Russell Cook spent fifteen years mastering one of commercial construction's least-understood systems — and his pitch to every skeptical owner comes down to math. Run the give-back analysis on suspended ceilings, slab coring, and ductwork, and the raised access floor often adds nothing to the budget at all.
Most commercial tenants never think about what's under their feet. The floor is just the floor. But in the right building — a tech campus that'll be reconfigured three times in a decade, a university lecture hall that needs USB and fibre at every seat, a mass-timber office where the whole pitch is exposed structural wood overhead — what's under the floor is the whole story.
Russell Cook has been telling that story since he took a posting on the Bow Tower in Calgary in 2009. The Bow: 56 storeys, 1.8 million square feet of raised access flooring, at the time the biggest single such installation in Canada. Ledcor was the construction manager; Cook was a young tradesperson who'd come up through drywall and the 675 union in Ontario, then joined a Toronto firm that specialized in raised access systems. The Bow was the crucible. "we've got three or four guys that we were all involved in that project that are still with us today, like 15 years later," he says. That core team — built on a shared formative project — became the founding crew of Cook's Construction & Consulting in 2018, now operating as Modular Interiors by Cook's out of Calgary.
The company started with a home office, personal vehicles, and a trailer. Today it runs a 2,500-square-foot warehouse showroom east of downtown and takes work across Western Canada, into Saskatchewan, British Columbia, and — as of a Q1-Q2 2023 tender with Palmer Low as GC — its first Atlantic Canada project: a 3,000-square-foot raised floor in a police operations centre in New Brunswick.
The product most architects forget to spec
Raised access flooring (RAF) originated in data centres, where routing power and cooling under the floor solved a density problem that ceiling-routed systems couldn't. The system is straightforward: steel pedestals bolt to the structural slab at a regular grid, and two-foot modular panels sit on top, creating a pressurized underfloor plenum. Power, data, and HVAC supply all live in that plenum. Pull a panel and reconfigure. The finished floor height runs from a few inches to whatever the structural engineer will allow; the panels themselves carry significant point loads.
Underfloor air distribution (UFAD) is what happens when you use that plenum for conditioned air. Supply air enters from the mechanical room at a moderate temperature and low velocity. Floor-mounted diffusers let it rise naturally through the occupied zone. Compared with overhead mixing systems — which push cold air down hard and mix it with the warm air rising from occupants — UFAD works with convection rather than against it. "you can bring it in a much more moderate temperature which means you're cooling less air," Cook says. The result is more free-cooling hours, lower fan energy, and a better air-quality experience at the desk level where it matters.
The energy case is verified. A peer-reviewed study (Cook's receipt, Applied Energy, 2010) confirms UFAD's energy advantages over conventional overhead mixing for commercial occupancies.
Do the give-back before you say no
The number that stops most conversations is the installed cost: roughly $15 per square foot for the RAF system itself. Against a baseline commercial build, that sounds like a significant premium. Cook's counter-argument is a give-back analysis.
A conventional office ceiling system — suspended grid, tiles, light fixtures, diffusers — runs money. Slab coring for electrical and data sleeves runs money. The ductwork to serve an overhead mixing system runs money. When you remove those line items from the conventional budget and apply them against the RAF premium, the gap closes. In many projects it disappears entirely. "you're actually able to add a raised floor into your budget but not necessarily increase your budget," Cook says.
This is not a guarantee — it is a calculation that has to be done per project, per spec. But it is a reason not to dismiss RAF in the design development phase. The project that gets it right is the one where the mechanical and civil teams are at the table early enough to quantify the offsets.
Flexibility is the real long-term asset
Energy savings are recurring. Flexibility is the multiplier that compounds over a building's life.
Cook describes a scenario that plays out regularly with tech tenants: a company takes a floor, fits it out, and then grows or contracts faster than the lease cycle anticipated. With a conventional concrete-and-ceiling build, changing the layout means coring, re-routing, patching. With a raised floor and demountable glass partitions, the change is logistical. "we were able to quickly adapt and change and completely open up the layout — we just relocated some of the wire," he says. No construction, no dust, no downtime.
The same logic applies to a university lecture hall. Cook's crew has retrofitted lecture halls — roughly 400,000 square feet of them — with new USB, fibre, and power feeds over a single weekend. Pull panels, run cable, replace panels. The facility was back in service Monday morning.
Casinos demand a heavier spec — the Calgary casino job ran to 26,000 square feet with an 8-inch pedestal height — while police operations centres need constant reconfigurability as technology and staffing change. Same system, different loading requirements.
Mass timber is the natural pairing
One of the stronger architectural arguments for RAF arrives with the mass-timber movement. Exposed glulam and CLT ceiling structures are the design asset; anything that runs at ceiling level either hides in a plenum (defeating the exposed-wood point) or stays visible (requiring careful coordination).
Raise the floor, and the structural ceiling is genuinely clear. "mass timbers and raised floors — they go together so well," Cook says. Both are modular; both reward early coordination; both carry long service lives that justify the upfront investment.
The deficiency you actually have to worry about
Raised floor installations have one recurring deficiency, and it is not structural. Panel load ratings are well-understood and rarely an issue in spec-compliant projects. The failure mode is air leakage.
In a UFAD system, the underfloor plenum is under positive pressure. Any gap — at the perimeter, under demountable glass walls, around electrical penetrations — is a path for conditioned air to escape before it reaches the diffusers. The system loses pressure, distribution becomes uneven, and the energy benefits erode. "the biggest deficiency is going to be air leakage — that's the biggest hurdle that we have to get over," Cook says. The fix is gasketed panels at the perimeter and sealed penetrations, confirmed before the glass-wall contractor closes in the space.
Layout precision is the other non-negotiable. A raised floor installs in two-foot modules across a floor plate that might run 150 feet in a single direction. If the starting reference line is off by a fraction of a degree, the error compounds across every panel until the last run is uncloseable. "if that line deviates ever so slightly once you start adding on to that flooring system we've had it where you just can't even squeeze a tile in," Cook says. Get the first tile right. Everything downstream is a consequence of that choice.
All in-house, or don't bother guaranteeing
Cook's differentiator in a market where specialty work often gets subcontracted down the chain is a fully in-house, salaried installation crew. No labour brokers, no one-off subs learning the system on your project.
The practical effect is scheduling confidence. "if a contractor asks us to be here on September 1st at 11 o'clock in the morning we can guarantee that," Cook says. For a GC managing a commissioning sequence where the raised floor has to be in before the glass walls, and the glass walls have to be in before the mechanical commissioning — a missed start date is a cascade. A certified, salaried crew that travels to the job (Cook's has worked out of Airbnbs in BC and will do the same in New Brunswick) is a different reliability tier than a local sub who has three other jobs that week.
Growth has followed referrals rather than marketing. "our business is so based on referrals — we do a good job here for one client there's a great chance we're going to work with that client again," Cook says. The Esso campus job — roughly 800,000 square feet, verified — came through that chain. So did the university lecture-hall retrofits. Word moves in construction circles, and it moves based on whether a specialty contractor showed up when it said it would.
The cash-flow reality of that model is less glamorous. "we're buying materials in February for a job that's just delivering next week — so we're months out and of course the manufacturers need something before you're even able to get boots on the ground," Cook says. Manufacturers require deposits; the GC pays on delivery. The gap between those two dates is the financial exposure that specialty contractors at this scale have to plan around deliberately.
Modular Interiors by Cook's — and the sponsor behind this episode
For anyone specifying commercial interiors in Western Canada — or anywhere in Canada with a crew willing to travel — Modular Interiors by Cook's is the Calgary-based specialty contractor behind the work Cook describes. The company also supplies operable wall systems under a sibling brand, TerraFlex Solutions, making it a single point of contact for raised floor, demountable glass partitions, and operable walls.
This episode is presented by Payzant Building Products — Atlantic Canada's family-owned Home Hardware Building Centre retailer, seven locations across the Halifax region and Hants County.
On starting a company when the timing is never right
Cook launched Cook's Construction in 2018 with no external capital and a team that used their own trucks. They hit COVID inside two years. Construction-site shutdowns in 2020 compressed revenue and stretched cash. They came out the other side owning a building.
Asked when the right time to start was, Cook is direct: "I don't know that there ever is a right time to ever do anything." The western Canadian market he's operating in now — Calgary filling its office vacancy, tech tenants moving into premium space, IBM among the names Cook mentions as incoming — is the most active he's seen since the Bow Tower. The labour constraint is real: a core crew of eight to ten can only take so many jobs simultaneously, and supplementing with new hires takes training time that a specialty system doesn't forgive. But the fundamentals are as strong as they have been.
A police operations centre in New Brunswick. The first Cook's job east of Ontario. It's a 3,000-square-foot raised floor in a building most people will never enter. The crew will fly in, stay in a rental, lay the first tile exactly right, and work across 150 feet until the last panel fits. The floor will be there, invisible and functional, when the building opens.
That's what this company does.
Guest: Russell Cook, Dip.ME, GSC — Founder, Modular Interiors by Cook's (formerly Cook's Construction & Consulting). Episode 32 of the Atlantic Construction Podcast. Watch the full episode. Also featured: Payzant Building Products. UFAD energy-efficiency claim sourced from Applied Energy, 2010; Esso campus square footage sourced from Avenue Calgary.