Month: September 2024

National Day for Truth & Reconciliation

Posted on by Gary Snider

Be patient with the people you encounter today.  Speak words of kindness. Reach out a helping hand.  And remember the children who did not return home.

There is no easy way to mark this day.  Thousands of First Nations children were removed from the families who loved them, taken to re-education schools where every effort was made to separate them from their culture, language and personal dignity.  In great error, some who staffed these schools thought that they were helping, while others were outright bullies and abusers.  It’s hard to overstate the immense harm that was done. The injury inflicted upon children for a century and a half accumulated in their families and communities and continues to ripple through thousands of lives today.

For a company that builds structures out of wood, how do we begin to grapple with our place in what has happened?  At this point, our answer is to acknowledge the harms done; and the ignorance that allowed children to suffer.  But it can’t rest there, we also need to commit ourselves to change how we think and act.  This work requires awareness.

Our plan for addressing the gaps in our awareness is still taking shape, but it has four starting points:

  • Our managers and client-facing staff are participating in cultural awareness learning, designed and led by a First Nations elder / knowledge keeper.
  • We are doing more business with suppliers who are indigenous-owned or led. We’re also aiming to employ more First Nations and Metis people.
  • We’re applying Indigenous perspectives to how we use forest resources. This starts by making better use of the wood we buy, knowing where our wood is harvested and that it is being done with care for the future.
  • We’re going to continue to build a work culture that respects and is thankful for the life and beauty in the forest products we receive and use.

Reconciliation is a big word, a nice word, but left on paper it’s just an empty word.  It needs our action to become a beautiful word!

Join us in acting out what reconciliation looks like.

In front of a newly built home at Shoal Lake 39.
Jeffery Thompson, Housing Manager (2nd on left) and Wayne Allary, WASA Construction (Center) with Cornerstone staff.

Our Forests- Balancing Protection & Use

Posted on by Gary Snider

How do we live well and benefit from forests while ensuring that they can thrive and continue to support life? Forests play a vital role in our planet’s well-being. They impact the lives of millions, providing income, recreation, food, and shelter.  When treated with respect, forests are life-giving, when misused or damaged they can take life away.  It’s something that is on the minds of many of us whose lives and livelihoods connect with forests.  Sustainability groups like Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) are also struggling to find the best answers to this question.

The desire to avoid loss can occasionally be short-sighted. Since the 1930’s forestry practice has attempted to protect large swathes of trees from fire. For many regions in North America, recent fire seasons have been made more intense because of past practices that suppressed fire.  Over-protection allows disease, insects and natural die-back to create dry, fuel-rich, fire-prone forests.  A better balance is needed.

The answer that forest stewards are discovering is that forest-adjacent communities are often in the best position to care for forests. They have the most at stake in finding the right equilibrium between use and protection.  In Canada, this will often be an indigenous community.  When people have their wellbeing connected to forests and are fully aware and committed to forest health and productivity, good outcomes follow.

First Nations bring a unique forest-use perspective that extends generations into the future.  Their worldview, often expressed in spiritual terms, requires humans to regard all living things, the land, the water and sky as being intimately linked and filled with a sacred respect, a mutual obligation to care and an infinite loop of reciprocity.  It’s hard to imagine a more sustainable and balanced outlook.

If there are concerns that such a view is incompatible with modern forestry, one need only look at the new forest regime in NW Ontario, where a First Nations owned forest management company Miisun has operated since 2010.  Traditional knowledge and values combined with a focus on healthy relationships between First Nations and forest companies is showing the way forward.  David Graham, president of Weyerhaeuser Company, says the Kenora and Whiskey Jack Forests are proof that it works well. He wants to see First Nations as forest resource managers across Canada.

If we empower and support First Nations to be leaders in forest management, we will be addressing colonial injustice and restoring a balance between protection and use.

Mass Timber Group Summit

Posted on by Gary Snider

Cornerstone’s Mass Timber Team recently travelled Denver, Colorado to attend the Mass Timber Group Summit, a conference bringing together the industry’s leading experts, designers and builders.

Day 3 of the Summit was a chance to get out of the conference venue in downtown Denver and visit two project sites where mass timber is being used. For Michael Pankratz, Cornerstone’s vice president and design lead, it was his favourite day. Following university, he spent two formative years working in construction, so any chance to put on a hard hat and see the practical working out of a design is a good time.

Colorado School of Mines “Park Village” in Golden, CO.

The Mines Park Village is a large site intended to provide a cohesive community for students and their families attending the Colorado School of Mines. Five multi-storey apartments are under construction, arranged around a central community green space.  When complete they will provide accommodations for over 1000 residents.

The sunny site will make good use of solar panels to reduce grid power use.

The short project timeline, just 20 months from breaking ground last November, made collaboration between the site developer, architect, and builder essential. The construction approach is hybrid: stick-framed load-bearing walls, cross-laminated timber (CLT) floors, and non-bearing demising walls between units.

Allen Becker, VP & Field Operations for Milender White describes the construction sequence.

The contractor, Milender-White, has taken three measures to ensure that they stay on schedule:

  1. Determine every detail ahead of breaking ground. They created a detailed model for each structure, “a digital twin”, that shows every component from fasteners to individual sheets of drywall in each of the five buildings.
  2. Wall sections are being prefabricated off-site, with backing points and mechanical openings cut and wiring runs installed. Each wall element is numbered to line up with locations identified in the digital twin, and every site worker has a tablet, allowing them to access and quickly identify these locations.
  3. Self-performance. Rather than subcontracting work to independent trades, Milender-White utilizes its own trade teams to do the work. Everyone is on the same page and committed to their GC’s timelines.

As they toured, Michael noticed the CLT install team, just two workers, making rapid progress on one of the apartment floors.  In 20 minutes, they placed five-floor panels, or roughly 1,000 sq. ft. – an amount that a regular framing crew of four would only hope to achieve in a full day’s work.  It was a great demonstration of the speed and ease of using mass timber!

When done, the architect anticipates these five apartments will receive LEEDTM Gold certification.

One Line Studio, Greenwood Village, CO

The second tour destination was a recently completed architecture office in Greenwood Village, a tony suburban neighbourhood in Denver’s southeast.

Tim Politis is the Principal Architect for One Line Studio. He felt that when it came time to build their firm’s new studio space, they needed to heed the same advice they give their clients: be bold, try new things and embrace the best sustainable practices.

The structure is constructed with mass timber panels called Dowel Laminated Timber (DLT’s). As the name suggests, the 2×6 and 2×8 alternating boards in these panels are held together by hardwood dowels instead of glue or nails.  This project is the first to use this form of mass timber in the Denver area. The board-to-board offsets, or baffles are visually pleasing and provide three additional benefits:

  1. The baffles, allow the open office space to be surprisingly quiet, greatly reducing sound bounce.
  2. Electrical conduit, and mechanical ventilation openings can be neatly concealed within the baffles, creating a more uninterrupted, uniform look.
  3. The baffles effectively reduce glare from the building’s large window walls, an important consideration for designers whose eyes are glued to computer screens!

An intentional design choice was to leave the wood untreated—no finishes were applied. This decision was also extended to the building’s structural and decorative steel elements and to the natural plantings around the studio. This approach has already garnered a few pointed comments in a neighborhood of expensive homes and neatly trimmed yards. But like other innovators, Tim Politis is unfazed; he’s committed to seeing his vision and studio lead the way to more sustainable construction.