PROJECT Churchill Meadows Community Centre and Sports Park, Mississauga, Ontario

ARCHITECT MJMA Architecture & Design

TEXT Elsa Lam

Photos Scott Norsworthy, unless otherwise noted

Toronto-based MJMA has steadily evolved the typology of the aquatic centre since its competition win for the Grand River Aquatic Centre in Kitchener, Ontario, in 1988. In the 36 years since, the firm has been awarded three Governor General’s Medals in Architecture for pool buildings. And this spring, one of its recent projects cinched Ontario’s top architecture prize: the Lieutenant Governor’s Award for Architecture went to Churchill Meadows Community Centre, located at the suburban western edge of Mississauga, Ontario.

The new facility shows how MJMA is not content to rest on its laurels, but rather, has been continuing to innovate from the basis of its successes. Churchill Meadows Recreation Centre shares a similar planning approach to MJMA’s Pam McConnell Aquatic Centre in Toronto’s Regent Park, which was acclaimed for its generous natural light and new-to-Canada introduction of universal change rooms. Both facilities have window-ringed pools, flanked by a block of universal change rooms, and edged with an access corridor set alongside a glazed façade; to this parti, Churchill Meadows adds a triple gymnasium and partial second floor. 

But here the similarities end. Churchill Meadows has decisively raised the bar for design excellence. This was in part enabled by MJMA’s wide scope on the project: the firm was responsible not only for the building, but for its surrounding landscape and for the masterplan of the 50-acre park in which it sits. Instead of sinking the rec centre to the back of the site, behind a sea of parking, the designers decided to rotate it 45 degrees relative to the urban grid, so that the building faces the cardinal directions. As a result, parking is pushed to two corners of the site, and the building becomes a focal point for the surrounding park.

Led by MJMA principal Chris Burbidge and design architect Tyler Walker, the team next opted to design the rec centre as a long, skinny rectangle, ringed by covered walkways. The most spectacular of these is a 130-metre-long promenade that stretches alongside the building’s western edge, facing the park. The two-storey outdoor space is topped by a sculptural parade of V-shaped glulam rafters edged with expanded metal mesh, providing a snow-free promenade in the winter, and a shady respite in the summer. Many recreation centres boast an outdoor public promenade of some type—a kind of enlarged version of a home’s front porch—but few achieve the combined sense of both intimacy and grandeur that is present at Churchill Meadows.

The creation of this promenade, explains Walker, stems from the core idea of the project: “pulling the façade apart and making it do as much as possible,” in order to blur the boundary between inside and outside. “The hope was that it would wrap the building in this kind of ‘sticky’ space where people gather, pause, and socialize—the idea of social infrastructure—while simultaneously shading the building and interiors.”

A highly efficient building section was developed with Blackwell Structural Engineers’ Ian Mountfort to work within the project’s tight budget, while maximizing visual impact. A series of glulam columns supports the building’s roof, and is the main support for the façade panels. To avoid diagonal members detracting from the rhythm of the columns, lateral bracing was moved into the core of the building, which was possible because of the volume’s thin proportions. 

The glulam columns are remarkably slender—just 136mm wide and 450mm deep. This is because they work in triads, with each steel roof truss supported by three columns tied together at their top, middle, and bottom points for stability. 

The steel angle tying the columns together at their bottom point supports a bench that extends the length of the building’s interior and exterior. Air supply vents and radiators are tucked under this bench, out of sight and safe from kicking feet chasing stray balls. In the gym and pool areas, the generous ledge is a convenient place for depositing backpacks, water bottles, and swim towels. Outside, it welcomes lingering—a sheltered place to sit, chat with friends, or watch playing kids.

On the east façade, the second floor volume cantilevers out to create extra-deep window alcoves on the upper floor—favourite activity nooks for children attending programs in the community kitchen and multi-purpose studios. On the lower floor, the projecting volume forms a canopy that creates a sheltered approach to the centre. The long bench makes an appearance here, too, providing indoor and outdoor amenity. 

If the short section of the project is an essay in maximizing the function and efficiency of a structure and its façades, the long section tells a story about inviting in light. Seven north-facing skylights, arrayed along the length, mark out the functions of the building: three skylights illuminate the three sections of the gymnasium, one crowns a central atrium, and three mark the pool. 

While the ceiling is shaped over each program space to support lighting, acoustics, and ventilation, the most dramatic sculpting happens over the warm water leisure pool, where the ceiling dips down to create a more intimate interior space. This continues an exploration of shaped roofs from the firm’s aquatic centre at the University of British Columbia, completed with Acton Ostry Architects, where a lowered ceiling caps and frames the leisure pool. “Pools are grand rooms and they want ceilings to define the space,” says Burbidge.

Both views and light are carefully considered in the natatorium. Swimmers enjoy park vistas to the west and to the north of the pool; a strategically located hill brings extra green into the view and conceals sports fields and a distant highway. 

“The quality of light that’s captured in this building is one of the most successful parts of the project,” says MJMA partner Ted Watson. Daylight is carefully filtered and balanced to cut glare, minimizing the need for the City operators to lower sun-blocking blinds. From the west, the expanded metal mesh and glulam struts provide shade without impeding the sense of openness between indoors and out, while the 450-millimetre-deep glulam columns act like giant venetian blinds, lowering heat gain. The use of a universal change room, equipped with individual and family-sized privacy cubicles, allows for daylight to enter through glazing to both sides of the change area.

The inclusion of a mass timber feature stair in the main atrium is audacious for a project that aims to be as open and transparent as possible. But it works, in part because it’s treated like a freestanding sculptural element. The upper portion of the stair is supported by 20-metre-long CLT beams—the longest self-supporting mass timber members available from Nordic Structures at the time of manufacturing. These eight-foot-wide, one-foot-thick beams land on delicate V-shaped steel supports, while the rest of the stair is supported by glulam hangers that integrate with the west wall. Beyond its impressive structural gymnastics, this serves to maintain a clear view corridor from the main entrance through to the park beyond. The only point of visual friction is the rough quality of the mass timber—because of the way that large CLT members are manufactured, it can have visible cracks and inconsistencies, unlike the more polished look one has become accustomed to with glulam.

The project began in 2016, before embodied carbon was a widespread topic of discussion, but the building has also proven progressive in this aspect. The optimized structure means that there is no secondary steel, reducing a major contributor to a building’s embodied carbon footprint. MJMA recently undertook a carbon analysis of 14 projects in its portfolio, and found that Churchill Meadows’ embodied carbon intensity of 435 CO2e/m2 put it at the lower end of its buildings with concrete pool basins. 

The learnings from this internal embodied carbon study, as well as from the design of Churchill Meadows, are already informing MJMA’s next set of buildings, particularly several mass timber buildings on its drawing boards. But while all recreation centres are similar in program, the buildings are also distinct—reflecting the diversity of individual communities. The unique identity of Churchill Meadows is perhaps most evident on Friday evenings, when the gymnasium hosts Muslim prayers, a function facilitated by foot baths built to the sides of the gym’s twin access corridors. “It’s amazing when you see it—they come up and set up all of the prayer mats straight to Mecca,” says Burbidge. Basket hoops pulled up and pickleball nets tucked away, with sunset colours framed by the wood structure to the west, the architecture gracefully transforms from a sports facility to a place of worship—a building truly at the heart of its community.

CLIENT City of Mississauga | ARCHITECT TEAM David Miller (FRAIC), Chris Burbidge (MRAIC), Tyler Walker (MRAIC), Ted Watson (FRAIC), Tarisha Dolyniuk (FRAIC), Tim Belanger, Andrew Filarski (FRAIC), Robert Allen (FRAIC), Obinna Ogunedo, Leland Dadson, Kris Vassilev, Darlene Montgomery, Jasper Flores, Caleb Tsui, Natalia Ultremari, Jeremy Campbell, Caileigh MacKellar, Kyung-Sun Hur | STRUCTURAL Blackwell | MECHANICAL/ELECTRICAL Smith + Andersen | CIVIL EMC Group | LANDSCAPE MJMA Architecture & Design | INTERIORS MJMA Architecture & Design | CONTRACTOR Aquicon Construction | EXPERIENTIAL GRAPHIC DESIGN/SIGNAGE & WAYFINDING MJMA Architecture & Design | AREA 7,000 m2 | BUDGET $48  (Community Centre & district park) / $61.8 M (2023 escalated) | COMPLETION October 2021

ENERGY USE INTENSITY (PROJECTED) 570.2  kWh/m2/year

As appeared in the June 2024 issue of Canadian Architect magazine

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TEXT Alexandra Pereira-Edwards, Misca Birklein-Lagassé and Zaven Titizian

When a Google Street View team was invited to Nunavut, Canada, in 2012, their first stop was Iqaluktuuttiaq (ᐃᖃᓗᒃᑑᑦᑎᐊᖅ, Cambridge Bay). While those visiting the remote hamlet surveyed it using a Google Trike, members of the community were trained to use Google’s camera equipment and learned how to add roads to the online map. Capturing these images was an opportunity for Nunavummiut to present their community to the rest of the world.

One of the indoor spaces that got a 360-degree treatment was the Cambridge Bay pool, with its brightly painted plywood walls and laminated signage describing rules for pool use, admissions requirements, and notes on ice safety—reminders aimed at lowering the high drowning rates in the Territory.

While the pool remains virtually open for view, its recreational function in the community halted in July of 2019 when the hamlet closed the facility early in its already short season. The 30-year-old building was deemed structurally unsafe as a result of thawing permafrost, a reminder of the amplified effects of global warming in the community. Its deck was slumping, its metal was corroding, and the supports under its liner were weakening, threatening to suck swimmers under the building should the liner burst. The pool’s closure meant that the largely youthful users who would typically spend days playing and learning how to swim in the shallow, warm indoor waters no longer had the space to do so. And while the option to swim in Nunavut’s frigid natural waters does exist, many communities do not have designated spaces for submersion.

Similar structural problems expose a material fragility that impacts Nunavut’s built environment, leaving in their wake social and financial burdens for Northern communities. But the pools in Nunuvut also point to a deeper line of inquiry, one that questions Southern ideals of leisure and recreation enabled by these facilities. What biases are ascribed when Arctic water safety is taught within the confines of a pool? And where does Inuit knowledge locate itself inside aquatic facilities when it has been consistently resisted by a standardized swimming education? Cambridge Bay’s defunct pool, and others like it, serve as potent if contentious spaces to discuss layered histories, including ongoing settler colonial practices that continue to shape the Canadian Arctic.      

By looking below the surface of the pool as a typology, discussions come into focus that unsettle the deep-rooted complicity of built form within Canada’s settler colonial narrative—and ultimately ask for retrospection and revision in how architectural research, scholarship, and practices are pursued.

Alexandra Pereira-Edwards, Misca Birklein-Lagassé, and Zaven Titizian were part of the 2020 Master’s Students Program at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), the first in a three-year thematic series entitled “In the Postcolony.” The research was guided by Rafico Ruiz, Associate Director of Research at the CCA, and in virtual conversation with Indigenous and non-Indigenous experts and guests. Their research developed into an open-access syllabus that questions settler colonial perspectives and research practices across design disciplines. The syllabus will be launched on the CCA’s website on November 23. 

The research was pursued under the guidance of Rafico Ruiz, Associate Director of Research at the CCA, and in virtual conversation with invited guests. The authors would like to extend their thanks to Nicole Luke, Lola Sheppard, Mason White, Darin Barney, Audrey Giles, Ana María León, Paul Renzoni, Lisa Landrum, Geronimo Inutiq, Jocelyn Piirainen, Taqralik Partridge, and the CCA staff.

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Toronto-based architecture firm, gh3, was selected among Fast Company’s top 10 innovative architecture firms for “jumping into the world of natural, chemical-free pools.”

“Certain stalwarts caught our attention for their thoughtful approaches to reducing architecture’s impact on the environment,” says Fast Company on their website. “We were also impressed by the architects behind such novel projects as natural swimming pools, large timber buildings, and heat-regulating software.”

The American business magazine recognized gh3 as a leader in the concept of “natural” swimming pools for building Borden Park Pool in Edmonton. Fast Company describes the outdoor public pool as a “technically sophisticated project” that uses locally sourced granite gravel and microorganisms as filtration.

The Borden Park Natural Swimming Pool is the first chemical-free public outdoor pool to be built in Canada. The project replaced an existing pool built in the 1950s and includes a seasonal pavilion and landscaped pool precinct for 400 swimmers.

According to gh3, the challenge was to create a large-scale pool with high-quality water control, while also achieving an environmentally healthy, natural filtration process.

“NSP is a balanced ecosystem where plant materials, microorganisms, and nutrients come together within a gravel and sand filtering process to create living water,” says gh3. “This is an unsterilized, chemical– and disinfectant–free filtering system in which isolating membranes contain water as it circulates and is cleansed by means of a natural process, which takes place at the north end of the pool precinct.”

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WINNER OF A 2020 GOVERNOR GENERAL’S MEDAL IN ARCHITECTURE

LOCATION Edmonton, Alberta
ARCHITECT gh3 architecture
PHOTOS gh3*

The Borden Park Natural Swimming Pool is the first chemical-free public outdoor pool to be built in Canada. The project replaced an existing pool and includes a seasonal pavilion and landscaped pool precinct for 400 swimmers.

The challenge was to create a large-scale pool with high-quality water control, while also achieving an environmentally healthy, natural filtration process. The design process began with developing a pool technology that cleanses the water through stone, gravel, sand and botanic filtering processes. This inspired a materials-oriented concept for the change room facility. The result is a technically rigorous and aesthetically integrated design: the change pavilion’s gabion basket stone walls visually evoke the idea of filtration.

Canada’s guidelines for public pools are some of the strictest in the world. To realize the project, the architects needed to take a creative design approach grounded in a first-principles, science-based approach to the design challenge. The project was classified as “recreational waters,” with the building permit issued as a “constructed beach with variances”—the variances were the pools.

The project creates a balanced ecosystem where plant materials, microorganisms and nutrients come together within a gravel- and sand-filtering process to create “living water.” There is no soil involved in this process. Filtration is achieved in two ways: through a biological-mechanical system (the constructed wetland and gravel filter) and in situ (with zooplankton). The unsterilized, chemical- and disinfectant-free filtering system uses isolating membranes to contain water as it circulates and is naturally cleansed.

The cleansing process takes place at the north end of the pool precinct. On deck, water passes through a sand-and-stone submersive pond and a planted hydro-botanic pond. Adjacent to these ponds, a granular filter PO4 adsorption unit is enclosed by gabion walls continuous with the building.

In addition to the water filtration mechanisms, the seasonal building houses universal change rooms, showers, washrooms and staff areas.

The swimming program includes a children’s pool, a deep pool, on-deck outdoor showers, a sandy beach, picnic areas, and spaces for other pool-related recreational activities. The project’s materiality creates a fundamental, conceptual connection between the technical demands of the pool and the design of the built enclosure and landscape elements. The dark, locally sourced limestone and steel of the gabion wall construction defines the enclosure’s vertical dimension as filter-like or breathable, as granular and porous. The pool precinct is defined by a planar landscape: flush-to-surface detailing creates seamless interfaces among sandy beach, the concrete pool perimeter and wood decking. The gabion walls of the low rectilinear building terminate with a lid-like flat roof that frames the tree canopy of the park beyond and enhances the sensation of open-sky spaciousness within the pool precinct.

The elemental form and reductive materials ease the user experience and enrich the narrative of bathing in the landscape. The juxtaposition of the constructed elements invokes comparisons with the geology of the North Saskatchewan River and the flat topography of the Prairie lands’ edge.

:: Jury Comments ::  Clear, calm and modest, this project presents admirable restraint and control over form, materials and scale. Every element feels essential and thought has gone into every decision and detail. The pool evokes an elemental walled garden that welcomes the surrounding community. The jury salutes the City of Edmonton for commissioning it. It goes to show that if you support good civic design, you just might get it!

Read the Canadian Architect review of this project here.

PROJECT TEAM Pat Hanson, Raymond Chow, John McKenna, Joel Di Giacomo, Dae Hee Kim, Byron White | CLIENT City of Edmonton | SUPERSTRUCTURE/MECHANICAL/ELECTRICAL/CIVIL Morrison Hershfield | GABIONS Associated Engineering | POOL ENGINEERING Polyplan GMBH | CONTRACTOR EllisDon | OCCUPANCY July 1, 2018 | BUDGET $14.4 M

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WINNER OF A 2020 GOVERNOR GENERAL’S MEDAL IN ARCHITECTURE

LOCATION Vancouver, British Columbia
ARCHITECT MJMA and Acton Ostry Architects

How can an aquatic centre effectively train Olympians, serve its community, and enhance the student experience? How can it operate learn-to-swim programs while hosting a thousand-person swim meet? These questions were at the heart of the design of the University of British Columbia (UBC)’s new aquatic facility.

In 2012, UBC sent more swimmers to the London Olympic Summer Games than any other university in Canada, and had the most successful swim team in the country. Meanwhile, the explosive market-driven expansion of the Endowment Lands and burgeoning campus community has created the fastest-growing youth and family population in the Lower Mainland.

The Aquatic Centre was required to meet the needs of both these groups, serving as a high-performance training and competition venue, while simultaneously acting as a community pool. It also strives to engage the surrounding public realm and contribute to campus life for UBC’s students.

The requirement to co-program daily community use with elite-level training and competitions led to a two-sided pool hall design, divided by a line of Y-shaped columns and a continuous skylight. In section, a translucent screen creates a luminous barrier between the two spaces, reflecting abundant sunlight into the leisure-swimming side, while providing the required controlled and balanced light for the competition-pool side.

The 7,900-square-metre program includes a 51-metre basin built to international competition standards, a 25-metre diving well with moveable floor, and a warm water leisure basin. The new facility is fully accessible and inclusive, and provides ideal acoustics for training and coaching communication. All finishes and systems are designed for durability and ease of maintenance.

The facility is designed to LEED Gold standards and will pursue the university’s regenerative neighbourhood goals by integrating with new campus infrastructure developments. The building’s extensive daylighting helps to achieve these goals. Daylight enters through the central skylight, as well as from the perimeter through a continuous ceramic-fritted glazing band on three elevations. Inside, sensors for zoned lighting control respond to natural light levels.

The building also implements innovative water re-use and air quality strategies that are precedent-setting for North American aquatic facilities. Instead of using municipal water, the building deploys a three-compartment cistern to store water from the roof and adjacent transit plaza. The cistern water tops-up the swimming basins to compensate for evaporative loss, allows for grey water flushing, and supplies a site irrigation system.

Chloramine-contaminated air is scoured from the water surface by air delivered from a central bench structure, and returned within the upper edge of the perimeter pool gutter. Developed in coordination with on-campus research, this system is intended to provide exceptional natatorium air quality and mitigate the problems of “swimmer’s asthma.”

:: Jury Comments ::  This campus building stands out for its luminous interiors. Being inside is like being in a white tent on a summer day, all year round. Outside, it transforms swimming into a rambunctious event, drawing in passersby and animating the campus. The clear organization of pools and utility spaces into three zones is intelligently reinforced through the structural organization, especially the sculpted Y-shaped columns and the canted ceilings.

Read the Canadian Architect review of this project here.

PROJECT TEAM MJMA—Ted Watson, Viktors Jaunkalns, Andrew Filarski, Robert Allen, Troy Wright, Ricardo Duque, Tarisha Dolyniuk, Kristin Beites, Janice Lee, Darlene Montgomery, Timothy Belanger, Aida Vatany, Danielle Lam-Kulczak, Luis Arredondo. AOA—Russell Acton, Mark Ostry, Adam James | CLIENT UBC Properties Trust | STRUCTURAL Equilibrium Consulting | MECHANICAL AME Consulting Group Ltd. | electrICAL Applied Engineering Solutions | SUSTAINABILITY Recollective | CONTRACTOR Heatherbrae Inc. OCCUPANCY August 1, 2016 | BUDGET $33.5M

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LOCATION Toronto, Ontario

ARCHITECT MacLennan Jaunkalns Miller Architects (MJMA)

PHOTOS Shai Gil

Located in downtown Toronto and built in the late 1940s, Regent Park is Canada’s oldest and largest social housing project. The neighbourhood was originally envisioned as a transitional community for new immigrants. But, due to inadequate planning, it would become infamous for concentrating a socially marginalized population into a series of increasingly neglected building complexes. 41% of those living in Regent Park are under 18, and over 70% of the population lives below the low-income cut-off rate.

In 2005, the City began the Regent Park Revitalization initiative, a 12-year program to redevelop the 69 acres into a vibrant mixed-use, mixed-income community, and one of North America’s largest urban redevelopments. At the heart of the revitalization—centred on the eastern flank of the new central park development—the Regent Park Aquatic Centre enjoys pride of place as the neighbourhood’s key civic amenity.

Regent Park Aquatic Centre is a multi-purpose, year-round indoor swimming pool facility that includes a 25-metre six-lane pool, leisure pool, tot pool, hot tub, slide, tarzan rope, diving board and a large multi-purpose community room.

The “pavilion in the park”—as the centre was conceived—is very open at the base and bisected lengthwise by a “dorsal fin” of aquatic hall skylights. The building form was shaped by its solar orientation. A large canopy to the south forms a generous public verandah at the main entrance; and a low continuous window overlooking the park to the west provides views, while minimizing heat gain from the afternoon sun. Replacing an existing outdoor pool, the project captures a feeling of transparency and connection to the outdoors. It has sliding glass doors off the main pool hall for access to the park-side terrace, as well as natural ventilation opportunities. Responding to the views from the new high-rise towers surrounding the park, the building’s green roof is designed as a fifth elevation that integrates with the building features and with its park setting.

The Aquatic Centre is the first facility in Canada that provides universal change rooms exclusively. These common areas—with private cubicles—establish equality by addressing cultural and gender identity issues. They also enhance openness, safety and visibility throughout the entire complex.

In the last three decades, Regent Park has become an immigrant settlement community. As such, the Aquatic Centre offers a new level of accommodation, with the addition of a complete system of aquatics hall screening for those cultural groups interested in privacy swims. Interest in the City’s aquatic venues has been greatly increased by the adoption of this progressive feature, along with the universal change rooms, the combination of fitness, leisure, and therapeutic aquatic uses, and the open and inviting design. This project typifies the design legacy commitment of the Regent Park Revitalization program.

:: Jury :: While the jury commends the many fine aquatic and recreational centres that it reviewed in other Canadian cities, Regent Park Aquatic Centre stands out. This facility is sensitively connected to its surroundings. Open and transparent, it invites passersby and those using the adjacent park into its grand space that houses a sparkling pool and recreational facilities. It is a pavilion in the best sense, elevating the activities within and making them accessible. The green roof is the building’s fifth façade, completing Regent Park’s green environment.

CLIENT City of Toronto | ARCHITECT TEAM David Miller, Viktors Jaunkalns, Ted Watson, Andrew Filarski, Robert Allen, Troy Wright, Jeanne Ng, Siri Ursin, Kyung-Sun Hur, Cohen Chen, Carla Munoz | STRUCTURAL Blackwell Engineers | MECHANICAL/ELECTRICAL LKM Consulting Engineers Inc. | INTERIORS MacLennan Jaunkalns Miller Architects | CONTRACTOR The Atlas Corporation | BUDGET $14.8 M | COMPLETION November 2016

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PROJECT Clareview Community Recreation Centre, Edmonton, Alberta
ARCHITECTS Teeple Architects Inc. in association with Architecture | Tkalcic Bengert
TEXT Graham Livesey
PHOTOS Scott Norsworthy, Tom Arban and City of Edmonton

Since establishing his Ontario-based practice in 1989, Stephen Teeple, FRAIC, has been among those at the forefront of Canadian architecture. What may be relatively unknown is that for over a decade, Teeple Architects Inc. has been having an important impact in Alberta.

Teeple’s work in Alberta began with the Montrose Cultural Centre in Grande Prairie (2009), home to the Grande Prairie Public Library and Teresa Sargent Hall; this was followed by the tightly configured Art Gallery of Grande Prairie (2012). These adjacent projects respond to local context: they involve the rejuvenation of a historic school and help establish a new civic centre in downtown Grande Prairie. The nearby town of Wembley is home to Teeple’s Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum, scheduled for unveiling this fall. Current projects on the boards include a new facility for the Edmonton Police Service and the transformation of the central Stanley A. Milner Public Library in downtown Edmonton; the firm has also undertaken conceptual work for the Haskayne School of Business expansion at the University of Calgary.

One of Teeple’s most impressive projects in the province is the recently opened Clareview Community Recreation Centre (CCRC), completed in partnership with Architecture | Tkalcic Bengert. CCRC is part of Edmonton’s program to create world-class architecture with new libraries, recreation centres, LRT stations, museums, and an ambitious downtown redevelopment plan (see CA, January 2013).

For some time, cities have injected a sense of urbanism into suburban contexts using multi-use complexes. These typically pair a recreation centre with a range of public agencies. In the case of CCRC, the programmatic mix includes a large City of Edmonton recreation complex, a branch library of the Edmonton Public Library system (the first to be located in a suburban recreation centre), a daycare service, community meeting facilities, and a high-school completion centre operated by Edmonton Catholic Schools (a first of its kind as well). Large multi-use projects benefit from the intensity that collaborating programs can create, although they risk diminishing the potential of dispersed institutions to influence a wider landscape.

Producing a suburban multi-use centre poses many challenges, most notably addressing the lack of context. How does one create urbanity in an environment devoid of recognizable urban structure? Is there such a thing as suburban urbanism? Presumably, it would mean creating an intensity of public experience, however defined.

If that is the goal, CCRC succeeds in spectacular fashion. Surrounded by banal big-box retail, housing, and urban infrastructure in northeast Edmonton, the CCRC both blends in and stands out. It takes some structural and functional cues from its environment—for instance, it establishes precise links to the local LRT station and community road network—but it also succeeds in making bold spatial and formal gestures that are unlike anything in the city.

CCRC wraps carefully around an existing twin-pad arena complex and responds to the optimal layout of surrounding outdoor sports fields. Beyond these initial planning decisions, the building operates on many levels, culminating in periodic moments of real architectural intensity. Volumes tilt and thrust, feint and jab, push and pull. This complexity carries into the interior: a topography of experiences that includes long sloping floors, fissured spaces, folding planes and colliding programs. The whole is underlined by diagonally defined fenestration, striking colours (bronze, purple, yellow and white) and a palette of tough materials (concrete, steel, aluminum). The use of tilted and folded surfaces has been a signature aspect of Teeple’s work for some time. At Clareview, the results showcase the firm’s mature ability in working with complex junctions of surface, structure and space, aided by the adept use of 3D-modelling tools.

CCRC avoids traditional urban typologies, such as the trope of internal streets and squares. Instead, it puts forward a complex set of architectural propositions including unusual programmatic adjacencies and novel spatial experiences. These reinforce and create context, and propose a world of new possibilities for the rec centre typology. What do residents make of a building that is so provocatively wedged into its location? It seems that they feel perfectly comfortable in such an environment, one where they recreate, study and play together happily. In its form, the Clareview complex is stealthy, and yet the result is also exuberant, tough, sublime and provocative—a kind of Piranesi in suburbia.

The building’s strategies are encapsulated in the library, a single volume pointed towards the LRT station to the west, in which folded wall and ceiling surfaces define various programmatic areas. The library overlooks the natatorium and is briefly penetrated by the fitness area above. The intersection of reading, swimming and fitness training creates a moment of connection and intensity—one of many in the complex.

More of these moments occur in the natatorium, a large, relatively simple space enhanced by overlooking adjacencies: the library, outdoor play fields, fitness area and public spaces all enjoy views of the pools. The steel structure is understated, and unattractive ductwork has been eliminated by the intelligent design of air-handling systems. Three pools provide options for competition, training and pleasure, although more slides and a larger wave pool would have added to the fun factor.

Sandwiched between the natatorium and ice rinks, the fitness centre and the double gymnasium sit at the heart of the project. On the ground floor, much of the major circulation encircles the gym with its distinctive purple floor. On the second floor, a suspended running track and fitness areas ring the gym. Transparent surfaces are carefully deployed to create provocative views and interpenetrations, allowing runners to look through, over, up, down and beyond the gym into other spaces during their workout.

Adding to the formal complexities of the scheme, the designers decided to lift the main floor one level above grade. This creates both exterior and interior changes in elevation that greatly enhance an otherwise flat site. The building is revealed through the resulting circulation system, centred on an east-west axis that runs through the major program areas. Extending beyond the site, this main axis locks into the LRT station to the west, supports two major entries, runs past the outdoor soccer field, and links to the community to the east. A network of secondary corridors connects to other entrances and various internal uses, bolstering connectivity. The entire system is labyrinthine and at times quasi-subterranean: but rather than being disorientating, the circulation exposes the sense of intrigue inherent in the design.

Behind the seeming complexity of the building stands a well-rationalized structural steel skeleton. The steelwork throughout the building is both exposed and hidden in a sophisticated play of structure and suspended surfaces. The material palette comprises straightforward materials: exposed concrete, painted steel structure, and aluminum standing-seam cladding. The Kalzip exterior cladding has a mid-bronze finish and creates a uniform and durable surface that transitions well from walls to roofs.

Teeple Architects has taken on the roles of swimmer, reader, weightlifter, athlete, janitor, student, teacher, parent, coach, community activist and child by creating a vortex of public activity where these roles are amplified and juxtaposed. This ultimately produces architecture of significant public worth. This effort also restores, to some degree, the erosion of public space that has plagued suburban environments.

In his seminal book The Fall of Public Man, Richard Sennett states that “playacting [or role playing] in the form of manners, conventions and ritual gestures is the very stuff out of which public relations are formed, and from which public relations derive their emotional meaning.” Creating urbanity in suburbia ultimately involves making propositions about how people might gather with those they know—but more importantly, how they might gather with strangers. Our propensity for both sports and suburbia means that for many people residing in cities, community recreation centres are the new public realm. Instead of encountering strangers on a downtown sidewalk, we participate in public space where the defined actions of athletes—a forward-flying somersault, a backhand, a slam dunk, a spike, a clean and jerk, or a smash—produce an urban theatre we all understand.

The public realm should provide experiences that we can share with others. This includes out-of-the-ordinary architectural experiences. In suburbia, it is not possible to replicate the density of public space found in the urban core—so new spaces, forms and programmatic configurations must be invented. The Clareview Community Recreation Centre achieves this. It is a bold approach to (sub)urban architecture.

Graham Livesey, MRAIC, is a professor in the Master of Architecture program at the University of Calgary.

Client City of Edmonton and Edmonton Public Library | Architect Team Teeple Architects— Stephen Teeple, Myles Craig, Richard Lai, Christian Joakim, Bernard Jin, Maryam Mohajer, Robert Cheung, Lang Cheng, Ingmar Mak. Architecture | Tkalcic Bengert—Brian Bengert, Eddo Cancian, Jane Brady, Shane Laptiste, Kevin Osborne, Eric Hui, Stacey Flasha, Holly Shandruk, Heather McIntosh. | Structural Read Jones Christoffersen | Mechanical Stantec | Electrical Aecom | Landscape Earthscape | Interiors Teeple Architects Inc. in association with Architecture | Tkalcic Bengert | Contractor Clark Builders | LEED Stantec | Cost LCVM Consultants Inc. | Area 190,000 ft² | Budget $94 M |  Completion January 2015

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