80 Atlantic

Set in the heart of Liberty Village, 80 Atlantic is Toronto’s first mass timber frame commercial building that includes office space with collaborative workspaces. It connects to a recently renovated building via a courtyard, creating a masterfully designed social space. The five-story mass timber structure includes a nail-laminated timber panel system supported by glulam beams. The developer envisioned 80 Atlantic as a prototype of what low-rise office buildings will look like for the next several decades.

The project is a modern interpretation of old brick-and-beam warehouse buildings with load-bearing masonry, big windows, and all mass timber floors and ceilings on the inside. The ground-breaking project pays homage to that historic look and feel while incorporating a high-performance façade.

Our team served as the building enclosure consultant on this project from the very beginning to the end. During design development, we played a supporting role for the façade development, then our team moved on to reviewing construction drawings and submittals, performing field reviews, and preparing for and executing whole building airtightness testing. We also provided consulting on construction moisture management for the timber structure.

One major goal of the project—to make an airtight building—drove a comprehensive quality assurance program from design through construction. Our team conducted a thorough review of the drawings and mock-ups and made reoccurring site visits to ensure that the building would perform up to the selected standard. The project design included a unique façade to give the building a distinguished look and feel, so attention to every small detail was integral to ensuring the building’s thermal and air control performance would be achieved without sacrificing the design.

Our team has a lot of experience ensuring the performance of mass timber buildings and designing enclosures in addition to extensive expertise on achieving building airtightness. Like many projects, the 80 Atlantic project faced challenges during construction, including extended periods of rain and other delays, however our team’s experience with similar issues allowed us to help the project team prepare for and mitigate those challenges.

As of April 2020, construction has been completed and the project has already won a myriad of design awards, including the Mass Timber Wood Design Award at the WoodWORKS! Ontario Awards. The project also received recognition by The Architectural Review/MIPIM Future Project Awards 2018 in the Office category during an awards ceremony at MIPIM held in Cannes, France.

Some building metrics are included below:

ENERGY USE INTENSITY (PROJECTED) 150 ekWh/m²/year

BENCHMARK (National Energy Use Database, office buildings after 2010) 252 kWh/m²/year

Greenhouse Gas Intensity (GHGi) 13 kg CO₂e/m²
Embodied carbon 2,143 t CO₂ e
Embodied carbon of equivalent steel building 2,849 t CO₂ e
Embodied carbon of equivalent concrete building 4,399 t CO₂ e