Platforms for Life (P4L) - A Mass Timber Product Platform for Urban Housing

The 21st century will see the most significant impact on urban development in the history of humanity. Cities across Canada, North America, and many other countries are facing a housing affordability and sustainability crisis that the incumbent construction industry has proven unable to address. With the increase of urban population, more multi-storey buildings will have to be built, old ones will need to be replaced, and a healthy density must be found. To achieve a significant environmental benefit in the AEC industry and improve affordability in urban housing, incremental innovation will not be enough. Considering the recently increased public discourse on urban housing supply and its affordability, sustainability, and qualitative aspects, the building industry cannot continue in the same direction. With the rising cost of materials, shortage of skilled labor, and more stringent code regulations, the problem is only getting more difficult to solve.

In short, buildings cannot be built as one-off projects anymore, but rather have to be developed as industrialized product-platform solutions that can be scaled and customized at the same time. Intelligent City overcame this challenge by developing a housing platform based on mass timber and prefabrication, which can be customized and recombined into a variety of buildings, many of which have or will start construction across Canada this year and next year.

1. Product Design - We developed urban housing as a product. As such, all systems, services, and interiors, are part of our product and have standardized and/or flexible solutions;
2. Building Systems – We developed, tested, and certified mass timber structural systems and façade systems to construct mid- to high-rise buildings completely out of mass timber components;
3. Manufacturing Automation – We combine Industry 4.0 principles and adaptive automation with industrial robots and one of the most versatile natural resources – wood. This enabled higher levels of customization and quality; and
4. ‍Parametric Software – We developed automatic design-to-manufacturing workflows that allow us to quickly design entire buildings according to our design constraints and possibilities and transfer that data directly into manufacturing instructions.

Together, these technologies and principles unlock the industrialization and productization of our industry.

Intelligent City developed and commercialized Platforms for Life (P4L) as a scalable, parametric, product platform for urban housing. P4L combines four main concepts and technologies to achieve enough scalability and adaptability for a Canada-wide roll out in the next years: