Over the past year, 475 professionals attended 40 UBC CAWP events, organized into three programs: Timber Tech Connect (TTC) events, the SHAPE prototyping series, and TWIG (The Wood Innovation Group).
TTC is a series of seminars highlighting British Columbia’s advancements in mass timber and wood prefabrication offered collaboratively by the UBC Centre for Advanced Wood Processing (CAWP), the Wood Innovation Group and Fast + Epp.
Timber Tech Connect | Photos: The Wood Innovation Group
Five TTC events brought participants inside some of B.C.’s most innovative timber buildings, including a session about the Mass Timber Demonstration program Vienna House (a seven-storey, 123-unit affordable housing project in East Vancouver) that explored key learnings from its prefabrication and mass timber assembly. Each event included members from the project team—developers, architects, engineers, and builders—offering honest, technical deep dives into material choices and design strategies.
Launched alongside TTC, the SHAPE workshop series offered five online sessions on topics like decentralized manufacturing and mass timber housing, with presenters from ChopValue, DIALOG, and Fast + Epp. These workshops extended technical learning opportunities to workers in the value-added industry who are new to the industry or existing workers who want to add to their knowledge pool.
Meanwhile, TWIG’s 27 events continued to foster grassroots dialogue and networking, with in-person meetups in Vancouver and Squamish supported by a growing online community and regular newsletters. These gatherings—whether a Wood-First- Wednesday in a local workshop or a student field trip—served as vital entry points for the next generation of timber champions.
