Vancouver Mass Timber Factory Plan Puts the Public on the Roof
- Aug 28
- 4 min read
A network of outdoor walkways opens across the production naves in Luca Fontana's Stanley Park competition entry, with British Columbia's tall wood chair on the jury.
Visitors cross the grassed roof planes in a visualisation of The Plank Factory, Luca Fontana's entry for a Mass Timber Innovation and Design Center at Prospect Point in Vancouver, where the pitched surfaces run rainfall toward the coast and the timber structure of the production naves stays visible under the eaves. Nothing has been built. (Image Credit: Luca Fontana)
Luca Fontana has drawn a mass timber factory whose pitched roofs carry the public over the production floor, with robotic fabrication visible from walkways that double as park routes. That is according to the project statement behind The Plank Factory, an entry for Design Unlimited’s Mass Timber Innovation and Design Center competition that designboom published on Wednesday.
Intersecting pitched roofs stretch across the complex, spanning long open naves sized for large-scale timber machinery without structural interruptions. Rather than the big-box shed the sector builds by default, Fontana gives the roof three jobs, organising production beneath it, circulation across it, and drainage through it.
The roof planes become a network of accessible outdoor walkways, and visitors cross above the manufacturing spaces and look down into them, turning robotic fabrication into the exhibit rather than the part of the operation kept behind a fence.
Fontana’s site visualisation steps the roof planes down the slope toward the water at Prospect Point, Stanley Park’s highest lookout over the First Narrows. The proposal exists only as a competition submission. (Image Credit: Luca Fontana)
Elevated routes open views back toward the park, and the building functions as a factory, demonstration space, lookout, and public promenade on a single footprint. Fontana keeps the material on show at both ends, as the product leaving the dock and as the structure the visitor stands on.
Rainfall collects across the sloping surfaces and runs toward the coast rather than into a drainage pipe. Fontana makes the water movement legible, tying the factory to the surrounding rainforest and the Pacific shoreline below.
Fontana reads the roofscape against the plank-house traditions of Indigenous communities of the Pacific Northwest, where heavy timber construction, broad roof forms, and passive ventilation answered the same climate.
Bolted glulam connections carry an external stair in a visualisation of the entry, the route Fontana draws between the ground and the roof walkways. (Image Credit: Luca Fontana)
Design Unlimited set the site at Prospect Point in Vancouver, which its brief calls a civic gateway where forest meets sea and Stanley Park’s highest lookout over the First Narrows and the Lions Gate Bridge. The brief told entrants to ground the work in respect for the land, histories, and ongoing cultures of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations, whose unceded territories include the site.
“Let every joint teach,” the brief reads, asking for light-touch pavilions threaded through meadow and forest to preserve trees and frame views to Burrard Inlet. Entrants had to deliver a legible entry to a hands-on Discovery Lab, an auditorium, a café, and a materials store, with a Timber Gallery anchoring the visit through full-scale mockups and life-cycle storytelling.
Behind that public face, the brief wanted research labs, tool-safe maker studios, and digital fabrication running CNC, laser, and robotic equipment, organised around a double-height assembly hall with crane and yard doors for one-to-one prototyping. Offices, loading, and timber storage connect to outdoor yards and accessible spurs onto the Raccoon Trail and Bridle Path.
Net-zero operation, discreet service routes, and trail-edge restrooms sat in the same document, which asks for a centre where timber innovation reads as clear and welcoming to somebody who wandered in off a walking track.
Robotic fabrication runs on the floor of the double-height assembly hall while visitors watch from a glazed mezzanine, in a visualisation of the arrangement the competition brief asked entrants to organise the building around. (Image Credit: Luca Fontana)
Thomas Tannert assesses the entries, and the Canada Research Chair and BC Leadership Chair in Tall Wood and Hybrid Structures Engineering at the University of Northern British Columbia gives the panel a working timber engineer. Mark Anderson, principal of Anderson Anderson Architecture and a professor of architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, sits alongside him.
Song He, design director at Chinese practice GOA, joins them, along with Kristoffer Tjerrild Lund, a senior architect at Copenhagen studio Cobe; David Jaehning, who also teaches architecture at Berkeley; and Karen YunJin Seong, who directs the school of architecture at the Academy of Art University.
Design Unlimited runs its programme for students, recent graduates, and young architects, and claims entries from more than 20 countries since it started. Its back catalogue covers a digital heritage museum in Cairo, a renewable energy research centre in Kopavogur, a gastronomy centre in Florence, and an urban air mobility terminal in New Jersey, now open for entries.
Its brief describes the Vancouver project as a habitat-sensitive campus woven into Stanley Park’s meadows, forests, and trail network, and cites British Columbia’s forestry strengths and building codes as the reason for putting it there.
The robots Fontana asks visitors to watch already run in Canadian laboratories. A 3.5-metre KUKA Quantec KR210 mills mass timber components to within 0.06 millimetres at the University of Toronto’s Department of Civil and Mineral Engineering, the first industrial-scale robotic fabrication system the department has installed for timber construction.
Norway puts the same equipment on live work, where Aanesland Treindustri and Sorlaminering shape six-metre laminated timber teeth for Kristiansand Zoo on robotic systems installed for the Oslo studio Oslotre. Robot Made collaborations between the Toronto department and the Daniels Faculty of Architecture have produced fastener-free assemblies on the research side.
Fontana’s answer to the brief removes the wall between the machine and the visitor, making the roof the route between them. Toronto stood its robot-made dome outside the Galbraith Building for most of an autumn, and kept the robot inside.
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