Tracey Mactavish is a cofounder and principal of MOTIV architects in Vancouver, British Columbia. Tracey started her career working in the Canadian north, where permafrost, extreme temperatures, and fly-in or yearly barge access communities were part of the everyday language of design and construction. This included working with indigenous communities throughout the north and later throughout British Columbia to develop schools, community buildings and affordable housing infrastructure – most often out of wood. She is an active advocate for the use of mass timber in mid-rise projects and continues to hone her design approach to seek efficiencies of modularity and repetition to improve the viability of mass timber against more typical construction methods and materials. Her most recent wood exploration was the design and building of her CLT garage/studio – with the clever ingenuity of Bernhard Gafner – using every component of the structure, including the gutter box to stiffen the structure.