A rendering of the exterior of the Leaside Innovation Centre. Originally planned for office space, which has been decreasing in demand since the start of the pandemic, it will now be designed to house wet labs. The new plans address the soaring need for lab space in Toronto’s burgeoning biotech sector, currently home to some 1,400 life sciences firms.studioCANOO Architects
Facing a persistently sluggish market for office buildings, one developer has pivoted his original plan to construct an environmentally leading-edge mass-timber building in Toronto to instead build lab and research space – without the wood.
Until late last year, the Leaside Innovation Centre at 154 Wicksteed Ave., near Eglinton Avenue East, was going to be a six-storey office condominium using “glulam” – glued, laminated timber that uses Ontario-grown wood – instead of steel girders and masses of concrete. Mass-timber buildings have become increasingly popular as a low-carbon alternative to steel and concrete.
The new plan for the Leaside site will see a building that is roughly the same size – 75,000 square feet compared with the original 77,000 plan – but no glulam. Ontario building code rules for wet lab space do not make it possible to use mass timber.
Economic as well as practical obstacles compelled the developer, Beeches Development Inc., to back away from the original project, company president Charles Goldsmith says.
“We made the change because we were finding in 2023 that office space was impossible to even give away,” he says. “My view is that this [lack of interest in office space] was an overreaction and there will be a correction, but that was the situation we were dealing with.”
Nevertheless, by mid-2023, Beeches was moving forward with the timber-frame project amid a market for office space that is uncertain at best. Demand for office space, once high in Toronto, has been dipping since the beginning of the pandemic.
Toronto’s office vacancy rate in the third quarter of 2023 stood at 16.9 per cent, according to Cushman & Wakefield’s Marketbeat Report, released at the beginning of 2024.
“When you reach 10-per-cent vacancy, it’s a glut from the landlord’s view,” says Daniel Lacey, associate vice-president in charge of CBRE’s life sciences team, which is working on the Beeches project.
Across the country, “overall vacancy will likely continue to climb through the majority of 2024, likely peaking somewhere in the last half of the year,” Cushman & Wakefield’s report says. “Any decline in vacancy afterwards is anticipated to be slow and moderate.”
Mr. Goldsmith says he was still moving forward with the mass-timber project in 2023 when he met with Toronto Economic Development Corp. (a city agency) to discuss details.
“All of us really wanted the timber-frame project to go ahead, but someone at the corporation said, ‘It’s too bad you can’t build a wet lab.’ I didn’t even know what a wet lab is, so I researched it,” Mr. Goldsmith says.
We made the change because we were finding in 2023 that office space was impossible to even give away.
— Charles Goldsmith, president of Beeches Development Inc.
A wet lab, Mr. Goldsmith explains, is a facility that deals with biological material, such as blood, brain tissue and parts of the body that undergo a biopsy or are used for research.
“Such facilities are also used for research and development of new drugs and vaccines,” he says. “Wet labs need different fixtures than dry labs, where work is done largely on computer screens and white boards.
“I discovered we could build a wet lab in Leaside but not with mass timber,” he continues.
In theory, a wet lab could be built with mass-timber technology, but right now it doesn’t make sense economically or in terms of keeping to the requirements of building codes, Mr. Lacey says.
“Mass timber brings a couple of challenges. One, you generally don’t have as high a floor load,” he says. A high floor load allows labs to install and operate sophisticated equipment for handling biological and medical material.
“In life sciences you want to have more than 100 pounds per square foot, and this is simply hard to do with mass timber,” Mr. Lacey says.
Secondly, wood is permeable. “While it looks great, you would have to enclose all the lab areas, so you don’t have permeability in all of your materials surrounding the lab. It would be a bit of a shame to build a mass-timber building and cover up all that timber,” Mr. Lacey adds.
The building is being adapted for wet labs, which handle biological and medical material and require different fixtures, equipment and systems than dry labs, where work is done largely on computer screens and white boards.studioCANOO Architects
Since July, 2022, the Ontario Building Code has allowed mass-timber construction of up to 12 storeys; this has spurred plans for numerous wood-based projects in the Greater Toronto Area and other cities and regions. But the requirements for wet labs hasn’t changed.
While it became increasingly clear to Mr. Goldsmith that demand for the kind of office space he originally planned was slow, the demand for lab space is huge. A recent white paper by Toronto Global, which works with businesses seeking to locate in the GTA, said the need for wet lab space is at “the tipping point … wet lab availability in the Toronto area is approaching near-zero levels, especially in the downtown core.”
Mr. Goldsmith says he envisions the new wet lab building as a promising site to anchor Toronto’s burgeoning biotech sector, which is home to some 1,400 life sciences firms, largely centred in the research corridor near the University of Toronto, MaRS Discovery District and hospitals such as Toronto General, SickKids and Mount Sinai.
He sees the Leaside site as a perfect complement to another major hospital – Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre – which is “just down the road” from the project. The development will also include now-expected environmental amenities such as bicycle parking spaces and a full change room and locker room.
In addition, the site is near the long-delayed Toronto Eglinton Crosstown light rapid transit line – a project initially scheduled to open several years ago but currently with no set completion date.
Both Mr. Goldsmith and Mr. Lacey add that they would have liked to use mass timber, known for its low carbon footprint, for the Leaside project. The Mass Timber Institute, based at the University of Toronto, estimates that every cubic metre of mass timber keeps one tonne of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere by sequestering the carbon and not requiring the intense fuel needed to make concrete.
But for now, they’ll have to focus on wet, not wood.
“It’s too bad lab buildings aren’t at the level of mass timber yet from a sustainability standpoint,” Mr. Lacey says. “Our goal for now is to build a really great lab facility.”