BC to Be Home to North America’s First Mass Timber Single-Level Underground Parking Garage

According to a report by Daily Hive (6-9-23), a new mixed-use, mid-rise building project located on the Sunshine Coast of British Columbia will soon be home to North America’s first underground mass timber structure for vehicle parking. The facility will be built by Massive Canada Building Systems (MCBS), a Port Moody-based company that specializes in fabricating mass timber materials and modular building manufacturing.

MCBS has secured a contract to design and build a single-level underground mass timber parking facility at the 1.3-acre site. MCBS said it knows that underground parking lots are typically built as reinforced concrete structures, but they want to challenge that assumption. They point out that if mass timber structures—such as the tall trestle bridges in BC’s interior—are able to carry the weight of locomotives and freight trains and are still standing a century later, a mass timber parking facility can support a six-story building.

Daily Hive says the underground parking level’s roof, which forms the slab for the building structure above, will be supported by band beams over wooden posts. The slab and posts will be built using engineered wood, creating a rigid structural diaphragm, which will be attached to the interior walls around the elevator shaft, staircases, and perimeter walls.

The mass timber parking slab will support the six-story rental housing building, which will include two-story townhouses, a childcare facility with a playground, and a courtyard with a lawn, landscaping, trees, and walkways.

A development permit application is expected to be submitted this summer.