Building Good

As Building Good wraps up its sixth season, we’re looking back at the big ideas shaping the future of construction. A few key themes kept emerging. First, sustainability still faces financial and reg…

For thousands of years, humans have built with wood. Today, mass timber is changing the way we design, build, and experience our spaces. It’s strong, fire-resistant, and capable of storing carbon, of…

Canada’s path to net zero hinges on electrification. As the world’s fourth-largest producer of hydroelectricity, we’re primed to take a global leadership role. With the provinces and territories at d…

Climate change is polarizing. Between inflation, investor pressures, competitiveness, high interest, and economic sluggishness, climate change can seem like a far-off problem — just another thing to …

In Asia, bamboo has been used as a construction material for thousands of years. Prized for its availability, strength, and flexibility, it has over a thousand uses—including scaffolding during the c…

What if your city wasn’t just a place to live, but a tool to keep you healthy? Dr. Avi Friedman, Professor of Architecture at McGill University, and Alexandra Pollock, landscape designer and urban pl…

New York Times science journalist Emily Anthes, author of The Great Indoors, has spent a lot of time thinking about how buildings shape our lives, from mood to mortality. From designing hospitals tha…

Because of the Indian Act, Indigenous communities have been blocked from accessing capital markets, which means they haven’t been able to invest in critical infrastructure projects happening in their…

NIMBY. It’s a cursed acronym that can send chills down an urban planner's spine and jettison approved building permits into liminal space. It stands for “not in my backyard,” and it can stop even the…

Mushroom bricks sound like something straight out of science fiction or an 80’s arcade game featuring an intrepid pair of plumbing brothers. But mushroom bricks are more than just fantasy—they’re a b…

Urban planning is a constant negotiation between the bold dreams of the built environment and the delicate balance of the natural one. After all, we have a limited amount of space to terraform, and p…

Wood isn’t what it used to be. Virgin lumber is generally less dense and grown faster than wood that was harvested from natural old growth forests. But logging what’s left of those old growth forests…

Buildings from around the world represent the culture they were built in. From gothic cathedrals in Europe to glittering glassy office towers. So why don’t we always think about local culture when we…

If you head downtown in any major Canadian city you will see a lot of construction, and it is mostly large residential towers that are going up. That means more people living there, but the roads sta…

Human nature makes the future a scary place. Scientists had predicted pandemics for decades, but the Covid-19 pandemic still felt like it came out of nowhere. Our tendency is to react to events, rath…

If job sites can be hostile environments for women and nonbinary people, how do we get them into construction in the first place, so they can change those workplaces? Nora Spencer founded Hope Renova…

When we’re starting a new, dream job, we can overlook some annoyances, thinking they might get better. As we get older, more experienced though, we might realise that annoyance was a red flag. That c…

Afdhel Aziz is a “recovering marketer”. His purpose used to be helping some of the biggest brands on the planet sell their products, and he did that by connecting them with “cool”. Now, he thinks tha…

Heading into downtown Toronto you see a forest of cranes and partly built condo towers. These buildings are providing new, much-needed housing… for a certain type of resident. They’re mostly small, w…

Cities are phenomenally complex, living spaces that can generate an overwhelming amount of data, so collecting, managing and using that data is also phenomenally complex. There are huge pitfalls to a…