Element5 Missing Middle

Element5 Mass Timber Leverages GENERATE for Middle Missing Project Success

Element5, a leader in mass timber innovation and manufacturing, partnered with GENERATE to accelerate the delivery of cost-effective, sustainable, low-carbon housing at scale for a Toronto developer building hundreds of multi-family units. By combining Element5's mass timber expertise with GENERATE's automated design and costing platform, project teams can evaluate, model, and price mass timber solutions in days rather than months.

Together, we're helping developers, architects, and contractors reduce design timelines, improve cost certainty, and bring sustainable multifamily housing projects to market faster.

Concept for the interior courtyard at 2720–2734 Danforth Avenue. (Batay-Csorba Architects Inc., courtesy Collecdev-Markee Developments)

The latest Element5 project is located just east of downtown Toronto, is the 2720 Danforth project. It will offer affordable, community-oriented housing for the “missing middle” — medium density, lower-rise apartment buildings ideal for many city dwellers seeking affordable housing.

This eight-story mass timber project will offer 64 units once complete, for a development that sped from concept to completion using GENERATE’s platform.

Concept for the interior courtyard at 2720–2734 Danforth Avenue. (Batay-Csorba Architects Inc., courtesy Collecdev-Markee Developments)

The project is the first start in the Missing Middle Rental Portfolio conceived by Toronto-based real estate developer Collecdev-Markee, led by CEO Jennifer Keesmaat. The collection of properties, which will grow to include five new apartment buildings, all employ prefabricated modular mass timber construction.

Partnering with GENERATE

At 2720 Danforth, just as on hundreds of sites across North America, the team at Element5 chose GENERATE to accelerate their delivery of mass timber structural systems for low-risk, predictable and repeatable building projects. This fast-paced approach helps Element5 outcompete other manufacturers and prefab mass-timber suppliers, says Lee Scott, Director of Sales at Element5, with a background as a civil engineer and surveyor.

"Because we're focused on faster, de-risked project delivery, we're able to help project teams transform an architect's schematic design or an engineer's concept into a fully occupied mass timber building in as little as 12 to 15 months." says Scott. “That’s why we work with GENERATE - they are integral to our process, delivering a generative platform for quickly optioneering the design concept into fully quotable mass-timber buildings in a matter of days, streamlining the path to fabrication and manufacturing — even for affordable housing.”

“In this case, GENERATE really helped us to win the job,” he adds.

One of the early generative structural models. (courtesy GENERATE).

The 56,000-square-foot transit-oriented development (TOD) incorporates an existing heritage structure on a site served by both subway and regional transit. Designed as a pilot project for Collecdev-Markee's future Missing Middle rentals, Element5 provided schematic designs from Batay-Csorba Architects to GENERATE for rapid optioneering and costing. The process evaluated both hybrid and all-mass-timber structural solutions, including post-and-beam systems with concrete cores, helping the team quickly assess the most efficient path forward.

A comparison of three design alternatives delivered by GENERATE, with benchmark data and quantities of mass timber required. (courtesy GENERATE)

Structural Metrics Methodology (courtesy GENERATE)

Element5 needed to identify the most cost-effective, constructible, and de-risked solution among four structural approaches while also generating bid-ready packages for detailed budgeting and scheduling. Through GENERATE's optioneering process, the team evaluated multiple design scenarios and ultimately selected a hybrid CLT cellular system as the preferred path forward.

Speeding to Completion

For risk-adverse developers in the multi-family sector, working with Element5 and GENERATE radically compresses schedules with hard data on price and quantity. To further improve delivery certainty, Element5 recommends an offsite manufacturing approach that aligned with the developer's self-performed construction model.

Scott and his colleague at Element5, Dennis Bott, Vice-President of Sales and Marketing, needed only the early architectural rendering for GENERATE to produce optimized 3-D mass timber designs, ready for quoting. The output included all the material selections and pricing data, including linear feet of wall, floor toppings and quantities, and everything else.

"The developer received detailed and tangible design options, allowing the project team to estimate faster and more accurately,” says Bott. “This brought Collecdev-Markee to project validation very quickly. For every question they had, we already knew the answers needed, including allowing for flexibility to pick and choose from different systems, such as hybrid or cross-laminated timber (CLT).”

“That’s what de-risking is all about,” adds Scott. “Our sales leads get colder by the day, so when GENERATE allows us to remove red flags for the developer and check all the right boxes for their project team, everyone can estimate faster and more accurately. That confidence is helping move the developer’s first mass timber project forward, with a pipeline of 11 additional projects to follow.”