The University of Toronto’s Academic Wood Tower is closing in on structural completion at 77 metres, making it one of the tallest hybrid timber buildings under construction in North America and a working example of what Ontario’s expanded mass timber code allowance actually produces once it leaves the regulatory text and reaches a job site. The 14-storey building, rising above the university’s Goldring Centre for High Performance Sport, uses a structural steel elevator and stair core hung inside a glulam exoskeleton, connected with roughly 92,000 screws and no welding across 350 tonnes of steel. Contractor Pomerleau expects the building to open for the 2026-27 academic year.

A code pathway that did not exist three years ago

The tower’s height and structural approach were not possible under Ontario’s building code as recently as 2024. The province amended its Building Code effective January 1, 2025, raising the ceiling for encapsulated mass timber construction from 12 storeys to 18 and easing drywall encapsulation requirements that had made taller timber buildings costlier to detail. The Academic Wood Tower was designed under the earlier limit and adjusted its structural strategy as the higher allowance came into force, a sequence that illustrates a pattern practitioners have seen repeatedly since Canada and the United States began raising tall mass timber allowances in their respective codes: designers front-load risk into a project years before a code change is final, then reconfigure once it lands. Toronto layered its own requirement on top of the provincial change, mandating the elimination of welding from the project because of fire risk above an occupied athletic facility, which is what pushed the design toward an all-mechanical connection system.

The glulam came from Alberta, not Toronto

The tower’s glulam was manufactured by Western Archrib in Edmonton and supplied through Timber Systems Limited in Markham, Ontario, a routing that underscores how concentrated North American glulam production remains even as demand for tall wood projects spreads across cities that have no manufacturing capacity of their own. Structural glulam and cross-laminated timber (CLT) production is still clustered in a handful of mills across the Pacific Northwest, the Prairies, and the Southeast, which means a marquee project in one city routinely draws material from a mill a thousand kilometers away. That concentration is starting to loosen. Timberlab is completing a 190,000-square-foot CLT and glue-laminated timber facility in Millersburg, Oregon, designed to produce seven to nine million square feet of CLT annually and targeted for completion by the end of 2026, one of the largest single CLT investments in the United States and a direct response to demand that has outpaced domestic supply for several years.

Trade costs are still the wildcard on the input side

Mill capacity is only half of the cost equation. Engineered wood importers spent the first half of 2026 absorbing a separate 15% border-adjustment surcharge on oriented strand board and CLT imposed under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, effective February 24, 2026, which applied broadly except to lumber already carrying the existing tariff imposed under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 and to USMCA-compliant Canadian and Mexican shipments. That surcharge lapsed in July under its 150-day statutory sunset, but it briefly touched a meaningful share of the CLT supply chain: Canada supplies roughly 63% of CLT entering the United States and Austria another 29%. The underlying softwood lumber duties have moved in the opposite direction but not fast enough to matter yet. The Commerce Department’s April 2026 preliminary review cut the combined antidumping and countervailing duty rate on Canadian softwood lumber from 35.16% to 24.83%, and a final determination originally due in early August has not yet been issued as of this writing. Because the 10% Section 232 tariff sits on top of whatever the underlying rate becomes, the effective landed cost of Canadian softwood inputs, including the lumber that feeds domestic glulam and CLT presses, has stayed close to 35% through the summer regardless of how the antidumping math shakes out. For mills and fabricators pricing tall wood projects with multi-year design and procurement timelines, that combination of an expired surcharge and a still-unsettled duty rate makes input costs one of the harder variables to lock down.

What the fire and insurance picture still depends on

None of this changes the underlying fire engineering logic that has carried tall mass timber through code adoption in both countries. Encapsulated construction, char-rate design margins, and sprinklering remain the basis on which authorities having jurisdiction sign off on projects like the Academic Wood Tower, and insurers underwriting builder’s risk and completed-value coverage on mass timber projects continue to price around the same variables: moisture management during construction, the number and type of mechanical connections, and whether a project team has documented fire-testing data specific to its assembly rather than relying on generic char-rate tables. Toronto’s no-weld requirement adds a data point to that underwriting conversation, since an all-mechanical connection system changes both the labor sequence on site and the assumptions an insurer makes about tolerances and quality control compared with a welded steel core.

What to watch

Specifiers with tall wood projects in the Ontario pipeline should confirm whether their local building department has adopted the province’s 18-storey encapsulated mass timber allowance in practice, not just in principle, since municipal fire departments have shown a willingness to layer additional requirements on top of the provincial minimum, as Toronto did here. Buyers sourcing glulam or CLT from Canadian or Austrian mills should track the Commerce Department’s final softwood lumber duty determination and confirm with suppliers whether any successor to the lapsed Section 122 surcharge is under discussion in Washington, since another border-adjustment action could reprice contracts already in procurement. And anyone benchmarking mill capacity should watch for Timberlab’s completion announcement out of Millersburg later this year, which will be one of the clearest signals yet of whether US CLT supply is catching up with a project pipeline that has outrun it for most of the past three years.