Despite the recent construction boom that champions glass, steel, concrete and fibre cement siding, Toronto retains and celebrates much of its ‘brick and beam’ buildings that saw the re-use of old industrial brick and heavy timber. At its peak, the Don Valley Brickworks was pumping out 25 million clay bricks a year, and until the 1920s, at least 10 brickyards along Greenwood Avenue between Queen Street East and Danforth Avenue produced hundreds of thousands of bricks annually. Reimagining the historical building structure of heavy timber post-and-beam (old growth Douglas fir or eastern white pine) in contemporary engineered glulam columns and beams with and cross laminated mass timber floor slabs and wrapping within high performance enclosures, drags this historic style into the 21st century.
