ensures every detail reflects the original vision. Andrew brings clarity and a relentless focus on quality, grounded in the belief that the best results come from doing things right the first time.
#podcast #construction
speaker-0 (00:00)
Building something that lasts takes more than good drawings. I'm Duane Segrist, co-founder of Segrist Architecture, here with my partner Andrew Martens. Join us for a look behind the build.
Today we want to talk to you about something fundamental, how buildings actually get built and what it really takes to make a great project. The construction industry is getting more complicated. It's really about affordable housing, but what we're really dealing with is cost overruns, tighter budgets. Buildings demand more attention, systems are more complex, and the expectations around quality just keep rising. At the same time, the roles and responsibilities have become more clearly defined.
architects and engineers are taking on greater responsibility from what we call letters of assurance. The truth is it's just a lot of work and sometimes we see contractors build it wrong first and then they get paid to fix it later. Today we want to share the perspective of someone who truly understands this process. He's someone Andrew and I have worked together with, somebody I've known for over 30 years and he's a mentor to me and he's shaped how I think about good construction and what it really means to build well.
speaker-2 (01:21)
Paul Oreck, you have a really long track record in the building industry, doing this for over 50 years. You've done many things during that time, owned and operated your own construction company and done work with industry leading firms, completing work on renovations and custom homes to multifamily and mixed use projects in wood frame, mass timber and concrete. And now you've transitioned to mentoring the next generation of builders. We have many great conversations over the years. So thank you, Paul, for joining us today.
speaker-1 (01:50)
You're welcome. I hope I live up to your expectations.
speaker-0 (01:55)
Paul, what's your first thought in what makes a good project? And you know how to put a construction project together from your point of view.
speaker-1 (02:03)
You certainly summed it up well in your introduction. the industry has changed enormously, Dwayne, as we've seen in 30 years, and it survived that major crisis, which was the leaky condo crisis.
speaker-0 (02:15)
I will jump in here quickly. For those of you who may not remember the leaky condo crisis, it refers to a widespread building failures, leaks in condos that were primarily built from the late 1980s to the early 2000s, causing massive water damage, mold, structural issues. It led to billions in repair costs and significant homeowners distress due to poor construction and design. It was a quality disaster.
creating a legacy of expensive remediation for owners and with an estimated 31,000 units affected in British Columbia alone.
speaker-1 (02:51)
which I think focused a lot of people on the question of durability and what that meant in building construction. know, that evolution of the industry being challenged for durability because here were buildings that were, you know, 10, 20 years old that were falling apart literally in front of people. And I saw more of my share and we sort of were focused on how do we do this so that they at least live through their life cycle. I was thinking about this before this meeting today because when I
first got involved in construction myself. One of the interesting things that I was really interested in was building durability. A developer I worked with once said, how did he put it? was instead of building consumables, he wanted to build durables, the durable goods instead of consumable goods. And I thought, wow, that pretty much sums up the industry, especially what we evolved into in the 90s for sure, when the leaky condo crisis hit.
speaker-0 (03:46)
I mean, did you know what was going on then? Did you have an idea what was causing all of this? We're seeing obviously rot. ⁓ see buildings fall apart well before their time. That's just not durable construction.
speaker-1 (03:57)
Yeah, well, we know that the genesis of that in multi-residential buildings was because of dew points and that sort of thing in the building envelope. That was compounded by many different factors. The first buildings that really started to fall apart were ones that used stucco siding. They had trapped moisture in them. Look around now, you hardly see any building going with stucco siding anymore.
speaker-0 (04:20)
Now let me explain what we mean when we say rain screen. Think about the front face of a building. When rain hits it, most of the water just deflects right off. We call a weather barrier. Now, if a little bit of water does sneak in past that outer layer, there's a small cavity behind it and that water just drains down and exits at the bottom. That's the second line of defense. The key thing is it keeps water away from sensitive areas like windows and wall assemblies.
It lets the buildings dry out instead of trapping moisture inside the wall. That drying out ability is the big reason rain screen works so well.
speaker-1 (05:00)
and it was face screen stucco siding. So the concept of rain screen, I can tell you rain screen became sort of a voluntary issue in the early 90s and by the end of the 90s it was an absolute must. And the very first buildings in Vancouver anyways we're talking, and now it's across North America. So we know how much this has grown in the last 30 years, it's phenomenal. I remember doing a siding project on a renovation in North Vancouver back in that time in the late 90s and
I remember we had an old carpenter who got angry about just lapping building paper. And he said something like, you know, I've always lapped building paper vertically. It always worked for me. And we were sort of, yeah, the problem is that now we're tearing these buildings apart because the water just gets straight into the envelope and sits there and literally rots the building out. And as we know, there was the introduction of air barriers and vapor barriers on the inside of the envelope in the late seventies and early eighties.
I blush to tell you that I remember that as well. We went from very rudimentary vapor barriers, paper-faced insulation to six-mil poly. Now, all of these things, these are tools now that you all use and no one thinks twice about.
speaker-0 (06:13)
You can see this translation. It transformed itself into high-performance buildings. you're seeing prefabrication. I prefabrication is something that you've been involved in.
speaker-1 (06:22)
A lot,
yeah. We see a lot of our projects going that way. We see a lot of larger, of course, wood frame projects where it's almost absolute.
speaker-0 (06:32)
Let me paint a picture here on a typical construction site. You've got crews handling every piece of lumber, cutting, fitting, and assembling everything out in the weather. That's traditional stick framing and it works, but it's slower and it's exposed to the elements the whole time. Now you compare that what we call prefabrication, wall panels, roof panels. They're built ahead of time, either in a shop, sometimes right at the site when they're ready, they're lifted into place almost like
assembling a kit of parts.
speaker-2 (07:02)
But the catch is you have to think ahead. The drawings have to be right. Once the pieces arrive, the building needs to fit together the way it was designed. We've been on projects where the walls and roof were up in weeks instead of months. Pre-fabrication and mass timber aren't just about speed. It helps us build better buildings quicker.
speaker-1 (07:22)
You build a 100 unit, six story wood frame building, you need a very accurate assembly of the building of all the components, especially the wall panels. As you know, Dwayne, the mistakes can grow from quarter inch mistakes on the main floor up to one and a half inch mistakes on the top floor by just compounding all of the errors and cutting and so on and so forth. So yeah, I know it's amazing, you know, in retrospect, we've come sort of from the dark ages as you were, and we're just.
we're sort of now getting into, as you called it, high-performance building, where, oddly enough, the circle about durability has come around in the sense of, think the push for sustainability is really just another term for durability. And that's kind of the push towards building durable, stout buildings, whether they're out of wood, concrete, mass timber, all of those things.
speaker-0 (08:11)
You had the ideas of prefabricating balconies on a project that we're working on. And you said durability. Well, that's durability. Don't you think that just translates into affordability?
speaker-1 (08:21)
Well, it definitely does. mean, you do the equations, durable buildings, durably stoutly built will last longer. I mean, that's the simple truth of it. I think the Canadian Building Code is designed to deliver buildings with a 60 year life cycle. So we know that if a building is properly maintained over that 60 years, you'll see it last about a hundred years. Attention that we're seeing to detail in assemblies, know, rain screen, air barriers is a subject.
near and dear to my heart, because I know that it makes all the difference in a building envelope. We're going to see examples of our building. We won't see it, but, you know, in generations to come, if there are good examples of what's being built now to a higher performance, these buildings are going to last longer than 60 years. They're going to last well into the future. They could could easily last for hundreds of years if they're properly maintained. So that to me is the essence of sustainability. It's building something that, you know, with simple materials like wood.
think about it. is the ultimate sustainable material. As a friend of mine once said about cellulose insulation, it's something that you can put in a wall and 100 years from now somebody will strip it out when they're taking the building down and they could literally reuse it again. It could go for another 100 years. So that's just all sequestered carbon, that sort of thing, right?
speaker-0 (09:40)
technology
advancements change and then you and others evolving with that knowledge to make buildings durable. That's what we're talking about.
speaker-1 (09:49)
Yeah, thank you for referring to that balcony example of our project recently. As you know, we looked at that seriously and we did a lot of research on it. We decided to not proceed with it on that particular project, but we've done our homework now. We are very sure of our costs and we can advance that now in many other examples in new projects coming up. And we've actually seen a few where we see the application for it.
speaker-2 (10:15)
So Paul, I think we both can agree that bringing a contractor on board as soon as possible is very valuable. And not all our projects get that. You guys come in usually around construction drawings, but some of the projects you guys come in for design development and schematic design, For the projects that you as a project manager and construction manager, when you're not on those projects, what should architects actually do earlier?
speaker-1 (10:40)
Well, I think if architects try to build a team as best they can with their partners and perhaps, ⁓ you know, with a contractor on board that is knowledgeable and can help them, then obviously that's going to go a long way, especially when it comes to issues of value engineering, as you know, because that's the key in our business. But yeah, getting stakeholders, people that actually do the work, involved as soon as possible. In essence, as contractors, that's what we do as well. We work with a lot of trusted.
partners, know, we're as good as the people that work with us. And we know, I've learned recently, Andrew, doing our balcony design for our project together by collaborating with a guy that I've worked with in the industry for many years. He's very knowledgeable about mass timber. And we all learned at Edge Construction a lot about the techniques.
speaker-0 (11:30)
You do need a team, you need a strong team and you need a team that works together. It's well said what you said there is having a team, being able to work with the con.
speaker-1 (11:37)
Yeah, well with all the contractors too. I mean there are so many key professionals that we work with and not only contractors but you know engineers and professionals that get involved in the project. The more you have a team that's worked well together in the past, worked together again, makes a huge difference. And I see that, you in answer to your question, I see that a lot on different projects. Even if it's a casual collection of consultants, if they've had a certain amount of track record with each other.
and if hopefully it's been positive, in most cases it has been, then there's much more openness to dialogue and collaboration, because that's really what it comes down to.
speaker-0 (12:15)
Yeah, that's well said.
speaker-2 (12:17)
So that's definitely one of the reasons what makes a good project is the design team, right? Because it starts from the beginning and it needs to grow into something. So having a contractor on board early has always benefited the end product. What do you think the key factor between the relationship between a contractor and an architect to produce one of these good projects?
speaker-1 (12:38)
I must admit with the track record that I've got, can kind of spot it most of the time. And it makes a huge difference working with an architectural group that's invested in their work or really interested in the work. Let's put it that way. And it doesn't have to be a high rise or a makeup project or whatever. can be, gosh, it can be a house, right? Well, interest, Andrew, more than anything, I mean, you you can talk about passion, but interest is so key. I find that with a lot of the people I mentor these days is that I can spot them.
speaker-2 (12:55)
Passion's part of it too.
speaker-1 (13:07)
If they're interested in what we're doing, then I'll help them any way I possibly can because that interest is what drives them. It drives good building in the end, right?
speaker-0 (13:16)
Paul, what I've noticed too is that what you're saying is it's the interest, it's the ability to listen. You know, can work with people that just can't. ⁓ They're certainly there, they've got all the qualifications, but they have the ability to listen. And that says a lot, I think, about how people and teams work together. What dynamic are you looking for to make a project successful?
speaker-1 (13:39)
Well, the dynamic that you're looking for, that we're looking for, is again that there are people that you respect and you've worked with in the past and you have an expectation again that they want to push the project forward. We know from much of our recent experience, Dwayne and Andrew, that you can have consultants on large teams that are just mass producing work, you know, because they're under the gun, they've got too much work, especially in the last five to 10 years, we've seen a lot of that because
right across the industry, people have been stretched and overworked. And as a consequence of gotten into the habit, I think you'll agree that they'll be trying to just promote and put out cookie cutter design and then just be satisfied with that. And I'm sure as a designer, you find that very frustrating because you can't put your best foot forward or you're not getting the best information that you know you could get from those consultants. Right. And that's frustrating. It's not only frustrating for you, but we can see that process as well.
And we find that when we're involved in those groups, we find that, and you very often, know, it's, the same as with trades. We often say, you know, we're building a project, say there's two dozen trades. If we can get half of them being top notch, we get all the right people in the mix. Then we can muddle through with others that are weak and get through the process. know, there were.
speaker-0 (14:59)
even
for you is trades. Like trades for you, you said trades for us, it's consultants as well. know, when Andrew and I realized, mean, Andrew, we've realized more recently that we can't have the consultant we really, really, really want on a project. And they're not retained, they're not hired. It does make a difference if we do feel the lack of having the right teams. And you're saying trades that works on both sides.
speaker-1 (15:23)
I can see that. Yeah, I know exactly what you're talking about because we've had mutual experiences in that regard, right? And it's sometimes when the odd thing I see in consultants is very, very accomplished people. But again, their focus is not on job one, as it were, right? On the design, on getting it through. I know Andrew's expressed that concern and we've shared it, right?
speaker-0 (15:44)
And the frustration really, isn't it? It's frustration in the end for most of us.
speaker-1 (15:49)
I think it speaks to a marketplace that's been overextended for quite a while now. And I think that's if we know now it's leveling off a bit. I'm being optimistic here, but I think hopefully we start to see people become a little less stressed. But hopefully we get away from this, you know, thing of just pushing off what I'd call cookie cutter design, right? You know.
speaker-2 (16:10)
So how do you pivot to affordable housing? A lot of people say mass produce housing, build more housing. So how would a contractor contribute to help create affordable housing? Is there something that you guys do specifically that benefits the whole process?
speaker-1 (16:27)
Well, you know, it's a good question. It's so ⁓ current, right? You know, what is it? I know of a contractor who I respect and I probably shouldn't drop names here, but suffice it to say he works in the interior and I met him through COVID. He's my age. He's been in the industry that length of time. And with huge respect, I've watched him and what he does in the buildings he puts up. And these are multi-residential buildings and he works almost exclusively in the interior places like Pemberton and Golden and that sort of.
and he's putting together the highest quality, highest performance buildings, like their passive house equivalent, their high performance buildings.
speaker-0 (17:07)
I want to jump in right here and clarify something because this comes up a few times in our conversation. When we talk about high performance buildings, this isn't actually a new idea. What is new is that high performance is now baked into our building codes. It's no longer optional. It's mandatory. So when Paul here mentions things like passive house, there are a few other terms you might've heard like step code, energy certifications, performance ratings.
But at the end of the day, they're all pointing to the same goal. It's about how a building performs, not just how it looks on paper. That's really what sustainability means. It's designing, constructing buildings that use less energy, perform better over time and do what they're supposed to do long after construction is finished.
speaker-1 (17:56)
And he's doing it for about 30 to 40 % less than standard building builders in his region. And the secret sauce is he's got a consultant team that he's worked with for years, people that he knows and trusts and all like to work together. They build fairly simple, nondescript buildings. He comes up with some really cool innovations in how to do things like balconies and that sort of thing. That's what's got me that interested into that.
And the other part of it that really shocked me is that because he works in small communities, he hasn't got the labor pool. So what he does is he hires over 50 % of his laborers and basically do, you know, they do all the formwork, the framing, they do their own drywall, they're doing the insulation. They don't require many trades. And the trades they do have, they're happy to work with and they move around. They're like gypsies, they work in different towns, they take on these different projects.
And I've watched this because it's basically a paradigm for smart building. This guy has put together a team, both the design and construction team, that can pull this off and do it at incredible discounts to the norm. And they're very stout buildings. You're talking buildings again that are passive host. And he won't, for instance, he won't do passive host certification because that costs too much. Yeah. Right. You know, he's just totally practical. He just goes, nope. But he knows what he's doing.
speaker-2 (19:19)
From what I hear from you is it's really about the team because everything what you just said there from the consultants to the internal, it's all about that team. It's about the leadership of the team and how that's all put together from the pre-design all the way into the construction back down into the occupancy. So very interesting.
speaker-1 (19:25)
Sorry.
speaker-0 (19:38)
And that's how we met Andrew, essentially, you know, Paul, basically, so to say, this is how things are really done. And that's the title of this podcast.
speaker-1 (19:47)
And Duane got me involved in a series of projects after we got to know each other initially in North Vancouver. And it seemed that every time we did a project, we won an award, which was quite remarkable. was reflecting back on that, Duane, some of the stuff we did in North Van, especially. was, at the time, you sort of, you don't think of it as being special, right? It's just work and it's more of it and so on. But...
speaker-0 (20:12)
I mean, you're the type of guy that would give you the phone call and say, you know, I have this great idea about something. And as architects and engineers were like, no, don't break the norm, don't.
speaker-1 (20:20)
Don't do it. But you brought me a bunch of those too, Dwayne. Remember that building we did on West 23rd in North Vancouver in the early 2000s? It was a small little apartment building, but it's amazing. I remember being approached by a guy in the industry, somebody again in construction management from another company. And he asked me what I'd done recently. And I mentioned that building.
speaker-0 (20:42)
Yes, yes, right. This is part of our architectural vocabulary in our overall design vernacular here at Secrest Architecture. On the West Coast, it rains a lot, so buildings need real protection from weather, but at the same time, we don't want to overdo it and create overheating issues. The way we balance that is through shading, especially with roof overhangs. Those overhangs protect the building from rain and sun at the same time.
speaker-2 (21:10)
Building a building is never just about concrete and steel. On paper, everything lines up. The moment construction begins, reality tends to show up. A small decision can snowball into a big problem. And sometimes, things don't go to plan. They go completely sideways. In this conversation, Paul gets candid about when things go wrong and what's at stake.
speaker-1 (21:36)
I've been advised to be polite on the show, so I'll do my best, but we just went sort of quietly ballistic when we saw some of the mistakes that were made in design, and they weren't caught by anybody. And it also amazed me that there were a number of other professionals we'd worked on previous projects with. I won't name any names, but a lot of them are the same people. They're interchangeable from project to project, that they had been working with this design group and watching this go down.
and not responding and there had been no response to the design deadlines and so on. You know, the various drawings, 50 % complete, 75 % complete. Nobody else was bringing up the base issues, which were, there was no supervision and they just were without any kind of leadership. They did not know where they were going and they were going very quickly. They were going to go bankrupt is what it was going to lead to. So if you want to paint a bad picture, that was a
Great example of.
speaker-0 (22:35)
Right, and the client, do I allotted stick? Allotted.
speaker-1 (22:38)
A lot at stake, yeah. And it's just amazing. And you know, it's, could give you numerous examples, not that I've necessarily been involved in, but I've seen in proximity. In Vancouver, throughout this building boom, especially in the latter days of it, we've seen some massive projects just suddenly go dark, you know, and we know what's driving it. It starts from the very beginning with ad hoc design.
without any serious thinking through of the consequences. And when we talk about consequences, we're talking about costs. Have these designs been costed and have they been worked out? And has everybody agreed all the way through the process? I know it's difficult for all of us, because we all have our love of what we think should go in a building. But in the end, somebody has to pay for it, right? They have to pay for it, and they have to make it make money for them, right? This is, again,
They wouldn't go and build buildings and do this unless it made money for them.
speaker-0 (23:34)
to be
measured if you didn't point it out, right?
speaker-1 (23:36)
Yeah. Right.
We realized that we had no choice. We were either going to get this thing resolved or we're going to get out. It was that bad. We had no choice. We've seen others that we reluctantly go into and get involved in. And believe me, there's a lot of gnashing of teeth as we go through it and afterwards, but what are we doing? Why are we being involved in this? I worry sometimes working on certain projects. I worry more about the people I work with, like the young people who have learned.
They've cut their teeth on some good work. And when they start to see poorly designed and poorly led projects that are hastily put together without concern for basic principles, they start to lose interest in what they're doing. They start to think, why am I bothering? Maybe I should go and be a window cleaner. They really get depressed. And I sort of do my best to tell them, well, it's not a perfect world. Your experience that you gain, sometimes you learn how to do something right by learning how to do it wrong first.
You know what mean? So that's been my experience, my work life, my early work life. I worked on a lot of really sketchy stuff, you know, like there was a lot of sketchy work in Vancouver. Let me tell you, as we know, as you mentioned before, there's a history of it.
speaker-2 (24:50)
Yeah, so Paul, if you were invisible in an early project meeting, what might you overhear that would make you think, this one's going to hurt? This is going to be a bad project.
speaker-0 (25:01)
Is it a behavior? Is it ego? Is it somebody's speech pattern? You know, is it?
speaker-1 (25:06)
What is it? Andrew, if I was invisible in that room, I mean, I would look for the person that was the most confused, I guess, in terms of what they were trying to get out of the project, right? Yeah, it's fascinating because, you know, sometimes you can see these things start on all the wrong foot and then turn around and work out quite well, surprisingly.
speaker-0 (25:24)
Every project starts with an idea. It's colliding with reality of really getting it built and how it's going to get built. What does that collision usually look like from your side of the table? There's a bit of a reality check. So let's say it another way, you've just got a set of drawings and they're this thick and you have to decode them. I mean, that's a lot what contractors do and they start divvying it up and try to find the right team and process. ⁓
speaker-1 (25:50)
And just how to use that creatively and how we can come about doing something that will still pass, you know, people will want to buy it. And it's obviously something that again, going back to it's something durable and sustainable and we can be proud of when we finish.
speaker-0 (26:05)
Paul has worked on more projects that he can even count, but one stands out. It's the King Edward Villa in Vancouver. It's a six story mixed use rental building. was completed in 2017. On the surface, it's impressive. Lead, platinum, certified, highly energy efficient and designed with sustainability at its core. But that's not the part here that really matters. Paul didn't just build King Edward Villa.
He made a series of intentional choices that shaped how the building would perform, how it ages, and how it impacts the people that live in it. In this next conversation, he takes us back to thinking behind the project. It was thinking behind the project with the decisions, the trade-offs, and the priorities that guided the building long before the first shovel hit the ground.
speaker-1 (26:55)
Well, that had to be high performance. It had to meet the standard, right? It had to be lead gold. The difference was between hydronic floor heating, which is fearfully expensive in a wood frame building and very stupid, I mean, in a sense, because you're putting these hot water pipes in a very thin concrete casing and expensive and not durable. So to me, that was just no, like, here's an alternative. And we'd recently been working on a project that involved double walls.
So that was one of the innovations and that's one that we still work on. Believe it or not, it's still an innovation all these years later. So because one of the calculations at the time was putting on exterior insulation on a wood frame building, which to me is sort of an oxymoron. It's not a good idea. Stupid. You can do it with a double wall construction. In that particular case, we filled that double wall with cellulose insulation and dense pack cellulose insulation, which not many people had tried.
It had been tried in custom single-family homes, but again, it wasn't getting into the multi-residential sector. So that was a big innovation.
speaker-0 (27:58)
and
you started to realize this is a new method at the time. I lead gold, I remember.
speaker-1 (28:03)
Another one of my favorite is open web trusses, right? And again, this is like going back to the future because open web trust design is something that's been around since the second world war. It's treated now by people as though it's innovation. It's well, I'm glad they see it that way. It's just smart stuff because you can build these bowling alleys in the floor assembly where you can run all of your rough ends, all your utilities, et cetera, into the building without dropped ceilings.
And this particular prefab company at that point was building their own trusses. They also were very innovative when we talked about it they said, you know what, what we should do is top hang these trusses. So double plate on top of the trusses and hang them on top of the party walls. And when we did that, we were able to firestop the party walls right up to the underside of the floor sheathing quite easily. And that all made it into the innovations woodwork article. won, we got Lee platinum on that building and we won an award for innovation on that building, but
Those were just some of the things, double walls, these custom made floor trusses and the load path in that building. And it's quite true. The way it was designed, we ended up with very little differential shrinkage over six stories, which is unheard of, right? You know, like about a half an inch and it can be done. I still like this very simple form of a building that we were talking about earlier. Does everything go cookie cutter? Well, everything has been cookie cutter, right?
Everything's a shoe box, right, in essence, right, in how we design. The way we get away from that is when we start cantilevering things and when we start putting recessed upper decks and that sort of thing and changing the load path down through the building. That's when we make these buildings in essence inefficient. And that's where your cost efficiency, I mean, just goes, just spirals downhill.
speaker-0 (29:50)
So that innovation is certainly met with resistance. mean, you're dealing with trades and people that are just not used to doing things that way.
speaker-1 (29:57)
It's mostly consultants, the biggest resistance.
speaker-0 (30:00)
as as it's us, not the trade people, it's us.
speaker-1 (30:03)
The trade people, they've experienced it firsthand, they go, you know, the typical thing we get when we build a building like that is to say, why aren't we doing this all the time? And I just shake my head and go, you know, maybe it takes 20 years to turn a ship. I don't know, because I've been turning. I've been turning for a long time. And it's like, takes a long time to turn a ship. Right. It really does. Suffice it to say it was a remarkable building. It still is a remarkable building.
I was very lucky to be engaged in it. In fact, Dwayne had it in a way, an indirect influence on me getting that project, being involved in that project. And it changed my career quite a bit to quite a degree. And I worked with that particular company for three or four years as their advisor, as a construction and development manager. But they went bankrupt. They lost everything. And it was because they were building like in the 2008, 2009 period where financial markets were taking off.
they got caught in a very large speculation, like you might remember for a high rise project in conjunction with these guys. And they went down. But on the other hand, they built something that was completely remarkable for its time. That money funded a building. And it's funny, that building's in North Vancouver. And I asked the real estate agent about it recently, like, is there any, how often do you have turnover there? And he said to me, you know, Paul, that building is like Hotel California. People buy in and they don't leave. So.
Yeah, amazing. That was a win. Yeah, was a huge win.
speaker-2 (31:37)
We can easily say that construction technology never stands still. Some of those innovations move the industry forward. Others look great on paper, but don't survive first contact with the job site. That's where we took the conversation with Paul next. The five decades of hands-on experience, he's seen trends come and go, technologies succeed and fail.
speaker-1 (31:59)
Well, it's ongoing. It's here. It's...
speaker-0 (32:02)
It's prefab, isn't it? It's mass timber, isn't it?
speaker-1 (32:05)
Prefab's been around for quite a bit and it's, modular building's getting a bit of an oversell right now, simply because everybody wants to be seen to be doing something. Modular building doesn't work in this market because it's not big enough. It's that simple. Vancouver is a small market. There's one modular builder, Britco, out in the valley. They built their business on building trailers for construction sites in BC. There's a major prefabber in Port Kells called Mitsui Home Canada.
speaker-0 (32:19)
That's good.
speaker-1 (32:33)
who are a big Japanese firm that came here to basically to buy Canadian, the best Canadian lumber and ship it back pre-cut to Japan. And they literally sell our lumber back to us in the form of prefabricated wall panels and so on. And remarkable technology that they've embraced and used. that's all the future, right? And so the thing with mass timber, which is very interesting by the way, and especially the hybrid mass timber designs.
They're coming up now with point loading on metal. They're kind of doing a hybrid HSS, which is really the way to go. And mass plywood panels, right now there's only one plant in North America that does it. And it's really innovative. It's called Freres, it's in Oregon. And there's a company in Quebec called Nordic Structures. They build mass timber out of black spruce. Black spruce is a weed in the boreal forest. And they actually take fillets of it, like two by two fillets, four feet long.
and then blue laminate them into these enormous gigantic beams. There's a structure in Montreal called the Stade de Soccer in East End Montreal. It's absolutely, it's a wonder of the world if you go and see that. That's the future.
speaker-0 (33:43)
If you were to wrap this up and talk about maybe even lessons learned or what certainly I've learned a little bit more today, how would you sum up this conversation with Paul?
speaker-2 (33:53)
I think it's two things. think it's building better buildings. And I think that comes from the wisdom, the team, the leadership, and how all those things come together.
speaker-1 (34:05)
I don't want you making this out like I'm a saint, because I'm not, right? You know, I've made a lot of mistakes as well along the way, right? I've been lucky now in retrospect in my career, but at the times that I was being lucky, I had no idea. I didn't have a clue. And there were times when I was really quite worried, you know, that we went through some pretty rough stuff. You know, the eighties were horrendous, right? You know, in terms of building in Vancouver, I went from being a very stable, well-off young.
union carpenter making boatloads of money to running a crew of guys. I had two apprentices working for me at one point and that was my crew. We renovating houses on the North Shore and ⁓ I'm lucky I had a really very talented wife who brought in lots of money and has had a really good career as a building code specialist. I guess just if you really, and again we've spoken to it with Andrew.
has the same feeling, and know Dwayne does as well, if you're committed to what you're doing and you really are interested in it, then you're gonna do well overall. ⁓ There'll be moments when you really question yourself and your sanity and should I be doing this?
speaker-0 (35:15)
You know, there it is. Yep. And you know what I've heard and what I've just want to summarize and lessons learned around it. It's just, comes back to, we've all keep saying, you got to have the right team. It's the team, the team. And we heard that from Paula. So it's, it's really team building. It's team building with the contractor in mind, collaboration. You said passionate, being passionate and interested. know, projects, as I said earlier, I mean, projects are complicated.
And we need good teams to pull this together. It's not the same platform as when you started out, Paul, and you've seen it evolve. And we talked about a lot of things in here, but it just sort of reinforces what I believe. And I know it's something that should be left. said it earlier, architecture should not be left up to architects alone. And we're certainly very proud to have you, Paul, as part of this building industry and building process. You've certainly taught us a lot.
And we're still doing it. And that's awesome.
speaker-1 (36:15)
I want to keep doing it. I'll be sending my resume over fairly soon, by the way.
speaker-2 (36:22)
You've been listening to Behind the Build, where great design, great builds, and better communities come together. See you next time.
speaker-0 (36:37)
Everything Pus production. ⁓
I'm gonna pat us where you get your pod count.
speaker-1 (36:44)
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