PROJECTS T3 Sterling Road and T3 Bayside Phase 1

ARCHITECTS–T3 STERLING ROAD DLR Group Architecture inc. (Design Architect and Architect-of-Record) and WZMH (Local Affiliate Architect)

ARCHITECTS–T3 BAYSIDE WZMH Architects (Executive Architect) and 3XN (Design Architect)

TEXT Lloyd Alter

In 1970, Barton Myers and Jack Diamond bought the Eclipse Whitewear Building on King Street in Toronto and converted it into offices. They left the brick walls and massive wood structure exposed, and kept visible all the conduits, ducts, sprinkler pipes and other mechanical paraphernalia, layering in industrial lighting. When you entered the space, you got the shock of the old: the existing warehouse adapted for modern use. Soon, warehouse conversions were happening around North America, including in San Francisco and in Minneapolis, where a renovation of the half-million-square-foot Butler Building became the continent’s most prominent example.

Creative industries loved these spaces, which quickly filled with architects, advertising firms, and tech startups. Jane Jacobs understood this, writing in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, “Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.” 

But old buildings were not without their problems. The floors were usually mill decking, where lumber such as 2x10s were nailed to each other to carry the heavy industrial loads. Noise passed right through them, as did dirt: staff would often find dust and debris on their desks. 

In 2016, real estate developer Hines built the continent’s first large new mass timber building, which they called T3 (for Timber, Transit, Technology). They aimed to capture the look and feel of a warehouse, without the drawbacks. It was sort of a new-old building. Hines noted in their marketing materials at the time:

“We love old brick & timber warehouses. We love the feel of them, the originality, and the entrepreneurship that lives inside their bones. They are cool places to collaborate, create, and innovate. Unfortunately, these buildings lack good natural light, are drafty, noisy, and have outdated HVAC systems. So we asked ourselves, why can’t we solve these problems by selecting an authentic location, surrounded by heritage buildings, and construct a brand new, vintage building? All the charm of an old brick & timber building, with none of the downsides.”

The Minneapolis T3, designed by Canadian mass timber pioneer Michael Green and American firm DLR Group, was built with glue-laminated columns and beams. Its floor slabs were made of Nail-Laminated Timber (NLT) supplied by StructureCraft of British Columbia, and nailed together in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Modern NLT was developed in Germany in the 1970s by engineer Julius Natterer. NLT was used because it was in the building codes and could be made anywhere, by anyone with a nailgun; Cross-Laminated Timber (CLT) was not yet approved or manufactured in North America. Unlike conventional construction, with mass timber, the supplier often acts as the timber structural engineer and builder, delivering the complete package. StructureCraft says, “Our Engineer-Build model brings responsibility for all the steps of engineering and construction under one roof, to a company that has significant experience taking on this responsibility. Engineer-Build synthesizes and smooths out the building process.”

T3 Minneapolis was a success, and Hines took the concept to other cities, with a total of 27 buildings completed, under construction, and in design. The most recent finished T3s are in Toronto, where Hines has opened two projects: T3 Sterling Road and T3 Bayside. 

Hines pitches its T3 projects as “timber buildings with a conscience,” claiming “T3’s exceptional amenities prioritize health and well-being, and the natural wood interior and bright, inspiring spaces help people feel—and do—their best.” Research backs this up. An Australian study, Workplaces: Wellness + Wood = Productivity found that “Employees surrounded with natural wooden surfaces on average reported higher personal productivity, mood, concentration, clarity, confidence and optimism—and were more likely to find their workplaces relaxing, calming, natural-feeling, inviting and energising.” These ideas are captured in the concept of “biophilia,” a term coined in the mid-80s by Harvard professor Edward O. Wilson to refer to humans’ fondness for nature, including plants, wood, and natural light.

Hines also points to the environmental benefits, noting that building with wood avoids the emissions that come from making steel or concrete, which together total about 15 percent of global carbon emissions. “When a tree is taken and used in a building that will last for centuries,” the developer writes, “that piece of wood is storing that carbon dioxide in the material for the life of the building.” 

For T3 Sterling Road, Hines brought DLR Group and StructureCraft together again, including lead designer Steve Cavanaugh, who worked with Green on T3 Minneapolis. StructureCraft’s roles once more encompassed acting as the timber structural engineer, coordinating timber sourcing, and providing supply and installation. The team also included WZMH Architects as the local architect of record. 

Toronto’s Sterling Road district has become a hotbed of warehouse conversions and brewpubs, anchored by the Museum of Contemporary Art; the New York Times has described it as “newly hip, its appeal broadening beyond the small cadre of tuned-in artists and bohemian types who for years have had it to themselves.” The site certainly nails the Transit of the T3 moniker, with a short walk to the Bloor subway and the UP Express train, which connects to downtown and the airport. The environmental importance of location and available transit is often underestimated: Alex Wilson of BuildingGreen calculated that the energy used by tenants commuting to a building was 2.3 times the energy consumed operating the building.

Phase 1 of the Sterling Road project includes two buildings totalling 300,000 square feet, constructed of glulam columns and beams, and with Dowel-Laminated Timber (DLT) floors. DLT was developed in the 1990s by a German company which called it Dübelholz, German for “dowelled wood.” Holes are drilled in softwood lumber with a moisture content of about 15 percent, and hardwood dowels, dried to about 8 percent, are driven in. As the dowels absorb moisture from the surrounding wood, they expand, locking the assembly together. StructureCraft has built sophisticated DLT machinery in its Abbotsford plant, which can spit out massive 12-foot-wide by 60-foot-long panels.

Sterling Road is a bit rough around the edges, and the design for T3 Sterling aims to be edgy as well, with exposed diagonal bracing and steel bars added on the exterior to emulate the appearance of industrial windows. The program is geared towards young urbanites; while the upper floors are conventional leased office space, the ground floor has a large co-working space, a well-equipped gym, and bicycle storage. 

Different types of mass timber have distinct looks and feel, and DLT can be finished in different ways. T3 Sterling’s DLT is made of 3”-wide boards with a kerf on the corner, giving it a seriously industrial look, like you used to get in warehouses when wood was thicker. While most modern office buildings have a 30-foot-by-30-foot grid, mass timber is not cost-effective at that span, so the grids in the T3 are 20-by-30. DLR lead architect Steve Cavanaugh explained that many layouts were tested against the grid, and it was found to maintain planning flexibility. 

Although they both share the T3 label and are made of mass timber, T3 Bayside is a very different building from T3 Sterling Road. It’s located in the rapidly developing area just east of the downtown core, and is surrounded by new residential towers.

In branding this building, Hines adjusted the second “T” in T3 to substitute “Talent” for “Transit,” because it’s a fairly substantial 24-minute walk to Union Station. (A light rapid transit line, approved by the City in 2019, is currently in the design phase.) WZMH is back as the architect of record, with Danish firm 3XN as lead designer. 

Where T3 Sterling Road is industrial and edgy, T3 Bayside is all business. Its defining architectural feature is a stepped, recessed band of glazing ringing the façades, which permits a succession of double-height spaces. The original concept included grand stairs running through these double-height spaces from ground to top floor, but this was before the pandemic, when it was anticipated that the building might be occupied by a single tenant who would appreciate the interconnection of their spaces. However, the market has changed significantly, and the building is starting to be leased to smaller tenants. The double-height spaces are now called “opportunities,” and are currently filled with removable slabs. Common areas on the first, second, and third floors do remain connected, resulting in a small set of dramatic spaces, linked by enticing stairs.  

As at T3 Sterling, the columns and beams of T3 Bayside are made of glue-laminated timber, but this location’s slabs are Cross-Laminated Timber (CLT). The laminations in CLT are made up of 2x4s, laid up flat to form a layer; the next set is laid at 90 degrees to the layer below, and so on. The whole sandwich is glued together in giant presses. CLT was invented in the States and patented in 1923, but modern CLT was developed by Professor Gerhard Schickhofer at Graz University in the 1990s. Austria had a large lumber industry, but being landlocked, exports were expensive. Turning lumber into CLT added significant value.

CLT is more dimensionally stable than DLT, and can act as a two-way slab, supported on columns without beams. However, Hines specifies a column-and-beam design so they can get competitive pricing between the different mass timber technologies. To avoid the noise transfer that was endemic in older warehouse conversions, the CLT floor is topped with a sound mat and 2.6 inches of concrete.

CLT is usually more expensive than DLT, but the wood, structural design and assembly for T3 Bayside is supplied by Nordic Structures. Nordic is a subsidiary of Chantiers Chibougamau, a vertically integrated lumber company controlling close to six million acres of black spruce Quebec forest; the company processes 15 percent of the renewable resources in the province’s woodlands. Geographically, Quebec is a lot closer than British Columbia, so it is likely that the reduced transport expense helps to balance out costs.

In the base building, there are no dropped ceilings to block the view of the mass timber beams and slabs, and no raised floor—all mechanical and electrical services are exposed. What is normally hidden and often installed haphazardly has to be precise and straight. Every conduit and duct is laid out in advance in the BIM model; notches are cut into the tops of beams for them to pass through. With rare exceptions, the electrical conduits in both Toronto T3s are a work of art, resembling a circuit board rather than a typical electrical installation. The ventilation ductwork is also lovely to look at; in Bayside, there is a narrow structural bay without beams running around the core so that the main supply ducts can run east-west, while the smaller ducts run north-south between beams. It is all brilliantly coordinated. No lighting is installed in the base building; that is added after the tenant layouts are determined. 

Hines notes that T3 Bayside “will store 3,886 metric tons of carbon dioxide.” However, this isn’t counted or credited by LEED. According to the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) report, “biogenic carbon is excluded since it is assumed that at the end of life, the wood will be disposed and the embodied carbon will be re-emitted back into the atmosphere.”

The treatment of biogenic carbon in LCA calculations is a major topic of discussion—and controversy—in both the industry and academia. Some in the industry don’t believe any credit should be given for carbon being stored in the wood, given that roots are left to rot in the ground, slash is left behind, scrap is burned to kiln-dry the wood, and wood panels are transported from factory to site in fossil-fuel-powered vehicles. Others, like Paul Brannen, author of the book Timber!, claim that so much carbon is sequestered in the wood that developers should be able to sell carbon credits for every tonne stored, to help reduce the cost premium and to encourage more wood construction.

Some also worry that building out of wood will lead to deforestation and the loss of old-growth timber. Hines counters by saying: “The trees we use at Hines come from responsibly harvested forests/certified sustainable forests. The forests in the U.S. and Canada, for example, reproduce the timber required for T3 buildings every 20 minutes.”

Adding to their claims, Hines measures and mentions “avoided emissions,” the carbon emissions that don’t happen because of the decision to go with wood. They note in a FAQ that “Compared with steel or concrete, T3 Sterling Road’s timber construction avoids emitting approximately 1,411 metric tons of carbon dioxide into our atmosphere.” I question the idea of avoided emissions, thinking that it’s like being on a diet and crediting the calories of the chocolate cake I didn’t eat. 

But any negativity disappears when you walk into either T3 Sterling Road or T3 Bayside. The spaces look good. They smell good. Fondle the columns, and they feel good. The biophilic effect is instantaneous. One may argue about the exact count of kilograms of carbon emissions stored or avoided, but as wood expert Dave Atkins noted about building materials, it all comes down to one principle: “If you don’t grow it, you mine it.”

The T3 buildings give tenants the culture, the aesthetics, the warmth, and the biophilic effects of an old warehouse building, with modern technology and services, and without the noise and dust. The carbon savings, however they are measured, are a wonderful bonus.

Lloyd Alter, formerly an architect and real estate developer,  is the author of The Story of Upfront Carbon (New Society Publishers). He currently writes a popular Substack newsletter, Carbon Upfront!

T3 Sterling Road

CLIENT Hines | ARCHITECT TEAM DLR Group—Stephen J. Cavanaugh, Kevin Curran, Kelly Goffiney, Charlie McDaniel, Bobby Larson, Kailey Smith, Neely Sutter. WZMH—Ted DuArte (MRAIC), Robert Sampson (MRAIC) | STRUCTURAL Magnussen Klemencic Associates | MECHANICAL/ELECTRICAL TMP | LANDSCAPE Janet Rosenberg Studio | INTERIORS Partners by Design | CONTRACTOR Ellis Don | AREA 28,234 m2 | BUDGET Withheld | COMPLETION Spring 2024

ENERGY USE INTENSITY (PROJECTED) 45.6 kWh/m2/year

T3 Bayside Phase 1

CLIENT Hines | ARCHITECT TEAM 3XN—Competition Phase: Jens Holm, Audun Opdal, Kim Herforth Nelson, Elizabeth Nichols, Sai Ma, Monty de Luna, Sean Lyon, Matthias Altwicker; Design Phase: Jens Holm, Matthias Altwicker, Elizabeth Nichols, Laura Wagner, Sai Ma, Catherine Joseph, Jacquelyn Hecker, Ida Fløche, Thomas Herve, Aleksandre Andghuladze, Farzana Hossain, Benji Magin, Christian Harald Hommelhoff Brink, Lydon Whittle, Sang Yeun Lee, Ann Christina Ravn, Thomas Lund, Eliana Nigro, Dora Lin Jiabao, Majbritt Lerche Madsen, Morten Norman Lund; Execution Phase: Matthias Altwicker, Catherine Joseph, Elizabeth Nichols, Jens Holm. WZMH—Robert Sampson (MRAIC), Nicola Casciato (MRAIC), Len Abelman (MRAIC), Paul Brown, Ted DuArte (MRAIC), Nazanin Salimi, Derek Smart, Liu Liu, Ashley McKay, Samer Richani, Akhilesh Ahuja, Terek Aly, Loc Nguyen, Tracey Gaull| STRUCTURAL DESIGN Magnusson Klemencic Associates | MASS TIMBER PRODUCTION Nordic Structures | MECHANICAL The Mitchell Partnership Inc. | ELECTRICAL Mulvey & Banani | LANDSCAPE Janet Rosenberg & Studio | INTERIORS Partners by Design | CONTRACTOR Eastern Construction Company Ltd. | CODE Vortex Fire | CIVIL WSP | GEOTECHNICAL EXP | CONTROLS AND SECURITY HMA Consulting | ACOUSTICS Cerami & Associates Inc., HGC Engineering (Site Plan only) | SUSTAINABILITY Purpose Building Inc. | ENERGY MODELLING EQ Building Performance | ENVELOPE Entuitive Consulting Engineers | COMMISSIONING RWDI Consulting Engineers & Scientists | TRANSPORTATION BA Consulting Group Ltd. | WIND Gradient Wind Engineering | VERTICAL TRANSPORTATION Soberman Engineering Inc. | SIGNAGE Kramer Design Assoc. Ltd. | BUILDING MAINTENANCE EQUIPMENT RDP Engineering Inc. | AREA 23,341 m2 | BUDGET Withheld | COMPLETION Fall 2023

ENERGY USE INTENSITY (PROJECTED) 141.3 ekWh/m2/year | WATER USE INTENSITY (PROJECTED) 0.3 m3/m2/year (water use reduction of 45% compared to the LEED baseline, including greywater reuse in toilets from water collected on the roof and stored in a cistern)

As appeared in the November 2024 issue of Canadian Architect magazine

The post Timber Redux appeared first on Canadian Architect.

PROJECT Maisonneuve Library, restoration and extension

ARCHITECT EVOQ Architecture

PROJECT Octogone Library, transformation and extension

ARCHITECT Anne Carrier Architecture in consortium with Les architectes Labonté Marcil

TEXT Odile Hénault

PHOTOS Adrien Williams

Late last spring, as I was lining up outside Montreal’s Théâtre du Nouveau Monde, waiting for the doors to open, I started a casual conversation with the person nearest me. At one point, totally out of the blue, she asked: “Have you visited Montreal’s new libraries?” Before I had a chance to answer, she went on: “You know, they are the result of architectural competitions. A great system!” I couldn’t help laughing and thinking this was the moment I had long been waiting for… The word was spreading! The news was reaching the public! 

Over the past three decades, the Quebec government has gradually set in place an enviable competition system for cultural buildings—that is, museums, theatres, interpretation centres, and libraries. It results from a policy adopted in June 1992 by the province’s Ministry of Culture, which aimed at “holding public competitions for cultural facility projects presented by municipalities and organizations and produced with the assistance of government grants, the cost of which is over $2 million” (Ministère de la Culture du Québec, La politique culturelle du Québec, 1992). 

A new cultural landscape

Thanks to this policy, a new cultural landscape has gradually emerged across Quebec’s major cities as well as in its smaller municipalities. Competitions have been behind the design of at least 16 theatres, 20 museums of various sizes, and numerous interpretative pavilions. As far as libraries are concerned, the wave of competitions started in 2001 with the small Bibliothèque de Châteauguay (by Atelier TAG with JLP architectes). Since then, more than 20 libraries were the object of competitions. Several of these new cultural institutions have gone on to win awards, and to be covered in journals such as Canadian Architect. 

The benefits to the public are obvious, even though the average Montrealer (with the exception of my theatre-going friend) is mostly unaware of the competition process at work. Needless to say, architects have gained a lot from this policy, which has allowed them to explore ideas and concepts they might not have been able to address in a standard RFP system.  

Two competitions 

It is often presumed that while design competitions may be suitable for new-builds, the complexities of additions and renovations put them out of reach for competitions. However, the contrary is proving to be the case: quite a few of Quebec’s library competitions have been for additions or the quasi-total transformation of existing buildings. 

This is the case for two recently-inaugurated amenities in Montreal: the Maisonneuve Library and L’Octogone both fit into this latter category. They are also among the largest of the city’s 45 branch public libraries, including seven that were the objects of architectural competitions. Both Maisonneuve and L’Octogone existed as libraries before 2017, when separate competitions were launched to renovate and expand them. 

The Maisonneuve Library

The Maisonneuve Library is a rather unique case, since it is sited in a historic City Hall—part of a grand City Beautiful plan carried by a few enlightened entrepreneurs, who developed this sector of Montreal at the turn of the 20th century. Opened in 1912, their new City Hall only filled its role for a short period as the heavily indebted Cité de Maisonneuve was amalgamated to Montreal in 1918. The Beaux-Arts building, designed by architect Louis-Joseph Cajetan Dufort, remained standing through the last century, relatively unaltered—thankfully—by its successive occupants. In 1981, it became part of Montreal’s public library network.

Four teams were selected to take part in the Maisonneuve Library competition: in situ atelier d’architecture + DMA architects; Saucier + Perrotte/DFS inc.; Chevalier Morales Architectes; and Dan Hanganu architectes + EVOQ Architecture. All four teams are considered to be among Quebec’s most creative architectural firms, a reputation they acquired mostly through competitions. They were paid the pre-tax sum of $82,000 to take part in the competition, a sum which was included in the winning team’s eventual contract. 

The challenge for the four teams was to triple the size of the 1,240-square-metre original facility with a contemporary intervention that would pay homage to the former City Hall. The Hanganu-EVOQ team had a definite advantage, EVOQ being one of very few offices in Quebec with a strong expertise in heritage preservation. Their parti was therefore centred on restoring the historic building (then in an advanced state of disrepair) to its original splendour, and treating it as a jewel inserted at the centre of a sober, contemporary composition. The alignment of the new curtain walls and the rhythm of a brise-soleil took their cues from the existing neoclassical colonnade.

On the exterior, stone façades and monumental doors were carefully restored. On the interior, similar attention was paid to the original plaster mouldings, wood panelling, and mosaic floors. The former piano nobile’s marble staircase and its two imposing stained-glass features were painstakingly restored by a team of remarkable artisans, who still work using traditional construction methods. 

Every effort was made by EVOQ—which now includes the late Dan Hanganu’s former team—to ensure the library would be fully accessible to all. This led to the design of a circular entrance pavilion, projecting from the east wing. An architectural promenade takes one from the new entrance, through the historic building, and onwards to the west wing. A sheer delight. The subtly handled transition points between old and new celebrate the original 1900s monument and the skill of its builders.

Slightly less convincing is the west wing’s shelf wall, visible from Ontario Street. It reflects an influence from Sou Fujimoto Architects’ Musashino Art University Museum & Library in Tokyo (2010), with its striking wooden shelving doubling as wall structure. In both cases, aesthetics seem to have been chosen over utility as any books stored in these areas are challenging to access.

While intent on keeping alive the memory of the past, the local librarians simultaneously embraced the progressive outlook of the International Federation of Library Associations and Federations (IFLA). The Maisonneuve Library looks clearly to the future, particularly in its mission is to improve local levels of digital literacy. Gone are the administrative offices hidden away from the public: staff members wheel mobile stations around the building, plugging into a large array of floor outlets. The library’s offerings also now include a playful children’s area, a Media Lab, and a small roof garden. Silence is no longer the rule, except for in a few enclosed spaces. 

Octogone Library

Another major library competition was also launched in 2017: this one for Octogone Library, in a totally distinct environment situated towards the western tip of the Montreal Island. A suburban street pattern is prevalent in the borough and the site of the library is off a banal commercial strip. The area’s most interesting feature is perhaps the adjoining Parc Félix Leclerc, with its gentle landscape and large weeping willows. 

The original Octogone Library building was the outcome of decades-long advocacy efforts by the local community, which did, finally, lead to the government commitment for a public library in 1983. The following year, a low-scale, rather Brutalist building opened its doors to the public. The architects were Bisson, Hébert et Bertomeu. The long-awaited amenity was named Centre culturel de l’Octogone in reference to its role in the community and to its geometry. 

When the 2017 competition was launched for a renovation and addition to the existing building, the resulting proposals aimed to perpetuate the memory—and the name—of the 1984 building. Again, four teams were selected to participate in the competition: Atelier Big City with L’Oeuf; BGLA with Blouin Tardif architects; EVOQ Architecture with Groupe A; and finally, Anne Carrier architecture in consortium with Labonté Marcil, the winning team. The octagonal foundations were deemed solid enough to handle the loads of a new construction, but the existing walls presented competitors with a number of difficulties.

Carrier and Labonté Marcil’s entry was, as noted by the jury, a “vigorous” and “joyous” response to the program. The team had opted not to adhere too closely to the original octagonal plan and to refer instead to a far more significant symbol for LaSalle citizens, the 1827 Fleming Mill. The project’s most striking feature is a central helicoidal stair, or “hub”, which immediately attracts attention as one enters from either side of the new building. 

The second-level plan is laid out to evoke a mill’s three giant “blades” revolving around a central pivot, which culminates in a quiet, more secluded, circular space enlivened by an airy artwork. Produced by artist Karilee Fuglem, this piece alludes to L’Octogone’s extensive collection of graphic novels and comics—the largest such collection in Montreal’s library network.

Conclusion

While architectural competitions have yet to spread across Canada, Quebec can boast a rich repository of experience in this domain. At the end of three decades, and with dozens of projects successfully built through the competition process, the province’s landscape of libraries, theatres, and museums is obvious proof that competitions are worth the effort. 

Of course, there are improvements to be made. The process has gradually been burdened with overly complicated programmatic specifications—some preliminary documents are now up to several hundred pages long. The constraint of tight budgetary commitments in a highly volatile context can also seriously hinder creativity. But in the end, despite the need to revisit and simplify the process, a healthy competition culture has emerged, not just in Montreal and Quebec City, but all over the province. 

At 32 years old, Quebec’s architecture policy is entering middle-age, and it’s perhaps worth considering how it might be adjusted to prompt even more innovative, mature expressions of architecture. Can programs be loosened to allow for more daring concepts? Is there a place for open design competitions, creating opportunities for younger generations of architects? Despite some shortcomings experienced over the last three decades, Quebec has successfully put competitions to the test. And the rest of Canada could learn from it.

Odile Hénault is a contributing editor to Canadian Architect. She was the professional advisor for two pilot competitions that led to the adoption of the Quebec Ministry of Culture’s 1992 policy on architectural competitions.

Maisonneuve Library

CLIENTS Ville de Montréal and Arrondissement Mercier-Hochelaga-Maisonneuve | ARCHITECT TEAM EVOQ—Gilles Prud’homme, Sylvie Peguiron, Marianne Leroux, Georges Drolet, Nathan Godlovitch, Anne-Catherine Richard, Lynda Labrecque, Simona Rusu, Alexis Charbonneau | ARCHITECT (HISTORIC BUILDING, 1911) Louis-Joseph Cajetan Dufort | LANDSCAPE civiliti | ENVELOPE ULYS Collectif  | STRUCTURAL NCK | CIVIL Génipur | MECHANICAL/ELECTRICAL Pageau Morel | ENVELOPE/QUALITY CONTROL UL CLEB | ELEVATOR EXIM | DOORS, HARDWARE SPECIALISTS ARD | COMMISSIONING Cima+ | FURNITURE/SIGNAGE/MULTIMEDIA GSMProject | ERGONOMICS Vincent Ergonomie | LIGHTING LightFactor | SUSTAINABILITY WSP | ACOUSTICS Octave | METAL/HISTORIC DOORS M&B Métalliers | MOSAIC Artès Métiers d’art | ORNAMENTAL PLASTERS Plâtres Artefact | MASONRY Maçonnerie Rainville et Frères | CONSERVATOR/MASONRY Trevor Gillingwater  | STONECUTTERS Alexandre, Tailleurs de pierres + sculpteurs | STAINED GLASS Studio du verre  | ARTIST (PUBLIC ART) Clément de Gaulejac | AREA 3,594 m2 | construction bUDGET $38.6 M | COMPLETION June 2023

Octogone Library

CLIENTS Ville de Montréal and arrondissement lasalle | ARCHITECT TEAM AC/A—Anne Carrier (FIRAC), Robert Boily, Martin L’Hébreux, Patricia Pronovost, Mathieu St-Amant, Andrée-Ève Gaudreault, Brenda Côté. LES ARCHITECTES LABONTÉ MARCIL IN CONSORTIUM—Pierre Labonté, Jean Marcil, Andréanne Gaudet, MICHEL DESMARAIS | Structural/mechanical/electrical EXP | LANDSCAPE Rousseau Lefevre  | INTERIORS Anne Carrier Architecture/les Architectes Labonté Marcil en consortium | CONTRACTOR Décarel | ergonomics VINCENT ERGONOMIE | acoustics Octave | SCENOGRAPHY GO MULTIMEDIA | aRTISTS (PUBLIC ART) CLAUDE LAMARCHE (1984), KARILEE FUGLEM (2024) | AREA 4,500 m2 | BUDGET $28.6 M | COMPLETION October 2024

As appeared in the November 2024 issue of Canadian Architect magazine

The post What Quebec can teach Canada about competitions appeared first on Canadian Architect.

PROJECT Old Crow Community Centre, Old Crow, Yukon 

ARCHITECT Kobayashi + Zedda Architects 

TEXT Adele Weder 

PHOTOS Andrew Latreille 

Arriving in Old Crow is like entering another country. Tucked into the northwest corner of Yukon, this tiny village of 280 citizens of the Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation is accessible only by air, or—for intrepid seafarers—along the adjacent Porcupine River. A grocery store is the sole commercial outlet. All-terrain vehicles putter through a network of dirt roads lined with simple wood houses in various stages of weathering, many festooned with caribou antlers. 

In this otherworldly hamlet, Old Crow’s new Darius Elias Community Centre, designed by Kobayashi Zedda Architects (KZA), stands out like a spaceship. 

From the road, the building reads like a giant cylinder clad in wood slats. From the waterfront side, it flexes inward, roughly framing the outdoor space into a naturalistic courtyard and subtly echoing the meandering river. On a balmy late-summer evening, a young man and woman and their dalmatian are hanging out around the building—under the building, actually. Like almost all structures built in the Arctic, the Centre is raised above the ground so that its warmth does not melt the top layer of permafrost that sheathes the Arctic. This building is raised even higher than the norm, partly to account for the periodic flooding of Porcupine River. Architect Antonio Zedda notes that the building’s elevated condition creates “a completely different planar experience”—inside and out. 

The Centre comprises a community hall, Elders’ lounge, industrial kitchen, games room, meeting spaces, offices, and exercise room. The main space—the large, circular hall—hosts the Vuntut Nation’s assemblies, which include intense discussions, heritage dances, bonding, and reconnecting. Although Old Crow is the current home base of the Vuntut, the Nation’s thousand citizens are dispersed across Yukon. A few times a year, those citizens gather and reconnect in the large hall. “It’s a beautiful space for dancing,” observes Vuntut Gwitchin Chief Pauline Frost. The adjoining kitchen—industrial in both size and equipment calibre—runs at full steam during those events to provide the accompanying traditional feasts. 

The oblique angles and concentric double circle of the ceiling’s radiating structural beams make the space feel alive and active even when empty, and emphasize the centrifugal force of the plan. 

At the other end of the structure, the spacious exercise room offers a stunning panoramic vista of the river, and doubles as a repository for traditional costume-making materials, with a hundred-plus bolts of fabric stacked floor-to-ceiling along one wall. The textiles are end-rolls donated to the community for use by local seamstresses. While it would be incongruous for a big-city gym, this juxtaposition makes perfect sense for a tiny community reclaiming its heritage crafts.

KZA also designed the John Tizya Cultural Centre a few dozen metres down the road, a rectangular mass sheathed in corrugated metal. The Cultural Centre serves as a venue for locals and visitors to explore Vuntut Gwitchin culture and history. That compact and superbly designed building, like the new Community Centre, resulted from the advocacy of Chief Frost, who successfully lobbied for these and other new buildings while serving as the Vuntut Gwitchin’s MLA from 2016 to 2021. She was sworn in as Chief last year, in the same Community Hall that she helped bring to fruition. 

The Community Centre presents an architectural contrast to KZA’s Cultural Centre, both in terms of massing and material. “The clients wanted a building clad in wood, period,” recalls Zedda. “Not metal, nor anything simulating wood. That was the challenge for us; the reality in Yukon is that wood does not last long because of the extreme sun and extreme temperatures.” In response, the design team researched an array of materials, finally settling on modified pinewood by Kebony, a Norwegian wood producer. Infused with an alcohol solution that preserves the wood, Kebony pine will naturally weather into a silvery hue over time, but will not decompose.

To many locals, the building is shaped like a snowshoe—an Aih in Gwichin. Others, like Vuntut Gwitchin Deputy Chief Harold Frost, tell me it’s designed to resemble a caribou trap. To this reporter, as a descendant of Prairie settlers, the plan evokes a leather waterskin. Read into it what you will. Drum? Snowshoe? Caribou trap? “It’s all those things,” says Zedda. “We don’t typically design things that reference something specific.” When the architects showed the floor plans to community members, he recalls, “they started to infer ideas of what it resembled.” 

For Zedda, the original community hall—a wooden octagon that still stands, vacant and rotting, beside the new structure—was the biggest driver. “The idea was to capture the essence of that building and its [interior] space in the newer building,” he says. The concept of circularity, rather than any specific representation, is at the heart of the design, echoing Indigenous respect for the cycle of life.

But here is the uncomfortable question: is this building too big, and too state-of-the-art? For Chief Frost, the biggest challenge of the Community Centre is its high heating costs. That is not an architectural failing per se: the design team followed the design brief in terms of size, but few buildings of this size and scope could keep their energy costs low in an Arctic locale with viciously cold winters. The huge circular space that is so highly appropriate and welcoming for the quarterly gatherings of the Vuntut Nation is otherwise often vacant. 

Zedda argues that our system of consistent building-code application and aggressive energy targets is problematic for remote places like Old Crow, with populations so small that residents are unlikely to have the skill sets to address and maintain the technical issues and features. “In terms of codes and standards that affect building systems such as mechanical heating and ventilation, for example, the code requirements tend to overly complicate the systems without understanding the context in which they are being placed,” he says. “This needs to be revisited. Otherwise, highly complex and efficient systems, if not operated properly, tend to perform poorly and are more expensive to operate.”

The time has come, he argues, to question whether it’s imperative in every instance to follow every code requirement when in certain communities it might be inappropriate or cost-prohibitive. “And by inappropriate or cost-prohibitive,” he clarifies, “we are not talking about life safety items, for which there should be no flexibility.  What’s needed is more consideration for the immediate geographic and cultural context.” 

He cites a real-life example from a past project in Old Crow: “The client asked why we needed to include a wheelchair ramp in the building design. Being on permafrost, the raised building resulted in a steel ramp system that was over 12 metres long with a price tag of over $50,000.” The client told Zedda that a ramp wasn’t strictly necessary, since on the rare occasions when someone would need assistance to enter and exit the building, others in this tightly-knit community would step up to help. “They would never leave an Elder or mobility-challenged individual to navigate these spaces and places on their own,” says Zedda. “I was in awe hearing this.”   

What are the fixes for the Darius Elias Community Centre and buildings like it? An architectural solution—unfeasible now, but perhaps viable with some future technology—is crafting a means to expand and contract a building’s capacity in response to shifting needs. As for the challenge of making and maintaining buildings in small and isolated places, it may be time to consider encouraging flexibility with certain code requirements and energy targets in such communities. 

Ultimately, for the Vuntut Gwitchin, the Darius Elias Community Centre is not just a functional amenity, but an existential one. Their periodic gatherings are essential as a cultural reaffirmation, both amongst their Nation’s citizens and to the outside world. “We were essentially the forgotten community, because of our remoteness and social isolation,” says Chief Frost. “We didn’t have anything before. But what’s happened here in the last six or seven years is so amazing.”

Adele Weder is a contributing editor to Canadian Architect. KZA Architects contributed a portion of the travel costs for this article.

CLIENT Vuntut Gwitchin Government | ARCHITECT TEAM Antonio Zedda (MRAIC), Chris Chevalier, Sheelah Tolton, Phillippe Gregoire, David Tolkamp | STRUCTURAL Ennova Structural Engineers Inc | MECHANICAL Williams Engineering Canada; Building Systems Engineering | ELECTRICAL Williams Engineering Canada | CONTRACTOR Johnston Builders Ltd. | FOOD SERVICES Lisa Bell & Associates | ENERGY MODELlING Morrison Hershfield (now Stantec) | SOLAR PV STUDY Green Sun Rising | GEOTECHNICAL EBA/TetraTech | AREA 940 m2 | BUDGET Withheld | COMPLETION June 2021

As appeared in the November 2024 issue of Canadian Architect magazine

The post Northern Light appeared first on Canadian Architect.

PROJECT Bombardier Global Manufacturing Centre, Toronto Pearson Airport, Mississauga, Ontario

ARCHITECT NEUF architect(e)s

TEXT Ian Chodikoff

PHOTOS Salina Kassam

Creating an aircraft manufacturing space is a unique programmatic challenge for an architect, combining advanced technology, precision engineering, and meticulous attention to safety. When Bombardier approached NEUF architect(e)s to create its new aircraft assembly centre at Toronto Pearson International Airport, the architects embarked on a five-year-long journey to realize a state-of-art facility, with 2,000 employees manufacturing over a dozen planes at a time. 

A complex coordination challenge

Not unlike the complexity of planning for a hospital, the project required NEUF to navigate many client requirements, specifications, and workflow methodologies, translating them into a functional design. Beginning with client-supplied diagrams built in Excel, the architects worked through detailed programmatic diagrams to assimilate everything from equipment requirements to unique fire and life safety standards. The complexity was multiplied by the challenges of the site—the aeronautic campus was to be built adjacent to Canada’s busiest runway, handling over 200,000 planes annually.

NEUF partner Lilia Koleva led the project, working alongside Marco Chow and Rainier Silva to ensure every detail aligned with Bombardier’s operational requirements; Linh Truong headed up the interior design. At one point, the NEUF team had 30 staff coordinating with 120 external professionals from various disciplines and specialties, including over 75 engineers and designers from Stantec. The project began in late 2019; after nearly 400 meetings, it officially opened in the spring of 2024. 

Koleva’s ability to coalesce complex programming requirements were previously honed through her involvement with the renovation and expansion of the Centre hospitalier de l’Université de Montréal (CHUM) completed in 2021, where, in collaboration with CannonDesign, she coordinated a constantly evolving list of facility and equipment requirements for dozens of operating theatres. For the Bombardier facility, Chow noted the creation of over 750 room data sheets with the client, as well as over 3,200 requests for information (RFIs) for the construction phase alone, 260 sheets of drawings, 3,000 Revit wall tags, 3,718 Revit construction notes and 58,000 Revit families. The architects had to address Bombardier’s evolving corporate needs as well. During the pandemic, the facility’s footprint was reduced by 30 percent, requiring the team to adapt the program to ensure it met Bombardier’s operational and strategic goals. 

Adapting to a new site and scale

Bombardier’s previous site was a century-old 366-acre campus at Downsview Airport. To enable the move to a much smaller, irregular 41-acre parcel at Pearson, the architects had to negotiate a comprehensive site planning process, and navigate complex municipal infrastructure requirements and aviation regulations.

Upon arrival at the new facility, one first notices an enormous parking lot filled with dozens of Teslas. There is a culture within Bombardier to improve the sustainability of their business—in addition to their aircraft design—as they continue to explore environmentally friendly aviation fuel options, and to reduce waste and emissions. Over 50 percent of the energy used on-site comes from renewable sources. The facility’s expansive exterior façades are marked by barcode-like vertical strips of curtain wall and translucent polycarbonate panels, which help to maximize daylight. 88 percent of workstations have access to natural light, boosting workplace health and wellbeing while reducing energy demands. The design intuitively orients employees to the fire exits, highlighted by narrower, single-width translucent overhead panels.

The new campus is responsible for Bombardier’s Global line of business jets, marketed for use by governments and private clients. NEUF’s detailed planning was most intense for the 60,000-square-metre manufacturing building—the largest standalone building constructed at Pearson airport in the past 20 years. The extensive production floor is divided into 16 interior work centres, each measuring approximately 38 by 38 metres, and tailored to specific stages of aircraft assembly. There are eight similarly dimensioned exterior work areas. The 75-metre clear span over the production floor allows plenty of natural daylight through highly translucent fabric “megadoors,” while the large volume of space makes for considerably reduced ambient noise compared to the old Downsview production facility. Beyond the production floor are testing areas, flight simulation rooms, offices for engineers, classrooms for the aerospace program at Centennial College, and training, orientation and computer labs. Separate buildings include a 10,600-square-metre flight test hangar. 

Designing anything near an airport means the architects must adhere to strict Transport Canada and NAV Canada regulations, including the Obstacle Limitation Surface (OLS). James Lambie, Industrialization Director at Bombardier, explains that with OLS protocols, nothing can be built within 100 metres from the centreline of the nearby runway. From there, every seven feet you go out, you can go up one foot. At the tightest points, the building stays within 15 centimetres of the OLS to provide construction tolerance. Safety and environmental considerations also required integrating advanced fire suppression, ventilation, and lighting systems.

Koleva estimates that, given the number of employees and requirements for the building, the needed municipal infrastructure upgrades that Bombardier performed were equivalent to handling the needs of six or seven residential towers. The existing sewers were nearing capacity before construction. Therefore, Bombardier had to build a new sewer alongside the runway and underneath the aprons for the busy FedEx distribution centre next door. At specific points, excavations had to go down 20 metres to build a sewer that could then be tied back into the main trunk lines for the City of Mississauga. At the same time, the airport runway and the FedEx facility maintained their complete operations, without any dust or disturbance that could affect the safety of the aircraft. Similarly, the architects had to control stormwater before releasing it to the City, by installing four underground tanks. The capacity of the two largest tanks totals 7.6 million litres of water—the equivalent of three Olympic-sized swimming pools.

Integrating advanced systems and equipment

Various custom solutions were needed to accommodate large component handling, specialized racking systems for the thousands of parts on reserve, and the need for precise clearances along the manufacturing line.

Large parts like wings and fuselage sections—manufactured at other Bombardier facilities outside of Toronto—are transported to Pearson using specially designed vehicles and handling equipment, to ensure they arrive without damage. Wing sections unloaded in the aerostructures facility undergo an initial inspection, and are then decanted in a climate-controlled area. This allows the components to expand or contract back to factory-specified dimensions in the case that they have been transported in excessively hot or cold environments.

Specialized robotic arms assist in drilling and riveting, as well as performing component quality checks. These robots are programmed to perform tasks with incredible precision, and are guided by specialized GPS sensors embedded in the concrete slab. An elaborate system of sprinklered scaffolding and cranes runs overhead and underneath the aircraft components as they move along the line, eventually arriving at a point when the fuselage, cockpit, wings and landing gear are assembled. In the factory, they call this the transformation into “weight on wheels.”

The building isn’t air-conditioned, only humidity-controlled. This is because the one-metre-thick double-reinforced concrete floors that run through much of the facility act as an effective heat sink. These floors are designed to house some 1.5 kilometres of slab-on-grade trenches, which run beneath the floors to accommodate power lines, vacuum systems, and hydraulic connections. The trenches help keep the workspace free and clear of objects and hazards, minimizing the risk of foreign-object debris (FOD). Anything from a plastic wrapper to a screwdriver could cause severe damage if it were to interfere with, or contaminate, the aircraft in any way.

To Bombardier Vice-President of Management and Programs Julien Boudreault, the biggest challenge in designing the new facility is to allow listening and seeing to happen. “It is the first line of defense where you must be able to quickly see which aircraft is in position on the assembly floor at any given time, and this is our company’s culture.” Many senior management offices have windows overlooking the two U-shaped assembly lines; the offices are also positioned to allow anyone to walk out onto the assembly floor quickly. “This configuration fits within Bombardier’s ‘go-and-see’ approach,” says Boudreault, referring to the concept that the CEO, a mechanic, and an engineer can quickly resolve an issue together, during any assembly stage. 

This exceptional degree of accessibility extends to all levels of production. The aeronautics industry is highly regulated, with many trades concentrated on the production floor. At every manufacturing stage, clusters of desktop workstations bring engineers within earshot of the production crew, so they can quickly collaborate to identify and resolve problems. Around the perimeter of the production line are areas where a new part can be replaced, modified or built—all designed so that workers in charge of those parts are within a four-minute walk from any point they need to access on the floor. Specialized tooling shops on the periphery operate around the clock to keep the flow moving.

The facility’s high-power engine run booth, unique to Pearson Airport, is designed to handle the immense power, heat, and noise generated during the testing and calibration of aircraft engines—the most expensive part of the aircraft, valued at around $10 million per pair. The extensive aircraft inspection process also includes a process known as “soaking,” where the aircraft is fuelled to its maximum capacity and left to sit to check for leaks or other issues that could affect performance.

Some bespoke aspects of the build-out are handled at Bombardier’s Montreal facility, including custom interiors, unique paint jobs, and the installation of specific equipment. Whether a customer chooses a particular sound system, carpeting, or bathroom fixture, each piece of equipment must be carefully sourced and documented—similarly to the plane’s rivets, bolts, or landing gear—to ensure airworthiness and safety. 

A complex building for a complex process

“Building an aircraft is an undertaking that rivals the complexity of a major building project,” says Graham Kelly, Vice President of Operations for Global Aircraft at Bombardier’s Toronto facility. “We needed a space that could not only handle the scale of our manufacturing operations, but also reflect our commitment to innovation and to exceeding client expectations, while ensuring the safety and wellbeing of our employees.”

NEUF became one of Bombardier’s “Diamond Suppliers” after completing the landmark facility at Pearson. Architects may not like to be referred to as “suppliers,” but in this context, it is an honour that demonstrates an earned trust with a client that lives and breathes a technical, process-driven culture.

For Koleva, designing this facility was also a personal achievement. She flew a lot with her parents as a child, and was fascinated by planes. She wanted her thesis project at McGill University to be an airport. (It ended up being an embassy.) As an architect, she always hoped to design an airport. From her perspective, “the Bombardier facility is as close to an airport as it gets, because it’s about all the requirements for moving people through space.” Bombardier builds the planes, while NEUF builds for the people who make them.

Ian Chodikoff is an architect and consultant focused on architectural leadership and business strategy.

CLIENT Bombardier | ARCHITECT TEAM Lilia Koleva (RAIC), Antoine Cousineau (RAIC), André Cousineau (FRAIC), Azad Chichmanian (RAIC), Marco Chow (RAIC), Rainier Silva, Linh Truong, Annabelle Beauchamp, Jean-Luc Bourbeau, Stéphane Claveau, Ailsa Craigen, Sophie Del Signore, Feroz Faruqi, Gabriel Garofalo, Marie-Pier Gervais, Valérie Godbout, Gary Hlavaty, Sarah Ives, Mathieu Jolicoeur, Nadia Juarez, Kazim Kanani, Madina Koshanova, Guillaume Lallier, Celia Lauzon, Alain Piccand, James Rendina, Kristen Sarmiento, Marina Socolova, Naomi Su Hamel, Sam Taylor, Serge Tremblay, Don Toromanoff, Varteni Vartanyan | STRUCTURAL/MECHANICAL/ELECTRICAL/ACOUSTIC/LANDSCAPE Stantec | INTERIORS NEUF architect(e)s | CONSTRUCTION MANAGER Ledcor | AVIATION CONSULTANT BDI Blast Deflectors  | AREA  Building area–54,250 M2 ; Gross floor area–70,400M2 | BUDGET $500 M | COMPLETION May 2024 

As appeared in the November 2024 issue of Canadian Architect magazine

The post Under the Wing appeared first on Canadian Architect.

West Park Healthcare Centre, founded in the early 1900s, has played an important role in the western Greater Toronto Area (GTA) care community, providing rehabilitation services and care after life‐altering illnesses or injuries, such as lung disease, amputation, stroke, and traumatic musculoskeletal injuries.

A new 730,000 sq. ft. ambulatory care centre, designed by CannonDesign and Montgomery Sisam Architects, is the latest addition to the historic site. The new centre, which replaced a series of aging hospital buildings, was created to meet the evolving needs and set new standards in rehabilitative care through its patient-centred philosophy and the use of nature as a healing ground.

The design of the new facility features the intersection of emotional and therapeutic healing and recognizes that recovery is not just a physical process but also one that must address the emotional, psychological, and spiritual well-being of patients. As a result, the facility incorporates elements of nature both inside and outside the building to foster a holistic healing environment.

The centre also features outdoor spaces, such as sensory gardens, fitness trails, and meditation areas, while the inside features natural materials, abundant light, and expansive views throughout the building.

Terraces on each floor also offer outdoor spaces for therapeutic activities, family gatherings, and personal reflection. Each patient room features operable windows positioned at a low height to promote natural ventilation and allow patients to look outside.

The new facility has three interconnected wings; one dedicated to outpatient services and two to inpatient care. The building exterior reflects West Park’s rich natural heritage through the use of wood-look soffits, aluminum and copper-zinc alloy cladding, brick, and stone.

A few other unique design elements include a fireplace lounge, spiritual care centre, therapeutic pool, rooftop garden, and unique art pieces that were donated to the hospital.

The post Newly-Designed Healthcare Centre in Toronto Combines Indoors and Outdoors appeared first on Canadian Architect.

The new Shawenjigewining Hall at Ontario Tech University in Oshawa, Ontario, is a recently completed 110,000 square-foot addition to the campus designed to create the sense of gravity and community.

With hybrid learning having now become the new norm and as students balance remote and in-person learning methods, higher education institutions have identified a need for campus spaces that promote socializing and an elevated on-campus experience.

The name “Shawenjigewining” means “a place of kindness and friendship,” and comes from a vision received during the sacred sweat lodge ceremony. A plaque with the building’s name, its meaning, and the image of a deer, which came during the vision and is Shawenjigewining Hall’s visual identity, is displayed in the front foyer of the building.

The architectural design was completed by Montgomery Sisam Architects in a joint venture with Architecture Counsel. The campus facility serves as a mixed-use student hub and contains a series of spaces for students.

The building incorporates different types of spaces, both active and quiet options, which have all been designed to cater to a variety of student needs as well as build an environment that complements hybrid learning. The new campus facility also accommodates the school’s Faculty of Health Sciences and features tech-enhanced student classrooms and lounge areas.

Mobile lectures were also created to facilitate easy movement for the professors within the classrooms.

The idea of wellness was at the centre of the design, which is why the architectural teams maximized daylight and created a visual connection within the building.

The building’s facade is designed to facilitate passive lighting, shading, and heating to optimize the quantity and quality of the sun coming in. To help draw light deeper into the building, four concrete panel types were arranged differently on each side of the building that differ from the solar path. The program spaces were also distributed within the campus building according to their individual daylighting needs.

The project takes a sustainable design approach and was designed to minimize energy consumption requirements, and the consumption of high carbon fuel sources. This was done to reduce embodied carbon emissions, and integrate opportunities for natural lighting, shading, heating and renewable energy generation.

Some of the building’s sustainable design features include a high-performance building envelope, a 30 per cent window-to-wall ratio, high-efficiency systems for artificial heating and cooling, and the use of LED fixtures and a heat recovery chiller to generate heat by connecting to the neighbouring geothermal field.

The design features a blend of manmade and natural products where concrete is paired with local limestone. This aims to create a play between the two and gives the building a simple yet elegant look and feel.

“Shawenjigewining Hall was designed with student well-being at its core. Our goal was to create an engaging sequence of space that fosters community, supports learning, and allows for personal reflection. The building’s integration of natural light, flexible study areas, and diverse social spaces reflects Ontario Tech University’s commitment to providing a balanced and enriching environment,” said Daniel Ling, principal at Montgomery Sisam Architects. “With sustainability being top of mind, we have designed Shawenjigewining Hall to be a timeless, adaptable, resilient, and inspiring building for generations of students to come.”

The building also offers a home away from home for Indigenous students, as well as a space for all students to connect and learn from Indigenous culture and resources. It also includes an Indigenous space, called Mukwa’s Den.

The post Shawenjigewining Hall at Ontario Tech University embraces hybrid learning appeared first on Canadian Architect.

PROJECT HEC Montréal Hélène-Desmarais Building, Montreal, Quebec

ARCHITECT Provencher_Roy

TEXT Olivier Vallerand

PHOTOS Ema Peter

Montreal-based Provencher_Roy has long demonstrated its aptitude for creating dynamic education facilities and university buildings, dating back to one of their breakthrough projects, UQAM’s J.-A.-De Sève building (1998). The lessons learned from this wealth of work are brightly visible in the Hélène-Desmarais Building, the new centre for Montreal’s post-secondary business school, HEC, in the heart of the city’s commercial core. 

Led by then-partner Alain Compéra, Anne Rouaud, and Gerardo Pérez, the architect team transformed an odd-shaped downtown site into a building that feels at once intimate and on-brand with HEC’s executive-oriented profile. The design takes inspiration from HEC’s role as an early-twentieth-century institution of the primarily French-speaking side of downtown: in 2000, its original building on Square Viger was transformed in the Bibliothèque Nationale du Québec’s Archives Centre, by Dan Hanganu and Provencher_Roy. Since that time, the institution has operated from two buildings at the Université de Montréal campus, on the other side of the mountain—a Brutalist one designed by Roland Dumais and recently renovated by Provencher_Roy, the other a new-build by Dan Hanganu and Jodoin Lamarre Pratte architectes. The new space repositions the school closer to the economic centre of the city, in a historic setting neighbouring Saint Patrick’s Basilica.

The design process built on models of collaborative learning and experimentation developed by the business school itself, which HEC had iteratively explored in its previous buildings. Working in collaboration with HEC research group Mosaic, Provencher_Roy undertook a co-design process that included a full-day workshop with HEC faculty and students, neighbours (including church members), heritage experts and creative professionals, followed by regular discussions with these groups. This process allowed the team to understand neighbours’ fears about the occupation of an empty space owned by the basilica. They worked closely with stakeholders, as well as with engineers, city staff, and government representatives, to develop a shared framework and vision for a contemporary addition to the city that would be integrated in the urban fabric. 

The building occupies a comb-shaped site created by the combination of land ceded by the church and two privately owned lots. Throughout the design process, the team had to adjust their design, as HEC didn’t know which private owners would accept to sell their lots. Reacting to the building’s siting—anchored in the heart of a city block—the team imagined it as forming a campus with the basilica to the north, at the top of the comb. The teeth of the comb, popping out onto Beaver Hall, mask the service sides of adjacent buildings. A planned next phase of the lot redevelopment will redesign the basilica’s forecourt, resulting in better connections to both the new HEC building and De la Gauchetière Street. 

To further complicate the design, the site sits on a steep slope, with nearly nine metres (two full floors) of height difference between De
la Gauchetière to the east of the building and René-Lévesque Boulevard to the west. This is negotiated by introducing a main circulation axis that steps up from De la Gauchetière, dividing the overall massing of the building into two sections. These volumes were further refined by thinking of the roof as a fifth façade, visible from the tall buildings surrounding it. Mechanical elements are carefully screened, and the top of the facility treated as a landscape of green roofs and terraces accessible from different floors. More shaping occurred in response to the Church’s requests that views be protected, and neighbours’ access across the site preserved. The resulting sculptural form creates a diversity of viewpoints and experiences both inside and outside. This renders it impossible to fully comprehend the building at a glance—and yet, easily understandable as one circulates through it. 

The interior clarity is achieved by two horizontal circulation axes. These visually connect the interior to the city, and provide for clear views of the vertically stacked program elements: a restaurant on the lower floor, conference and lecture rooms above, followed by classrooms, floors dedicated to continuing education, and foundation and administration offices at the top. Throughout the building, circulation areas and informal collaborative working spaces are positioned along the façades. The composition is anchored by a monumental stair on the first floors, connecting to a more contained sculptural stair on the upper floors. Contrasting black and white walls on each side of the feature stair subtly divide the space. This constellation of events and nodes, all consistently linked to views of the city, make wayfinding easy, despite the building’s unusual shape.

Walking through all the informal working spaces is enough to make anyone jealous of HEC students—even before going into the classrooms. These are carefully planned, based on many years of experimentation in HEC’s other buildings, and informed by lessons learned during the Covid disruptions. The classrooms and formal meeting spaces integrate hybrid teaching and collaborative tools, including webcams and screens on every wall of many rooms. U-shaped fixed configurations and modular tables allow for close interaction between teachers and students. In addition to a traditional 300-seat main auditorium with glazed walls to the circulation spaces, the building includes a “deconstructed” auditorium designed to teach entrepreneurial communication skills, mimicking situations in which students might be asked to work during their professional careers. 

Throughout the building, shiny stretched ceilings and mirrored walls provide a visual sense of expansiveness. Fritted glass similarly creates continuity between walls and façades on the white side of the building. The fritted glass doubles as passive shading, playing a role in the building’s energy efficiency strategy—an important requirement from HEC even before the adoption of the most recent building code, with its more stringent energy-savings measures. Instead of curtain walls, highly insulated composite walls were designed and prototyped; the resulting modular system helped with the rationalization and constructability of the building’s sculptural form. A geothermal system results in smaller mechanical equipment needs, increasing the accessible areas of the building’s roofscape.

Subtle gestures are integrated throughout, connecting with both the history of the site and of the institution. For instance, maple links the new building to HEC’s other facilities in Montreal. Trees from the site, which had to be removed during construction, were reused in furniture for the facility. Outdoor furnishings were designed using stones from the former St. Bridget shelter, a building demolished in the late 1970s, whose foundations are inscribed on the ground floor of the new building. 

Provencher_Roy’s site-responsive design promises to become, with time, a central meeting point for the Montreal business community, and an important chapter in the school’s proud architectural history. Once again, HEC teaches here the importance of investing in architecture: both for fostering the collaborations that are at the heart of business, and for expressing the institution’s longstanding role as a civic leader.

Olivier Vallerand is an Associate Professor at the École de design, Université de Montréal.

CLIENT HEC Montréal | ARCHITECT TEAM Alain Compéra (FIRAC), Anne Rouaud, Gerardo Pérez, Claude Provencher (FIRAC), Henry Cho, Jonathan Bélisle, Olivier Chabot, Guillaume Martel-Trudel | STRUCTURAL/CIVIL Consortium SDK/MHA | MECHANICAL/ELECTRICAL Pageau Morel/Bouthillette Parizeau in Consortium | LANDSCAPE Provencher_Roy | INTERIORS Provencher_Roy | WAYFINDING Arium Design | PROJECT MANAGER WSP Canada | CONTRACTOR Magil Construction | AREA 24,000 m2 | BUDGET $160 M | COMPLETION September 2023

ENERGY USE INTENSITY (PROJECTED) 105.5 kWh/m2/year | WATER USE INTENSITY (PROJECTED) 0.46 m3/m2/year 

The post Lessons learned: HEC Montréal Hélène-Desmarais Building, Montreal, Quebec appeared first on Canadian Architect.

For the longest time, Quebec’s schools, like many schools in Canada, were associated with humdrum architecture. This was not particularly because of the architects involved (often a stable roster of firms), but because of unimaginative programs, poor budgets, and overemphasis on security issues. Flat roofs were the norm—as were artificially lit corridors, predictable classrooms, and paved yards surrounded with chain-link fencing.

And then, on November 7, 2017, totally out of the blue, an unexpected trio held a press conference. Chef Ricardo Larrivée and triathlete Pierre Lavoie, both darlings of Quebec media, had joined forces with well-known architect Pierre Thibault. They were determined to prove that if you provided children with joyous, dynamic learning spaces, if you encouraged them to be physically active, and if you engaged them in learning to prepare healthy meals, you just might have a tremendous impact on their future—and on the future of our societies. As Ricardo put it, the trio hoped to create conditions that “would make children eager to go to school.”

The threesome had managed to convince Sébastien Proulx, then Education Minister, to invest three million dollars for a two-year period (a mandate that was later renewed) in the setting up of what they called a Lab-École—a research centre for experimental, progressive schooling—closely connected with Laval University’s School of Architecture. Initial research for the project included visiting dozens of schools located across the province, but also in Denmark, Japan, and Finland, as well as meeting with teachers, school directors, and others to develop ideas and concrete solutions. Then, work started in earnest, exploring ideas through drawings and models, and developing guiding principles for the optimal spatial organization of elementary schools. These guidelines were published in manuals that would serve as a base for the Lab-École’s next steps.

The first real-life testing ground for Lab-École’s research took place in a Quebec City neighbourhood. Stadacona School was initially going to be renovated, but had to be demolished. ABCP architecture and architect Jérôme Lapierre, the latter a close collaborator with Pierre Thibault, were selected to design a replacement building, which incorporated some of the ideas being developed by the Lab-École group. 

But the bigger effort was yet to come. Five other elementary school locations were then selected across Quebec, and each of them became the object of a major open architectural competition. As this article goes to press, four of the resulting new and renovated schools are now open; the fifth one, located in Gatineau across the river from Ottawa, is still under construction.

Simultaneous design competitions, all with anonymous entries, were launched in 2019 to choose the professional teams that would eventually design and build the five projects, within the Lab-École’s guidelines. The conditions were far from perfect: no remuneration was offered for Phase 1; the schedule was extremely tight; and the requirements were demanding, the competitors having to produce two perspectives, a site plan, plans of all floors, a significant section, as well as a model. Nevertheless, the Lab-École received a total of 160 entries for the five sites. Quite a few well-established firms were among the participants. This was a surprise, since such firms tend to shy away from anonymous, unpaid competitions. This high level of participation was probably due to the fact that, for decades, most of the province’s schools had been kept in the hands of a very select group of firms. For established firms which had never managed to build a school, entering one of the five competitions was a way to get a foot in the door. And of course, for younger, emerging teams, it was a chance to break through the system. 

This is exactly what happened at École des Cerisiers in Maskinongé, a small municipality of 2,250 people. Here, the smallest (2,770 m2) of the five Lab-École schools was awarded to a consortium headed up by two young women—architects Lucie Paquet and Paulette Taillefer. The duo was initially selected among four teams asked to develop their concept during a second phase: at this point they teamed up with Leclerc architectes, an established firm with a long record of school building, to eventually win the project.

École du Zénith (4,350 m2) and École de l’Étincelle (3,577 m2) went respectively to Pelletier de Fontenay (again with Leclerc architectes) and to a consortium of two up-and-coming firms, Agence spatiale and Appareil architecture (with BGLA architecture). Finally, École du Boisé-des-Prés, the largest (6,365 m2) of the school projects, was won by a consortium of two well-established firms, Lapointe Magne et associés and L’Oeuf. 

The vision proposed by the Lab-École researchers was summed up by architect Pierre Thibault in a Radio-Canada interview aired in August 2020: generous interior spaces, sloped roofs, the widespread use of wood, bleachers for various activities, and community gardens outside. 

The projects completed so far are all interesting in their own right, although there is a slightly uneasy similarity between two of them, École du Zénith (four kindergarten and 12 elementary classes) and École de l’Étincelle (three kindergarten and 12 elementary classes).
In both cases, the solution was to break the school down into small, interconnected pavilions, grouped around a partially enclosed exterior court. Sloping roofs and wood façades create a home-like feeling, highly evocative of Quebec tradition. At École de l’Étincelle—a project that was recently awarded a Governor General’s Medal in Architecture—the school also seems to offer a clear nod to the area’s iconic “Little White House.” Within walking distance of the new school, the small building is a strong symbol of resilience for the community, having survived the destructive floods of the summer 1996.  

At École des Cerisiers, the site included an existing school, which had to be integrated into the project. The architects’ response was subtle, as they managed to cleverly navigate between the 1950s structure and the contemporary intervention. The project raised a lot of enthusiasm in the municipality, which invested extra funds for its realization. As at several of the other sites, the school’s ground floor was planned so that the gym and the kitchen area could be made directly accessible to the public outside of regular school hours.

For École du Boisé-des-Prés, the architects delivered a much larger, complex project under an imposing roof structure. The program provided for eight kindergarten classes and 17 elementary classes. The building is characterized by its large aluminum-clad volumes and the strong presence of a community-accessible gym to one side of the public entrance. The sloping site also made it possible to locate the school kitchen so that it can be reached directly from outside, or by using the interior stairs. The school’s pièce-de-résistance is its central agora, with its generous bleachers that project to the exterior. One of the lead designers, architect Katarina Cernacek, acknowledged that the Patkaus’ early school projects had been a source of inspiration.

Conclusion

Studying the whole Lab-École operation, one cannot ignore the serious budget overruns—which, to be fair, were in large part due to Covid-related difficulties such as the increased cost of materials and labour shortages. Looking back at the work accomplished and at the results, Lab-École co-founders prefer to talk about “investment” rather than “expense.” They might be right. 

Curiously, a rather similar school building program had been initiated in British Columbia during the 80s and 90s. Thanks to the efforts of Vancouver-based Marie-Odile Marceau, then regional architect for the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, a series of award-winning, well-published schools were built across the province for several First Nations communities. The use of wood, welcoming interiors, natural light, proximity to nature—it was all there! It took decades, but finally, the message has made its way across the continent.

This time, the Lab-École experiment may have a lasting effect in Quebec education. Even though the Province may not launch another school competition for a while, expressions such as “child creativity,” “natural light,” and “collaborative spaces” have now found their way into official Guidelines for primary school design in Quebec. That, in itself, is a huge victory. And the unexpected trio—Ricardo Larrivée, Pierre Lavoie and architect Pierre Thibault—should be thanked for it.

Odile Hénault is a contributing editor to Canadian Architect.

École du Zénith, un Lab-École

LOCATION Shefford, Quebec | CLIENT Centre de services scolaire Val-Des-Cerfs | ARCHITECTS Pelletier de Fontenay + Leclerc Architectes | ARCHITECT TEAM Thomas Gauvin-Brodeur (Leclerc Architectes), Hubert Pelletier (PdF), Etienne Coutu Sarrazin (PdF), Ghislain Gauthier (Leclerc Architectes) | STRUCTURAL Latéral (Thibaut Lefort and Alexandra Andronescu) | MECHANICAL BPA (Marco Freitas) | ELECTRICAL BPA (Jean-Claude Corbeil) | CIVIL Gravitaire |  LANDSCAPE Fauteux et associés in collaboration with agence Relief Design (Jean-François Bertrand) | INTERIORS Pelletier de Fontenay | CONTRACTOR Binet Construction (Charles-Antoine Busque) | AREA 4,350 m2 | BUDGET $30.5 M | COMPLETION January 2024

École Des Cerisiers, un Lab-École

LOCATION Maskinongé, Québec | CLIENT Centre de services scolaire du Chemin-du-Roy | ARCHITECTS Lucie Paquet – Paulette Taillefer + Leclerc architectes | ARCHITECT TEAM Paulette Taillefer, Lucie Paquet, Thomas Gauvin Brodeur, Elaine Tat, Leslie Bellessa, Ibtissame Zandar, Hugues Patry, Étienne Pelletier, Alexandre Chartré-Bouchard | STRUCTURAL/MECHANICAL/ELECTRICAL Stantec | LANDSCAPE Mousse Architecture de paysage | INTERIORS Lucie Paquet – Paulette Taillefer | CONTRACTOR Therrien | BUILDING ENVELOPE Envelop3 | AREA 2,770 M2 | BUDGET $16.8 M | COMPLETION November 2023

École du Boisé-des-Prés, un Lab-École 

LOCATION Rimouski, Quebec | CLIENT Centre de services scolaire des Phares | ARCHITECTS Lapointe Magne et associés + L’OEUF architectes in consortium | ARCHITECT TEAM Katarina Cernacek, Sudhir Suri, Jennifer Benis, Pascale-Lise Collin, Martin-F. Daigle, Alain Desforges, Aurélia Crémoux, Agata Najgebauer, Océane Purnham, Aline Gabriel-Chouinard, Benjamin Rankin, Ronnie Araya, René Chevalier, Chantal Auger, Caroline Corbex, Daniel Pearl | STRUCTURAL Latéral Conseil | MECHANICAL/ELECTRICAL Gbi Experts-Conseils Inc.| LANDSCAPE Pratte Paysage | CIVIL Vinci Consultants | INTERIORS Lapointe Magne et associés + L’OEUF architectes | CONTRACTOR Construction Technipro BSL | ARCHITECT COLLABORATOR FOR SITE SUPERVISION Proulx Savard Architectes | AREA 6,365 m2 | BUDGET $35 M | COMPLETION June 2024

École de l’Étincelle, un Lab-École

LOCATION Saguenay, Quebec | CLIENT centre de services Scolaire des Rives du Saguenay | ARCHITECTS Consortium Agence Spatiale – APPAREIL Architecture – BGLA Architecture | ARCHITECT TEAM Stéphan Gilbert (BGLA), Kim Pariseau (APPAREIL Architecture), Étienne Bernier (Agence Spatiale), Lydia Lavoie (BGLA), Marc-Olivier Champagne-Thomas (APPAREIL Architecture), Johanie Boivin (previously with Agence Spatiale), Jérôme Duval (Agence Spatiale), Pascal Drolet (BGLA) | ENGINEERS LGT (now WSP) | LANDSCAPE Collectif Escargo + Rousseau Lefebvre | ENVIRONMENT/SUSTAINABILITY Martin Roy & Associés | MEP Pro-Sag Mechanique Inc | ARTIST Mathieu Valade | AREA 3,577 m2 | BUDGET $16.75 M | COMPLETION September 2023

The post Four Lab-École schools in the spotlight appeared first on Canadian Architect.

PROJECT Canadian Centre for Climate Change and Adaptation, Saint Peters Bay, PEI

ARCHITECTS Baird Sampson Neuert architects, part of the WF Group with SableARC Studio 

TEXT David Sisam

PHOTOS Brad McCloskey

Building on a reputation for delivering environmentally progressive institutional buildings, Toronto-based Baird Sampson Neuert (BSN) has once again designed a notable academic building with ambitious sustainability goals. This time, the project, completed with SableARC Studio, is situated on Prince Edward Island, a small province with a remarkable history of initiatives to combat the threatening consequences of climate change.

The Canadian Centre for Climate Change and Adaptation (CCCCA) is a 30-minute drive across the eastern tip of the Island from Spry Point, the site for the 1976 Ark, an experimental built demonstration of a self-sustaining house and ecological research centre by architects David Bergmark and Ole Hammarlund. That landmark project from 50 years back—officially opened by no less than Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau—was built under the auspices of the US-based New Alchemy Institute, with funding from the federal government and land from the province. The Ark was the first in a long series of environmental initiatives on PEI: in 1981, the Wind Energy Institute of Canada was established in North Cape, where there is a Research and Development Park testing a great variety of experimental wind turbines. By 2018, 23 percent of the electrical energy on PEI was supplied by wind turbines. In 1999, the Island Waste Management Corporation was created. Its Waste Watch program has converted 65 percent of the Island’s waste to compost or recycling. From 2019 to 2023, the Green Party formed the Official Opposition in the PEI legislature—for the first time in the history of any Green Party in Canada. 

These bursts of environmental consciousness are not surprising on a small island with no oil and gas reserves, a fast-eroding shoreline, limited space for landfill, and other vulnerabilities to climate change, including the effects of sea level rise. These vulnerabilities became clearly evident in 2022, with the widespread damage of post-tropical storm Fiona. The storm destroyed 40 percent of the island’s forests, and coastline erosion was in many cases measured in metres.

In 2019, the province’s track record of environmental initiatives continued when the federal government, along with the province and the University of Prince Edward Island (UPEI), announced combined funding for the new Canadian Centre for Climate Change and Adaptation (CCCCA) at UPEI. The CCCCA is located remotely from the main UPEI campus in Charlottetown and overlooks the Village
of Saint Peter’s Bay (pop. 231).

Program and Built Form

The rather heroic presence of the CCCCA takes its position on a ridge above the picturesque village, on land donated by three families. It is a location that in previous generations might have been occupied by a grand mansion or a church. In effect, it symbolizes the necessary effort that will be required to counter the real threats posed by climate change.

Innovation is also evident in the Centre’s program, which accommodates the internationally recognized UPEI Climate Research Laboratory, as well as other teaching and living spaces. Its unique 24-hour live/learn/research programme includes teaching, research, maker and social spaces that extend across the ground level, and compact accommodation for twenty-one residents on the upper levels. 

The entrance to the Centre is a double-height space with a view through to a grass forecourt, which hosts a drone launching pad and a solar array. At the east and west ends, a drone port/workshop, art gallery, and resource room/kitchen break free of the bar to further define the forecourt. The drone port/workshop takes advantage of the site’s topography to allow a greater volume for the space. The teaching and research spaces all have abundant natural light, and faculty offices border a 57-car parking lot on the north side.

As a living laboratory and educational destination, the building enables world-class sustainability-focused research, as well as immersive experiential learning for graduate and undergraduate students. The Centre specializes in coastal climate science, precision agriculture, and climate adaptation research. Its location gives researchers and students access to nearby wetlands, forests, and coastal habitats, as well as facilitating the monitoring of PEI’s shoreline by drone.

The CCCCA doubles as a community hub, hosting workshops and public meetings with local residents, including the neighbouring Abegweit First Nation, and engaging the local community with significant global climate change research.

Headwinds

When the project was awarded to BSN in association with SableARC Studio, immediate headwinds were encountered. Essentially, there was that all-too-familiar problem of too much program for too little money, and too little time. Within a fast-track 21-month design and construction schedule, the architects had to reprogram the facility from its initial 4,180 square metres to 3,530 square metres to meet budget limitations. Even then, the building and its ground source geothermal system were realized for $295 per square foot—a remarkable feat given the sustainability achieve­ment of the project. Significant site costs were required to service the lot and to provide onsite capacity for firefighting, including water storage, booster pumps and back-up emergency power systems. In an additional set of challenges, the project was designed and built during the peak of Covid pandemic lockdowns, a period of significant material price escalation.

Sustainability

Because of the Centre’s research mandate, for the architects it was a given that the CCCCA building would need to showcase the best in sustainability practices. Implementing a carbon sequestering design approach, the structure primarily consists of conventional wood stick construction with occasional use of glulam beams and steel columns. The exterior walls are made up of prefabricated, thermally broken wall panels and locally harvested wood cladding. Triple-glazed and operable Passive House certified windows provide daylighting, views and natural ventilation for all regularly occupied spaces within the building. The Centre is sited to address the grass forecourt, maximizing views, access to daylight and microclimate conditions. The Centre achieves the CaGBC Zero Carbon Performance Standard, based on an all-electric design approach which includes a ground-source geothermal heating and cooling system, coupled with 100 KW of onsite solar panels, and a low-voltage power distribution system for lighting and electric vehicle charging.

The Achilles heel in the sustainability profile of the CCCCA doesn’t have anything to do with its architecture, but rather with its location and car dependency. While its live/learn program is intended to help address this, the Centre is located 51 kilometres from the main UPEI campus and over 10 kilometres from the nearest grocery store. Recognizing the problem of distance, UPEI has made arrangements with the provincial bus service to allow opportunities for daily trips between the Centre and the main campus on its regular route, and provides subsidies for students to use the service. Resident students typically carpool for grocery store outings.

What if?

There were several sustainability initiatives proposed by the design team that were not possible to implement due to the budget constraints. These included green roofs, permeable paving for the entry drive and parking lot, as well as brise-soleils for the art gallery/multi-use gathering space and drone port/workshop. A proposed second-floor rooftop terrace was a casualty of value engineering during the construction management delivery process.

When asked what would have been different if the project had a larger budget and a more forgiving timeline, principal Jon Neuert of BSN allowed that the community space would have been more developed, and that the built form would have been more granular in nature, as is typical in BSN’s portfolio of university academic and residence projects. This finer grain would also allow the built form to be more attuned to the village of Saint Peter’s Bay, with its array of small buildings and church spires, while at the same time maintaining its strong presence atop the ridge.

Notwithstanding these ‘what ifs’ and other built form options, the CCCCA as constructed is a remarkable achievement, and provides UPEI and its students a fertile setting for teaching, research, community activities and living accommodation. The client and the architects have done more with less—economy of means, generosity of ends—reflecting the Island’s tradition of punching above its weight in its efforts to tackle the threatening consequences of climate change.

David Sisam is Principal Emeritus of Montgomery Sisam Architects. He and his family have a summer place near Malpeque on the north shore of PEI.

CLIENT University of Prince Edward Island | ARCHITECT TEAM BSN—Jon Neuert (FRAIC), Luke Cho, Dat Pham, Mehdi Latifian, Clare Commins, Jesse Dormody. SableARC—Bill Saul, Jodi Crompton, Robert Haggis | STRUCTURAL SCL Engineering | MECHANICAL MCA Consultants | ELECTRICAL Richardson | LANDSCAPE Vollick McKee Petersmann | INTERIORS SableARC  Studio | CONTRACTOR Bird Construction | CAGBC NZB SHADOW REVIEW LMMW Group Ltd. | AREA 3,600 m2 | BUDGET $11.4M building / $12.4M with site servicing & improvements | COMPLETION May 2022

ENERGY USE INTENSITY (PROJECTED) 109.6 kWh/m2/year | EMBODIED CARBON 60-YEAR LIFE CYCLE ANALYSIS (PROJECTED) 204.7 kgCO2e/m2 (59% below CaGBC NZB v3 threshold) 

The post Economy 
of Means, Generosity of Ends: Canadian Centre for Climate Change and Adaptation, Saint Peter’s Bay, PEI appeared first on Canadian Architect.

On June 13, 2024, Arthur Erickson’s beloved Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia reopened after 18 months of closure. During this time, its iconic Great Hall was entirely rebuilt from the ground up. The epic reconstruction was steered by Vancouver architect Nick Milkovich, whom Erickson first hired in 1968 and who worked on the original building.

Here’s Milkovich’s account of the project, drawn from an interview with Adele Weder.

Since the Museum of Anthropology was built, the knowledge of earthquake impact has changed; the building was about 25 per cent of what it should be for current codes. The building was already showing signs of deterioration: the plastic skylights leaked like hell, steel reinforcements in the concrete were starting to show, things like that. The Great Hall was the worst off.

We started out by scanning the building components. That’s when we discovered that the concrete columns were actually hollow. Fifty years ago, the lifting capacity of the construction equipment was more limited; it would have been difficult or impossible to raise the largest column, which was 50 feet high. So that’s probably why they were thinned out and hollowed. The engineering consultant had said that it would come down fast in an earthquake—and that’s before we found out that the columns were hollow!

When we found out that it was that bad, we thought it would be really difficult to reinforce it without showing a lot of steel, but doing it that way would have changed the whole character of the building.

The key to the seismic upgrade is what’s called base isolation, so the building can move in an earthquake. The old structure was slab-on-grade concrete, resting directly on the ground. We rebuilt it with precast concrete, with a crawl space under the building and a huge beam under the columns that helps supports it.

And underneath every column, we incorporated rubber-and-steel tips called base isolators. They’ll act like shock absorbers in an earthquake. Our projection is that the building will be able to move up to one foot two inches, in two or three seconds. That was the big move.

The existing walls were tempered glass, which wouldn’t break into deadly shards—but in an earthquake, all that glass would all
instantly shatter and pile up on the ground at the foot of the building. We replaced that glass with laminated sheets of glass, which are stronger and still safe.

Before, the glass plates were pinned to the columns and hung from the beams. Now, long plates of glass are cantilevered over the columns a bit, meeting at the vertical glass plates at a right angle, caulked together with a steel rod in the middle of the caulking, and that
allows for a bit of movement in an earthquake.

I hesitated for about a week before I took on the job. I’m not a huge political animal; I’m just a guy who likes to make things. I had to decide if I could handle the politics of it all. But I knew I could handle the architecture part, and I knew the building well.

And I realized too there was an obligation—a moral obligation, in a way.

The post Museum of Anthropology renewal, Vancouver, BC appeared first on Canadian Architect.

BALNEA spa + réserve thermale has announced the official opening of a new component of its outdoor spa facilities, designed to offer an immersive experience in nature while also promoting relaxation.

The project, set in the countryside of Bromont, Quebec, was completed by the architectural firm MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple Architects.

This new installation features a spacious infinity thermal bath and a relaxation room which promises an experience that awakens the senses. The thermal bath has a 670-square-foot area that fits over 25 people, and offers a breathtaking panoramic view of Lake Gale.

“These new installations represent a perfect blend of innovation, sustainable practices, and architectural excellence. Every detail has been designed to awaken the senses and enhance the well-being of our guests. We aimed to offer a unique, immersive, generous, and authentic experience inspired by the richness of the surrounding nature,” said Denis Laframboise, president of BALNEA spa + réserve thermale.

This marks the latest milestone for BALNEA in a significant expansion project that began in spring 2023, supported financially by the Quebec Ministry of Tourism under the Tourism Industry Recovery Assistance Program (PARIT).

The project references the surrounding natural environment through its materiality and form. The concrete volume of the spa emerges from the landscape and references the texture and natural rock of the Appalachians.

“The generous new thermal bath and spa terrace grounds the scheme within the landscape. The use of natural materials enhances the reading of the “spa in nature,” while offering a wide range of haptic user experiences,” said Brian MacKay-Lyons, founding partner of MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple Architects.

In April 2023, BALNEA embarked on an extensive eco-friendly expansion project to realize its vision, as the establishment prepares to celebrate its 20th anniversary in October 2025.

The work will continue this summer with the addition of extra changing rooms and with the expansion and upgrade of the Beatnik Hotel in fall 2024, which will double its number of rooms. While the hotel will remain partially open during the renovations, the official inauguration is scheduled for summer 2025.

The project is part of an environmentally conscious approach, a vision shared by MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple Architects and the partners involved.

The new terraces are heated by recovering heat from the mechanical rooms, and the wastewater treatment system has been moved away from sensitive areas. The filtration system has also been optimized, tripling its treatment capacity while only doubling the size of the installations.

In the long term, more than 20,000 square feet of buildings will be preserved and renovated, maximizing resource use and material reuse.

 

Technical sheet:

Location: Bromont, Québec, Canada

Completion Date: June 2024

Client: BALNEA spa + réserve thermale

Design Architect: MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple Architects Ltd.

Design Lead: Brian MacKay-Lyons

Architect: Project Manager: Tyler Reynolds

Project Team: Talbot Sweetapple, Paryse Beatty, Ryan DeWolde, Andrew Tomchyshyn, Matthew MacKay-Lyons, Ryhland Taylor

Local Architect: Architecture écologique (Étienne Lemay)

Contractor: Construction Maurice David & Filles

Panoramic Lift and Slide: Bachand & Bosquet

Exterior Door: Bachand & Bosquet

The post BALNEA spa + réserve thermale designed to offer immersive and revitalizing experience appeared first on Canadian Architect.

təməsew̓txʷ, derived from the hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ language and meaning “Sea Otter House” Aquatic and Community Centre has opened in New Westminster, British Columbia.

The City’s largest capital project to date aims to be the heart and soul of the community and a place to build connection. The building also aims to make a strong, civic statement while being sensitive to the natural environment and human-scale experience.

The building, designed by hcma architecture + design, was designed for all ages and abilities with a focus on community connections, wellness-based activities, and sporting and fitness activities.

It is located on the edge of a residential neighbourhood north of the Fraser River, which has been a cultural and economic life source for Indigenous peoples for thousands of years. The project, located on the site of the former headwaters of Glenbrook Ravine, which was lost to development over the preceding decades, takes a strong stance toward reconciliation with the natural character of the landscape.

The 10,684 sq m / 114,571 sq ft aquatic community centre is Canada’s first completed all-electric aquatic facility to achieve the Canada Green Building Council’s (CAGBC) Zero Carbon Building-Design Standard.

təməsew̓txʷ is also the first to use the gravity-fed InBlue filtration system, which reduces the need for chlorine usage and creation of associated harmful byproducts.

In 2019, the centre’s design was recognized with a World Architecture Festival award for Civic Facilities (Future Projects).

The site opens out to the community on four sides and two major civic plazas act as entry points, connected by the lobby, which draws visitors in.

The two plazas have been designed for different arrival experiences. A major public sculpture by Squamish Nation artist James Harry called Miyiwts (“Water’s Edge”) welcomes visitors and honours the Host Nations to whom these territories belong.

The spacious double-height lobby features a local heavy timber glulam roof, with a skylight that illuminates the space and draws people in. Large glass openings, which are flanked by acoustic wall paneling, connect the lobby to interior program spaces.

In the east wing, the design embraces a trend in wellness focused aquatic facilities. The eight-lane, 50 metre lap pool and two diving platforms are enclosed by a sawtooth roof structure formed by a hybrid steel truss and mass timber (cross laminated timber) system. Above the pools, the second level fitness centre is nestled into the nooks and crannies between the large roof volumes.

Extensive public and stakeholder group engagement took place over two years and involved over 3,000 people, including urban Indigenous, Host Nations and multicultural groups, and an accessibility committee. Community input helped make many of the decisions that guided the design of the facility.

A Naming Advisory Panel made up of urban Indigenous and local First Nations gifted the name təməsew̓txʷ to the centre. Meaning “sea otter house” in hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓, the Down River language of local First Nations, the panel chose the name due to the “playfulness, joyfulness, and family-oriented nature of the sea otter,” which reflects themes that came up during community engagement.

Inclusive design and physical accessibility are core aspects of the facility’s planning and detailing. The pool change rooms offer options for all-genders as well as dedicated male and female spaces. The project will receive its Rick Hansen Foundation Accessibility Gold Certification in the coming weeks.

In addition to achieving the CAGBC’s Zero Carbon Building – Design Standard, the project is also on track to receive LEED Gold certification. The innovative InBlue pool filtration and disinfection system is expected to have a major impact on guest experience, as well as minimizing pump energy consumption by almost 50 per cent and improving air and water quality.

“Aquatic centres are some of the worst offenders when it comes to energy use and carbon emissions, so it’s been incredibly rewarding to complete Canada’s first all-electric, zero carbon building-certified facility. We couldn’t have achieved this without the City of New Westminster’s vision and commitment to the project as well as to their Seven Bold Steps for Climate Action,” said Paul Fast, principal, hcma architecture + design.

The post Canada’s first completed aquatic centre to achieve Zero Carbon Building Design Standard opens in B.C. appeared first on Canadian Architect.

Every two years, the prestigious Governor General’s Medals in Architecture recognize and celebrate outstanding design in recently built projects by Canadian architects. The competition, established by the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada in collaboration with the Canada Council for the Arts, continues a tradition initiated by the Massey Medals in 1950. Here are this year’s winners.

SFU STADIUM

ARCHITECT Perkins&Will

LOCATION Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia

Erickson Massey’s original masterplan for SFU’s Burnaby campus included concrete bleachers in front of the Lorne Davies Complex (LDC)—housing gyms, a fitness centre, and a pool—to provide seating for sporting and cultural events. Deemed too expensive at the time, the seating was never constructed, and the campus has lacked this critical community-building space. 

In 2012, the Simon Fraser Student Society passed a vote to collect an annual levy from students to fund the construction of new student facilities, including a stadium. The resulting design takes inspiration from the terraced planes of the original masterplan, and maintains the LDC’s key experiential element of uninterrupted views to the south from its pool deck. The stadium is conceived as a minimal intervention synchronized to the structural rhythm of the LDC, and topped by a canopy that floats above the seats.

The stadium is designed to host events throughout the year, and to be a sheltered public space when not in use. Mass timber panels are both the finish and structure, creating a warm place of welcome to the campus. The seating area has been used as a marshalling space for sports camps, an outdoor lecture theatre, and an informal hang-out space for students. During events, the facility offers a variety of viewing experiences, from formal seats to more casual areas for socializing.

The jewel of the design is the canopy over the central seating area—a structure that seems impossibly thin for the span it covers, and is supported by slender columns that almost disappear in the background. As a minimalist element, it frames clear views to the field, with a supporting structure that sits above the plane of the soffit. The wood surface amplifies the noise of the crowd, enhancing the spectator experience and providing inspiration to the players.

Jury Comment :: The jury appreciated the quiet and clear response of the SFU Stadium project to its context and purpose. The main architectural feature of the project is the canopy that shelters the stadium seating. The design’s simplicity was well executed and was an elegant choice given the context of the brutalist backdrop of the Lorne Davies Complex Building. The jury noted the efficient use of materials including CLT and the handsome honest detail of the structural approach. In a time of excess, the SFU Stadium illustrates restraint and elegance that will no doubt remain functional and beautiful for many decades to come.

CLIENT Simon Fraser University | ARCHITECT TEAM Max Richter, Abu Benjaman, Paul Cowcher, Nic Dubois-Robitaille, Jana Foit, Bojana Jerinic, Horace Lai, Sarita Mann, Gavin Schaefer, Elsa Snyder, Kim Stanley, Laurence Renard | BUILDING ENVELOPE Perkins&Will | STRUCTURAL Fast + Epp | MECHANICAL Introba | ELECTRICAL WSP | CIVIL Kerr Wood Leidal Associates Ltd. | CONTRACTOR Chandos Construction | CODE GHL Consultants | A/V IBI Group | SUSTAINABILITY Perkins&Will | AREA 2,776 m2 | BUDGET $21 M | COMPLETION June 2021

GROW

ARCHITECT Modern Office of Design + Architecture (MODA)

LOCATION Calgary, Alberta

GROW is a 20-unit housing project in the inner-city neighbourhood of Bankview, Calgary. It’s also an urban farm: its zigzag sloped roof is topped with 0.6 acres of rooftop gardens that act as a place for residents to meet, walk the dog, and get a breath of fresh air.

To further support social interactions across generations and demographics, GROW’s rental units suit a range of ages and family sizes, including small (42 square metre) studios, medium-sized (56 square metre) condos, 1.5-storey lofts, and large (79-93 square metre) two-storey townhomes. This arrangement potentially places a retired couple next to a young family with children, or a single student next to a young professional, building resilience and social connections through proximity.

The development’s formal strategy evolved from its restrictive setbacks and steep slope, with six metres of elevation change from the northwest to the southeast corner of the site. The architects responded by placing the parkade at grade, pushing units at the rear of the building up to create a terracing effect that provides equal access to light and view for all of the units. Offsetting the terraced bars opens up the development’s generous outdoor amenity space.

In most multi-unit buildings, the only opportunities for social interaction occur in shared corridors and at the mailboxes. At GROW, residents can participate in all facets of the rooftop garden, which is managed by a local, not-for-profit urban farming collaborative, or simply enjoy spending time in the outdoor space. Trust is built through the shared ambition to cultivate and care for a resource that benefits the community. 

Lead architects Ben Klumper and Dustin Couzens describe the devel­opment as “unusual in Calgary, where private/speculative devel­opment drives housing provision, and cost-cutting takes precedence over community growth.” But, they add, “if GROW’s approach […] were to become more prevalent in our inner-city communities, and we were to focus on building social capital in tandem with real estate capital, we could create more equitable, inclusive and diverse inner-city urban spaces.”

Jury Comment :: GROW creatively reimagines the typology of a multi- unit residential complex and offers a much-needed new take on collective living. The jury praised the project’s form, program, and organization as a sensitive response to its suburban context. In particular, the clever sculpting of the topography of the ground and the roof levels provides the building with an animated communal stepped garden. The jury also recognized the significance of the project’s contribution as a new case study to the “missing middle” housing crisis.

CLIENT Andrei Metelitsa | ARCHITECT TEAM Dustin Couzens, Ben Klumper, Nicholas Tam, Cara Tretiak | INTERIOR DESIGN Modern Office of Design + Architecture (MODA) | LANDSCAPE Modern Office of Design + Architecture (MODA) | URBAN FARMING CONSULTANT YYC Growers (Rod Olson) | ENERGY MODELLING EMBE Consulting Engineers (Moortaza Bhaiji, Paul Caicedo) | ENVELOPE/SUSTAINABILITY Williams Engineering (Hillary Davidson) | CIVIL Richview Engineering (Robin Li) | STRUCTURAL Wolsey Structural Engineering (Danny Wolsey) | MECHANICAL/ELECTRICAL TLJ Engineering Consultants (Kevin Vig) | BUILDER RNDSQR + BMP Construction + Signature Properties | AREA 1,806 m2 (Interior) / 856 m2 (Exterior-Urban Farm) | BUDGET $4.78 M | COMPLETION July 2020

PUMPHOUSE

ARCHITECT 5468796 Architecture

LOCATION Winnipeg, Manitoba

Winnipeg’s historic James Avenue Pumping Station was slated for demolition after 14 failed attempts to revive it. Taking on a role outside of the usual scope of architects, 5468796 Architecture developed an unso­licited conceptual design paired with a financial pro forma, and presented the business case to an existing client. This combination eventually led to the building’s successful preservation.

Two design interventions made the project financially viable: repurposing the capacity of original gantry crane rails to suspend a floating floor above the preserved pumping equipment below; and building a residential block on the 13-metre-deep sliver of land between the historic building and Waterfront Drive. A larger residential building was also placed on the opposite end of the pumping station.

In the completed project, the pumping equipment remains in its found state, free of complicated programming. Above, a flexible office floor plate opens fresh views of the equipment, enhanced by floor-to-ceiling glazing. New skylights pierce the roof, bringing natural light deep into the expansive space. 

Materially, the upper level of the pumping station is grounded in the straightforward, industrial quality of the place. Steel studs and stiffening bars are repurposed as supports, allowing for thinner glazing, reducing embodied carbon by half, and increasing construction speed and affordability by removing the need for specialized installers. 

The residential blocks are offset from the existing building, creating new laneways that respect the original pumping station envelope, reference the human scale, and expand the ground floor commercial frontages. Barrier-free access points are nestled along these paths, and the massing makes room for an outdoor amphitheatre, a number of public plazas, and a pair of footbridges suspended between the residential blocks and the heritage building. 

The mid-rise residential buildings bookending the site have Nail Laminated Timber (NLT) technology composing the floors and ceilings, nodding to the Exchange District’s century-old warehouses. Rethinking the norms of multi-unit residential design, they include a skip-stop configuration and open-air egress. The vibrant exterior passageways act as sites for neighbourly interaction and encourage a sense of shared ownership over communal space. Open-air stairwells provide unobstructed vistas to the city, park, and river. 

Blending historic revitalization and sustainable development, this multi-faceted, mixed-use development has brought back a historic structure using practical innovation, and gained the support of heritage advocates, neighbouring residents, and the community at large.

Jury Comment :: The jury noted the excellence of this sensitive and convincing rehabilitation, which demonstrates a deep understanding of the site’s potential and qualities, proposing adapted programs and additions integrated into the logic of the existing elements. Using the load-bearing capacity of the gantry crane rails to support a new floating floor frees up floor space and highlights the architectural qualities of the building and the industrial equipment as artifacts of the former use. The densification of the site with two new residential buildings ensures the feasibility of the project. The jury also appreciated the way in which the apartments are distributed by external walkways, offering to each of them double exposure and through-ventilation.

CLIENT Alston Properties | ARCHITECT TEAM Emeil Alvarez, Pablo Batista, Brandon Bergem, Ken Borton, Jordy Craddock, Donna Evans, Ben Greenwood, Ralph Gutierrez, Johanna Hurme, Ainsley Johnston, Jeff Kachkan, Stas Klas, Lindsey Koepke, Matthew Kurtas, Kelsey McMahon, Colin Neufeld, Sasa Radulovic, Anika Thorsten, Matthew Trendota, Shannon Wiebe | LANDSCAPE Scatliff + Miller + Murray | INTERIORS 5468796 Architecture | STRUCTURAL Lavergne Draward & Associates | MECHANICAL/ELECTRICAL/CIVIL MCW Consultants | ENERGY Footprint | CODE GHL Consultants | SURVEYOR Barnes & Duncan | CONTRACTOR Brenton Construction Corp. | AREA 7,108 m2 | BUDGET $22 M | COMPLETION December 2023

NEIL CAMPBELL ROWING CENTRE

ARCHITECTS MJMA Architecture & Design | Raimondo + Associates Architects

LOCATION St. Catharines, Ontario

Located in the Port Dalhousie community of St. Catharines, Ontario, Henley Island and its two-kilometre racecourse on Martindale Pond have been the epicentre of Canadian rowing since 1903. The site has hosted the yearly Royal Canadian Henley Regatta and rowing competitions for Olympic Trials, the Pan Am Games, and World Championships. 

The new Neil Campbell Rowing Centre (NCRC) continues Henley’s tradition as a venue for elite competitions, while also serving as a year-round training centre for athletes. The project demonstrates how simple, elemental, and respectful design can support a broad spectrum of uses, while also achieving both Net Zero-Energy and Zero-Carbon Emission benchmarks.

Built on a gentle promontory, the NCRC reconfigures a previously ill-defined staging area. Its signature mass timber roof is topped with photovoltaic panels, and uses Canadian glue-laminated (GLT) and cross-laminated timber (CLT) products. It is supported by a light steel column structure and a centralized service core. Steps running down to Martindale Pond serve as seating, but also allow spectators and children to dip their toes in the water. The facility rests on 15-metre-long screw piles that extend down to bedrock.

The biased and overhanging roof, extensive glazing, and steps to the racecourse give the NCRC a striking visual identity. Its linked interior and exterior spaces offer ample space to host events. With its sliding doors open, it becomes a pavilion—a central space for viewing races and gatherings. 

The building’s design inverts the opacity of the typical boat shed and introduces aspects of the glass house, reimagining these traditional typologies to create a new functional and social amenity that elevates the experiences of athlete and spectator alike. 

Jury Comment :: The Neil Campbell Rowing Center illustrates how a powerful singular gesture against a natural backdrop delivers a flexible program in a beautiful, restrained manner. The jury appreciated the clear construction and use of mass timber, Passivehaus envelope detailing, PV array and other sustainability features as well as the architect’s ambition to meet Zero-Carbon and Net Zero-Energy aspirations. Although programmatically relatively simple, the design is well considered to ensure that the simplicity was rigorously executed.

CLIENT 2021 Canada Summer Games/Canadian Henley Rowing Corporation | ARCHITECT TEAM MJMA—Robert Allen, Dan Kronby, Tyler Walker, Ted Watson, Tarisha Dolyniuk, Tim Belanger, Andrew Filarski, Matt Lamers, Monica Leung, Timothy Lai. RAIMONDO + ASSOCIATES—Emilio Raimondo, Brad Augustine, John-Alexander Raimondo, Jeff Visentin, Brennan Klys, Carrie Rose | INTERIORS MJMA Architecture & Design | STRUCTURAL Blackwell | MEP Smith + Andersen | CIVIL Upper Canada Consultants | SUSTAINABILITY Footprint | CONTRACTOR Aquicon Construction | AREA 527 m2 | BUDGET $7.2 M | COMPLETION February 2022

CHURCHILL MEADOWS COMMUNITY CENTRE AND SPORTS PARK

ARCHITECT MJMA Architecture & Design

LOCATION Mississauga, Ontario

Located in Mississauga, Ontario, the Churchill Meadows Community Centre and Sports Park transforms a 50-acre former agricultural field into a richly textured park centered on a pavilion-like building. 

The Community Centre is ringed by extensive glazing, and its entrance elevation is clad in white standing-seam metal, modulated with bold faceting that opens up the building’s form towards approaching visitors and the sky above.

Interior spaces are arranged into two bars running the building’s length. The eastern bar holds the changerooms at grade, with a teaching kitchen, multi-purpose rooms, and a fitness area on the mezzanine level above. To the west, a wider bar houses the triple gymnasium, lobby, and aquatics hall. Here, the sculptural ceiling’s inverted peaks diffuse natural light from a series of sawtooth skylights, with an overall effect evoking serenely lit caverns.

In the lobby, a generously proportioned switchback stair provides clear wayfinding to the mezzanine level, and allows for views to the pools, gym, and park. 

The fully glazed park-facing elevations to the west and south boast a striking exterior canopy that extends and makes visible the building’s mass timber structure. The canopy is clad in an expanded aluminum mesh that protects the wood from the elements, while filtering light to mitigate glare inside the lobby, pool, and gym.

MJMA also completed the park’s masterplan and the design of the park’s initial phase, allowing for an exceptional programmatic and formal integration of community centre and park. The building is set diagonally with respect to the urban grid, with its four elevations facing each cardinal direction, and the playing fields and courts are aligned with it for optimal solar orientation. Parking areas are pushed to the north and south ends of the site, so that park and building can occupy an uninterrupted car-free zone. The park includes a covered walking track that rings the building, and sports fields and courts spread across a landscape whose gently rolling hills, made from soil reclaimed during building excavation, offer elevated seating and viewing points. At virtually every point inside the building, the facility’s primary program spaces are transparent to the outside. The experience throughout is accompanied by panoramic views through the array of glulam columns into the park.

Jury Comment :: The Churchill Meadows Community Centre and Sports Park is a welcome addition to the community of Mississauga, Ontario. With the Community Centre at the heart of the design, the building creates spaces of safety, accessibility, and equity for all users. The scale and massing of the building creates a new landmark in the suburban landscape, with the expression of materials and structure being key. A nuanced understanding of light and transparency between the inside and outside creates a delightful play of shadow and light.

The jury was taken by balance between sensitivity and pragmatism, the consistency of concept and detail, and the durability of the execution.

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 | MEP Smith + Andersen | CIVIL EMC Group | LANDSCAPE MJMA Architecture & Design | SUSTAINABILITY Footprint | INTERIORS MJMA Architecture & Design |  GRAPHIC DESIGN/SIGNAGE & WAYFINDING MJMA Architecture & Design | CONTRACTOR Aquicon Construction | AREA 6,827 m2 | BUDGET $51 M | COMPLETION September 2021

KING CITY LIBRARY AND SENIORS CENTRE

ARCHITECT Kongats Architects

LOCATION King City, Ontario

Stretching out like an open hand, the King City Library and Seniors Centre is a multigenerational community hub: a place to meet, share stories, exchange knowledge, and access information. 

Kongats Architects was initially retained to investigate the program and feasibility of a facility that would replace the existing library. The study and its public consultations identified the benefits of a shared public library and seniors centre as a place for community building, and a configuration that could realize operational savings.

The resulting building is centered on a welcoming core, whose intimate, wood-lined study rooms contrast with glazed, light-filled reading rooms that offer views to the surrounding landscape. Program areas across the two-level building include a senior’s centre with flexible event spaces, collaborative meeting zones, a digital media and ‘make-it’ lab, exterior reading balconies and patios, and dedicated areas for adult collections, local histories, children and teens. 

The entry from King Road was re-envisioned as a welcoming public space, where the curved façade of the building symbolically embraces community markets, book fairs, and barbeques. Elements of the interior spill out to entice potential patrons. Sustainability initiatives are also interwoven throughout the site and building: stormwater is managed on site through bioswales, natural daylighting is provided to all occupied areas within, and operable windows allow for cross-ventilation.

At a moment when libraries are perceived to be under threat from a shrinking public realm on one side and digitization on the other, the King City Library and Senior’s Centre creates an innovative and vital “third space” that is neither home nor work. It’s a place where the community benefits from intergenerational learning and making, and has wide access to well-curated information. 

Jury Comment :: The King City Public Library and Seniors Centre provides a multi-generational community hub for residents of King City that integrates two vital urban functions—an urban social space and a seniors’ centre. The jury noted the social and cultural value of the combined program. The jury discussed the contextual approach, material detailing and the sustainable strategies which included bio-swales, natural daylighting, natural ventilation and optimized heating and cooling systems.

CLIENT King Township | ARCHITECT TEAM Alar Kongats, Paul Dolick, Paula Prada, Carolanne Bedard-Reid, Adam Troter, Stephanie Leboeuf | STRUCTURAL/ MECHANICAL/ ELECTRICAL/AV/IT  WSP | CIVIL MGM | LANDSCAPE Brook McIlroy Inc. | COST A.W. Hooker & Associates Ltd. | AREA 1,951 m2 | BUDGET $10 M | COMPLETION September 2020

GARDEN LANEWAY HOUSE

ARCHITECT Williamson Williamson Inc.

LOCATION Toronto, Ontario

Facing a service lane in the west end neighbourhood of Roncesvalles, Toronto, the Garden Laneway House reimagines the possibilities for small-scale urban densification.

The four-bedroom home accommodates a family of five, and its ample spaces and light-filled rooms counter the stereotype that laneway homes have limited space and unappealing sightlines, and lack privacy. 

The house was designed to feel like a primary home, clad in a rotated brick façade that brings beauty to the laneway. The front door is recessed under a carport canopy clad in charred cedar, ensuring privacy from the cars that access the garages surrounding the home. Inside, the house’s program is flipped upside-down from a typical home. The primary suite is on the lowest floor and enjoys a large lightwell, the teenagers’ bedrooms are on the ground floor, and the living spaces are on top. A skylight above the stairwell ties together the levels, and the main living area and rooftop deck enjoy picturesque views of the neighbouring treetops.

Material innovation maximizes the interior space. The use of a cold-formed steel joist system increased ceiling height by four inches on each level and left room to run the services directly through the supports, eliminating the need for dropped ceilings. Smart home lighting and zone-specific radiant heating and cooling systems enable the house to run efficiently, while providing an added level of comfort for the family, achieving a TEDI of 27.50 kWh/m2/yr.

This project provides inspiration for how laneway and garden suites can allow property owners to unlock value in their backyards, while encouraging increased density in well-established neighbourhoods.

Jury Comment :: Nestled between garages and an alley, Garden Laneway House is a true gem, with whimsical yet quiet architecture that more than compensates for the site’s lack of context. In an often-overlooked typology, the jury was delighted by the effectiveness and efficiency of the space layout, complemented by the strategies implemented by the design team to achieve the project’s spatial qualities such as the views and natural lighting. This project is exemplary in its approach to small-scale urban densification. The jury was also impressed with the overall quality of its construction and details, particularly the beautiful brick facade providing a playful texture contrasting with the banality of the laneway.

CLIENT Suzanne and Jeff Wilkinson | ARCHITECT TEAM Betsy Williamson, Shane Williamson, Javier Huerta, Dimitra Papantonis, Steven Chen, Nassim Sani, Christina Vogiatis, Silas Clusiau | INTERIORS DESIGN COLLABORATION Suzanne Wilkinson Interiors Inc. | CONSTRUCTION Jeff Wilkinson, Wilkinson Construction Services Inc. | STRUCTURAL Atkins + Van Groll, faet lab | MECHANICAL McCallum HVAC Design Inc. | AREA 214 m2 | BUDGET $1.25 M | COMPLETION  May 2022

31 SCARSDALE ROAD

ARCHITECT Suulin Architects Inc.

LOCATION North York, Ontario

31 Scarsdale Road is an adaptive reuse of a warehouse and office complex in Don Mills, Toronto. The original light-industrial development was part of the area’s modernized approach to the Garden City. Over time, the complex became an ungainly assemblage of three buildings. It included a one-storey warehouse built in 1962, a one-storey rear warehouse/showroom added in 1977, and a two-storey front office/showroom added in 1985. These additions were joined, but functioned and appeared as separate, disparate buildings.

Together, the architect and client created a brief to unite the parts into a cohesive whole, while balancing the technical aspects of sustainability with the cultivation of social spaces. The rear building would receive a second-storey addition and be converted into the client’s headquarters. The other two buildings would be modernized and subdivided into tenant spaces that celebrate the contemporary workplace with natural materials.

The project was designed to LEED Platinum standards, though it was not certified. An early decision to retain and expose the structure of all three buildings minimized the amount of new construction and associated embodied carbon. The existing structure of steel and precast concrete provided the basis for the added layering of new materials. At the rear second-storey addition, exposed Douglas Fir decking softens the existing open-web steel joists. The front building’s precast cladding was stained to integrate with the new precast concrete panels at the back, which were made with a high fly-ash content.

The new workspaces were organized around two new light-filled interior courtyards, which allow for sunlight and views to the surrounding pine trees. The central atrium in the middle building connects four tenant spaces, providing a circulation hub with generous, light-filled common social spaces. In the rear building, a similar double-height atrium with a feature stair is an expansive connecting space, surrounded with breakout spaces and adjoining a cafeteria with a rooftop deck. Energy usage is reduced through passive design elements, such as the wood fins and deep canopies. 

Coupled with the continuity of natural light, these architectural features knit the buildings into a harmonious whole, and create a new sense of place and connection, while paying homage to the building’s industrial origins. As industrial mid-century buildings reach the end of their life cycle, this project is a valuable case study in how these buildings can be adapted to meet current needs, while raising the bar on building sustainably.

Jury Comment :: The jury appreciated 31 Scarsdale Road foremost for its important recognition that the preservation and renovation of existing building stock is one of the most important choices societies can make when considering sustainable building. Putting forward sober means and passive bioclimatic strategies, the project is well executed with straightforward details that create a light-filled environment.

CLIENT Withheld | ARCHITECT TEAM Amy Lin, James Chavel, Andrew Hart, Valerie Arthur | STRUCTURAL Blackwell | MEP BK Consulting | ENERGY MODEL Technosim | AREA 3,989 m2 | BUDGET Withheld | COMPLETION February 2017

THÉÂTRE DE VERDURE 

ARCHITECT Lemay

LOCATION Montreal, Quebec

The Théâtre de Verdure is an iconic venue in the heart of Montreal’s Parc La Fontaine. The original amphitheatre and modernist stage opened in 1956, but was shuttered in 2014 due to obsolescent equipment.

To bring art back to the centre of the park, the venue required a complete overhaul. The vision for the new Théâtre de Verdure is based on the relationship between landscape and architecture, and the dematerialization of architecture to showcase the site, making art and culture accessible and visible to all.

The new theatre is built on the footprint of the previous structure, with the stage delicately placed on an island at the end of the park’s artificial lake, and the stones from the old theatre salvaged for sitework. The approach to the theatre has been completely reworked, with multiple access points from which the stage gradually appears through the trees. The theatre’s 2,500 seats are set in tiers within a natural amphitheatre. 

From the stage, the curtain opens to a theatre set against the backdrop of landscape—sober, modern, dynamic—in harmony with the historic memory of the place and Montreal’s unique cultural identity.

All of the theatre’s elements are embedded in the landscape, from its stage and backstage to its lake-view dressing rooms, storage rooms, control room, reception, rest areas, and green room. Support functions are carefully concealed under the seats, and multifunctional service areas extend out towards the park, enhancing the heritage character of the site and inviting exploration both inside and outside this urban oasis. 

In line with the City of Montreal’s sustainable development policy for buildings, the design aimed to promote general well-being, while having a minimal impact on the environment. The theatre’s existing canopy was preserved, and local species were selected for new plantings.

When the stage lights come up, theatre takes on the scale of the landscape as the performance resonates out and into the park, and art and place come alive together.

Jury Comment :: The redevelopment of Montreal’s Théâtre de Verdure has breathed new life into Parc La Fontaine and created a public amenity which is positively contributing to the urban landscape of the city once again. The building becomes a theatrical play in itself, with the observer becoming an active participant in the way one experiences the journey through the park, with glimpses of and through the building. The idyllic setting is enhanced by the theatre being set on the water. This creates the illusion that the building is delicately floating, creating transparency and capturing views of nature beyond. The well-considered laying of materials and lightness of structure makes this project a delight to experience and a sensitive addition to the park.

CLIENT Ville de Montréal | ARCHITECTURE AND LANDSCAPE TEAM Eric Pelletier (MRAIC), Maria Benech, Marie-Eve Parent, Valérie T. Gravel, Yanick Casault, Marc-André Lemaire-Perreault, Maryse Ballard, Arnaud Villard, Francois Ménard, Jean Deslauriers, Eric St-Pierre, Philippe Lafrance, Daniel Smith, Alejandro Mendoza Vazquez, Donald Lavoie | LANDSCAPE Lemay | MECHANICAL/ELECTRICAL Bouthillette Parizeau | STRUCTURAL Calculatec | CIVIL Marchand Houle | THEATRE Trizart Alliance | LIGHTING Ombrages | FORESTRY Nadeau Foresterie | CONTRACTOR AXE Construction | AREA Site—7,825 m2; Building—635 m2 | BUDGET $11.5 M | COMPLETION June 2022

PROMENADE SAMUEL-DE CHAMPLAIN PHASE 3 

ARCHITECT Daoust Lestage Lizotte Stecker

LOCATION Quebec City, Quebec

The recently concluded third phase of the Promenade Samuel-De Champlain, completed fifteen years after the inaugural phase by the same design team, offers a continuation of the design language, while evolving to provide distinct and enhanced visitor amenities.

The site transforms what was previously a desolate expanse of highways and rail corridors into an urban boulevard with a significant recreational and cultural riverfront. The primary goal of the project was to return the river to the people of Quebec. The architectural vision embraced a comprehensive, multidisciplinary approach, encompassing all scales from the masterplan down to urban furniture and signage.

Drawing inspiration from the area’s history rooted in the timber trade and shipbuilding, the architectural language centres on wood. Phase 3 also includes an urban beach that is open and accessible to all, reminiscent of the beloved Plage du Foulon that animated the area in the previous century.

The design of the beach area’s Pavillon des Baigneurs is composed of two elongated rectangular volumes. The first volume, in granite, extends from the curvilinear beach wall, while the second, fashioned from wood, sits atop the granite base, offering panoramic views of the landscape. The strategic use of high-performance glass blurs the boundaries between interior and exterior, while the interior’s white wood pays homage to the sunny character of coastal locales.

A seamless connection is created between the infinity pool swimming area, the shallow Mirror of Water, and the river, offering the illusion of bathing and strolling within the river’s embrace. A sandy beach and sea lyme grass plantings contribute to a resort-like landscape, tailored to the unique character of the waterway.

Flanking the beach, the promenade unfolds with areas including picnic platforms, gardens that mimic the coastal meadows, a dockside trail that highlights a restored marshland, and architectural elements such as the Pavillon de la Côte, the Frontenac Quay, and the Pavillon de la Voile. Biodiversity was restored to this neglected area with the planting of 1,055 trees, 28,950 shrubs, and 117,000 native herbaceous plants. 

The outcome of this multidisciplinary effort is a project seamlessly woven into its environment—and a place that has been a resounding success among visitors. The Promenade Samuel-De Champlain is a source of collective pride and identity, offering users a meaningful, enjoyable experience while making positive contributions to public health, ecology, biodiversity, and climate action.

Jury Comment :: The Promenade Samuel-De Champlain – Phase 3 project continues the requalification of the riverfront on the north shore of the St. Lawrence River, in front of Quebec City. Initiated fifteen years ago, the project has enabled the transformation of a heavy industrial zone bordered by traffic infrastructures.

The jury appreciated the clarity of the architectural intentions, their sobriety, and the remarkable quality of execution of the interventions. The architecture takes full account of the river landscape and engages in dialogue with it. The jury underlines that only the collective support of a strong development vision, endorsed and supported by successive governments over time, has enabled the coherent and integrated realization of such a major urban project, which the population has rapidly embraced.

CLIENT Commission de la capitale nationale du Québec (CCNQ) | PROJECT MANAGER Société québécoise des infrastructures (SQI) | LEAD DESIGNER (ARCHITECTURE, URBAN DESIGN, LANDSCAPE) Daoust Lestage Lizotte Stecker—Réal Lestage, Eric Lizotte, Caroline Beaulieu, Lucie Bibeau, Grégory Taillon, David Gilbert, Mélissa Simard, Luca Fortin, Maria Benech | ARCHITECTURE Daoust Lestage Lizotte Stecker | CONSORTIUM – LANDSCAPE Daoust Lestage Lizotte Stecker, Option aménagement et Williams Asselin Ackaoui | PARTNER Ministère des Transports et de la Mobilité durable | ENGINEERING AtkinsRéalis, WSP, Tetra Tech | PROCESS ENGINEERING François Ménard | CONSTRUCTION MANAGER Pomerleau | CONTRACTORS Construction BML (Station de la Côte, station de la Voile and Boulevard); Construction Deric (Station de la plage, mirror of water and the swimming area); Construction Citadelle (Pavillon de la Côte and Pavillon de la Voile); Bauvais & Verret (Pavillon des Baigneurs) | AREA 150,000 m2 (Promenade) + 1,200 m2 (Buildings) | BUDGET $135 M | COMPLETION July 2023

ÉCOLE DE L’ÉTINCELLE, UN LAB-ÉCOLE 

ARCHITECTS Agence Spatiale – APPAREIL Architecture – BGLA Architecture

LOCATION Chicoutimi, Quebec

Located in the Chicoutimi district north of Quebec City, the École de l’Étincelle exemplifies architecture rooted in its context. The design reimagines the conventional school as a welcoming, accessible environment for children. Built to resemble of grouping of vernacular house forms, the design aims to create a reassuring and familiar home-like atmosphere. 

Inside, the school is divided into three distinct sections. The section facing the street houses administrative offices on the ground floor and kindergarten classrooms on the garden level, linking the youngest students directly to the playground. 

The central section redefines the traditional library as a community learning hub. This area is designed to be open to locals outside of school hours. In the middle, bleachers serve as gathering and collaboration spaces. To one side, the Creative Lab is a maker space equipped with the latest technology. On the other end, the Culinary Lab is a place where produce harvested from the school garden can be cooked and shared with students and the community.

The final section, containing classrooms, is articulated as three smaller peaked-roof houses, each an intimate mini-school for a single grade. Collaborative spaces at the centre of each classroom cluster mimic public squares to encourage mutual support and teamwork. Sunlit interstitial spaces connect the houses and open to the courtyard, inviting informal gatherings.

The Chalet, a distinctive element of the program, is a space for children with special needs. It includes a small living room, kitchen, and dining area, providing a safe space for discussions, building trust, and developing social skills.

The landscaping extends spaces for learning and discovery beyond the school walls. Designed with the area’s northern location in mind, the U-shaped layout creates a microclimate with a sports track, an outdoor classroom, a vegetable garden, individual and group play zones, and a sheltered area for use during inclement weather. The design encourages free, open-ended play by enhancing the site’s natural topography with mounds and surfaces for climbing and sliding. 

Jury Comment :: Stemming from the new Quebec elementary school program, which is based on the development of spaces that enable a diversity of learning activities and promote collaboration, the École de l’Étincelle proposes an original solution, organized around the courtyard. The jury notes the interest of this organization, which favours intuitive orientation for children wherever they are in the school, and offers, on the first floor, a direct relationship between each classroom occupied by the youngest pupils and the outdoor space. The scale of the building, divided into modules reminiscent of a house, contributes to the children’s sense of ownership and comfort. The jury salutes the substantial use of wood (structure, exterior cladding, interior finishes, integrated furniture), which gives the school a strong identity and helps reduce its carbon footprint.

CLIENT Commission Scolaire des Rives du Saguenay | ARCHITECT TEAM Stéphan Gilbert (BGLA), Kim Pariseau (APPAREIL Architecture), Étienne Bernier (Agence Spatiale), Lydia Lavoie (BGLA), Marc-Olivier Champagne-Thomas (APPAREIL Architecture), Johanie Boivin (previously with Agence Spatiale), Jérôme Duval (Agence Spatiale), Pascal Drolet (BGLA) | CONTRACTOR AMEC Construction Inc. | ENGINEERS LGT (now WSP | LANDSCAPE Collectif Escargo + Rousseau Lefebvre | ENVIRONMENT/SUSTAINABILITY Martin Roy & Associés | MEP Pro-Sag Mechanical Inc | ARTIST Mathieu Valade | AREA 3,577 m2 | BUDGET $16.75 M | COMPLETION March 2023

CABOT CLIFFS: CLIFFS RESIDENCES, HALFWAY HUT, AND PRO SHOP

ARCHITECT FBM Architecture | Interior Design

LOCATION Inverness, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia

Located on the rugged west coast of Cape Breton Island, Cabot Cliffs is among the most celebrated golf destinations in the world. The design of the walking-only links course, by Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw, is profoundly sensitive to its dramatic landscape, and to the experience of topography, views, vegetation, and wind, in tandem with the game itself.

The architecture at Cabot Cliffs echoes this sentiment with its relationship between landscape, building, and human play. This begins with sensitivity to the historical and cultural context of the area. The region was once home to extensive coal-mining activity; the demise of the coal industry destroyed the livelihood of the town and left a contaminated landscape. The Cabot golf courses (Links and Cliffs), and the associated tourist economy, have brought employment to the region. New development at these courses bolsters the community’s resilience by creating a year-round construction industry. Wood construction is very much a part of the vernacular of rural Cape Breton, and this material selection allowed the buildings to be constructed from local products, by local tradespeople.

The brief for the project was to design eight seasonal holiday homes with four-to-five-bedroom suites, a Halfway Hut to provide refreshment along the course, and a Pro Shop. Additional buildings, including two-to-three-bedroom homes, a restaurant, and a thermal bath, are to be added in the future. 

To allow for the seamless addition of these future programs, an incremental and adaptable approach to the architecture was adopted. A kit-of-parts of typological forms was developed, comprising single-storey gabled sheds, bedrooms, and kitchen/living/dining rooms, joined together by flat interstitial roofs. 

In the first phase, these forms are arranged in various combinations and orientations, creating unique dwellings that sit playfully on the site while remaining similar in materiality and scale. Cedar shingle walls and galvalume roofs scatter across the sand dune and fescue grass landscape. Black masonry fireplaces punctuate the horizon, providing cozy spaces to watch the course while linking the earth to the vast sky. The planting around the homes, considered an extension of the links landscape and part of the larger ecosystem, uses drought-tolerant fescue grass to reduce the need for intensive irrigation.

The houses’ interiors offer a rich spatial experience, where the corridors linking spaces expand into full-height gabled volumes that bring daylight into gathering and sleeping spaces. The communal kitchen/living/dining areas create dynamic social spaces, while each home is oriented to provide privacy with doors and windows that open to refreshing ocean breezes and decks.

The modern aesthetic of the homes underscores the idea that a large house can still feel like an airy seaside cottage and, when combined, they create a village at the edge of the ocean.

Jury Comment :: The jury noted the contextual response and materiality, as a refreshing departure for this landscape-driven recreation residence. The simple wood vernacular traditions of Cape Breton aligns with the dramatic landscape. The jury also noted the social connections offered by the communal kitchen, dining and living areas, which allows this village to go beyond typical recreation properties. The result is an architecture that is rooted in the place, offering a connection with the natural setting – complete with natural pathways and views to the ocean. The sustainable approach includes regional construction that employed local craftspeople, vernacular plantings to control erosion and low irrigation plants. The jury also noted the innovative kit of parts assembly that can be replicated to support incremental growth.

CLIENT Cabot Links at Inverness LP | ARCHITECT TEAM Susan Fitzgerald, Peter Kolodziej, Kaitlyn Labrecque, Alicia McDowell, Stavros Kondeas, Rita Wang, Stephen Hewitson, Ben Griffiths, Shawn Doyle, Danny Goodz | STRUCTURAL BMR Structural Engineering | CIVIL Strait Engineering Ltd. | MECHANICAL CBCL Limited, MCW Consultants Ltd.| ELECTRICAL MCW Consultants Ltd. | CODE Gerard Donahoe, RJ Bartlett Engineering Ltd. | LANDSCAPE Outside! Planning & Design Studio | MASTER PLANNING Ron Krater Studio | INTERIORS Jill Greaves Design Inc. | CONTRACTOR Lindsay Construction, D.J. MacLean & Sons Contracting Ltd. | GEOTECHNICAL Janega Engineering | AREA Accommodation—2,275 m2; Halfway hut—57 m2; Pro shop—200 m2 | BUDGET Withheld | COMPLETION October 2023

The post 2024 Governor General’s Medals in Architecture appeared first on Canadian Architect.

PROJECT Inuusirvik Community Wellness Hub

ARCHITECTS Lateral Office Inc. (Design Architect); Verne Reimer Architecture Inc. (Prime Consultant)

TEXT Adele Weder

PHOTOS Andrew Latreille

As I entered the Inuusirvik Community Wellness Hub in Iqaluit last fall, it seemed like I was walking through a door into another universe. Aside from the hemispherical St. Jude’s Cathedral down the road, the building is mostly surrounded by starkly orthogonal edifices that relay no urban logic nor sense of place. Next door to the Wellness Hub is the windowless concrete hulk of NorthMart, one of the town’s main grocery stores. Beyond that are scores of former military housing units and recently built shoeboxes. But upon stepping into the Wellness Hub, a visitor is met with curves, birch plywood, and soft daylight seeping in from above. 

The building opened late last year in Iqaluit’s downtown core and was instantly beloved. In a community that struggles with social and geographic isolation, the Wellness Hub could turn out to be the town’s most important new building in years. Spearheaded by Qaujigiartiit Health Research Centre director Gwen Healey Akearok, and designed by Toronto-based Lateral Office with Winnipeg’s Verne Reimer Architects as prime consultant, the project offers a refreshing approach for designing in Arctic communities.

The Wellness Hub is a compact multi-purpose community centre that brings together many sorely needed services: counselling, daycare, wellness research centre, research library, food preparation, and gathering spaces. Iqaluit, the capital of Nunavut, is a fast-growing town of 8,000 residents, and such programs have been underserved for years. Equally important, it offers something more: a visceral connection to the rich local culture. 

Over a decade ago, Healey Akearok and other community members had begun conceiving of a place that would provide more of the essential community services necessary to local residents. At a serendipitous moment, she met Lateral Office partners Lola Sheppard and Mason White in 2012 while all three were researching health architecture in the Arctic. They then enlisted her as a collaborator for Arctic Adaptations, Lateral Office’s exhibition at the 2014 Venice Biennale of Architecture. Healey Akearok saw Sheppard and White as the logical choice of designers to help realize her vision. 

The next part of the puzzle came into place when the Research Centre acquired the abandoned house next door to its office in downtown Iqaluit.  The two lots, joined together, became the site for the project. 

From the start, Healey Akearok and the architects worked in an intensely collaborative manner, discussing form, program, cultural expression, and seasonality. In the course of their research prior to and after receiving the commission, White and Sheppard have made numerous treks to the region to understand its culture and geography. (Their observations and analyses of the North are the basis of their 2016 book Many Norths: Spatial Practice in a Polar Territory.) 

“The Arctic has always been like building on another planet,” says White. Or on planet Earth, he clarifies, it’s like building in a climate as extreme as the tropics, or the desert. “In Canada, this is our extreme environment.” 

The extended winters of sub-zero temperatures, permafrost that precludes subgrade construction, high windspeeds with no trees to break the wind, and the sheer remoteness of the place require a completely different mindset and building approach, he explains. Take the usual challenges of construction—budget restraints, labour shortages, unexpected shipping delays—and multiply each one by five or six. There is no road route to Iqaluit: every object, person, and piece of material must be flown in or barged in—or sealifted in, in northern parlance. Both modes of transportation are enormously costly. Air transportation limits the size of construction components to be transported. Sealifts allow for larger components, but pose other difficulties: Frobisher Bay’s sometimes-unpredictable schedule of spring thaw and winter freeze delayed this particular project—among others—by half a year when one shipment of materials missed the delivery-schedule window. 

In recent years, the response to Iqaluit’s surging demand for housing has been the construction of subdivisions and sprawl. In contrast, the Wellness Hub has been constructed on two adjacent single-family house lots in the downtown core. Although it might seem like land is endless in the Arctic compared with the metropolises of the south, the imperative for density is arguably greater in such a community. Densification of the downtown core makes better use of the area’s limited infrastructure, it reduces the carbon emissions from inner-city travel, and it makes for mercifully shorter pedestrian journeys in the biting cold of winter. 

Both Healey Akearok and the Lateral Office principals caution against the stereotype of the region as buried in snow year-round. On one hand, Iqaluit is undeniably colder: average winter temperatures fall to minus 45 Celsius and rise to an average of just nine degrees in summer. On the other hand, the local Inuit who live and work on the land are intensely attuned to richly variegated annual cycles, and recognize six distinctive seasons over the course of the year, rather than the standard four.  

I spent most of last January in this town, when walking to a building a few hundred metres away required gearing up in head-to-toe Arc’teryx. On my second visit last fall, the earth was bare and raw, dusted with frost on colder mornings, but perfectly hospitable for walking around downtown or hiking the nearby Apex Trail. “Our seasons are different here, and they determine what people are doing throughout the year,” says Healey Akearok. “There are different hunting and harvesting seasons, and we wanted our building to support all those activities that happen throughout the year.” 

Part of that support is a recognition of the different ways that space is used by the local community. The hunters’ bounty must be brought into the building’s food-preparation room, where the carcasses are butchered right on the floor. The option of dragging freshly harvested seals, caribou, and beluga through the common spaces of the building is a non-starter, so in starkly practical design terms, a large, separate ingress point was required. The opening started out as a hatch and evolved into a full-size door at the unloading level of a vehicle, once the design team had figured out how to resolve the related code requirements. 

The relationship of the Inuit people to the land is central to their culture, notes Healey Akearok. She worked with the architects to find contemporary ways to express that relationship visually and address it pragmatically. The syncopated corrugated-metal cladding is evocative of the shimmering sea, she notes. It’s also light on the land, in keeping with the values of contemporary environmentalists and age-old Indigenous traditions, and it’s less expensive to bring in than heavier cladding materials. 

Many Indigenous cultures favour circular forms, reflecting the historic rationality of domed structures. The iglu is the most widely known of those forms, but as Healey Akearok points out, there are other curvilinear forms that remain contemporary and are familiar to Inuit residents: the qammaq (a temporal structure, like a tent) or the qaggig (a very large iglu, built on four smaller ones to form a large gathering space). Even the iconic iglu, which I took to be anachronistic as a housing type, is still in use, albeit more as a secondary dwelling. 

“Those round forms are out on the land; they are what’s familiar to people here,” says Healey Akearok. “You just don’t see them in the towns.” For Lateral Office, the design directive to visually reinterpret the cultural norm required a creative approach. “We told them: ‘You’re not going to get a dome; we just don’t have the budget for that,” recalls White. “And, by the way, we do love rectangles!” 

Although Iqaluit is filled with rectangular buildings, that standard is strongly associated with its years as a colonial military outpost, as well as with expeditiously built government housing. “We all agreed that a rectangle wasn’t an acceptable form,” says Healey Akearok. “So they came back with five different concepts, and everyone let them know which one was their favourite.” 

The final design resolution involved rethinking the conventional mode of architectural curvilinearity, seeing the challenge more in conceptual terms. “We didn’t take the iglu as a form,” says White. “The iglu as a form would be a cartoon building. Instead, we took elements of an iglu, the spirit and aspects of an iglu, and used them selectively.” Instead of configuring the massing as a dome or tacking on rounded shapes, the design team embedded curves as subtractions rather than additions. 

The footprint is orthogonal, and the basic massing is close to cubic, but the subtractions—which read as five “scoops”—break the orthogonality of the volume and transform it into a different form altogether. These curved, indented spaces on the corners and front entrance help deflect wind in the harsher months, offer outdoor space in the milder seasons, and provide access to the green roof decks of tundra and moss. Snow will collect in the scooped-out spaces in the winter, but that’s all right, says White: “The snow will insulate the building: this the Inuit have taught us.” 

The design also embodies the concept of an iglu in its treatment of light. Iqaluit receives as little as four hours of daylight in the winter, but up to a full 22 hours of daylight in high summer. That cyclical shift required the architects to favour indirect glazing, in order to shield the occupants from being flooded by light in June, while still allowing light in during the dark months of winter. 

The rotunda at the centre of the building embeds curvilinearity into the entire sequence of interior spaces that surround it. The tundra roof and clerestory glazing atop the rotunda bring landscape, light, and views into the building in an indirect manner, acting in a similar manner to the fenestration pattern of an iglu. The rotunda itself—a wood-sheathed cylinder embedded with Inuit art—serves as a performance hall and social hub of the building. “At the top of this cylinder of space at the heart of the building is a full ring of windows, which is one of the ways you’d bring light into an iglu,” says White.  

Iqaluit is now one of the fastest-growing cities in Canada and will need a profusion of new buildings in the years to come. For Sheppard and White, this burgeoning demand is both an architectural opportunity and an imperative to design responsibly in a locale with a starkly different climate and way of living within it. 

For all their years of research, the Wellness Hub is the first completed building for Lateral Office, whose principals hold academic positions at the architecture schools at the universities of Toronto and Waterloo. Their practice has long been more focused on raising questions than chasing commissions. “There is a wider conversation about circumpolar architectural typology: What is an arctic vernacular today?” says White. “This building is a response to that question, but it is not the response. We’re just happy that this building can contribute to the wider conversation.”

Adele Weder is a contributing editor to Canadian Architect.

CLIENT Qaujigiartiit Health Research Centre | ARCHITECT TEAM Lateral Office Inc.—Mason White (FRAIC), Lola Sheppard, Kearon Roy Taylor. Verne Reimer Architecture Inc.—Verne Reimer (FRAIC), Jeff Penner (MRAIC), Daryl Holloway, Stephen Meijer, Youchen Wang. | STRUCTURAL/MECHANICAL/ELECTRICAL WSP Canada Inc. | LANDSCAPE Lateral Office Inc. with Roxanne Miller, Sopranature (green roof); and WSP Canada Inc. (civil) | INTERIORS Lateral Office Inc. | CONTRACTOR NCC Development Ltd. | PROJECT MANAGEMENT Colliers Project Leaders and MLPM Inc. |  AREA 883 m2 | BUDGET $10.2 M | COMPLETION November 2023

ENERGY USE INTENSITY (PROJECTED) 553 kWh/m2/year

The post Cool Comfort: Inuusirvik Community Wellness Hub, Iqaluit, Nunavut appeared first on Canadian Architect.

The slowness of the approvals process has been pegged as a key villain in the goal to increase the supply of housing in Ontario. But the truth is more complicated.

In recent years, the province has seen a flurry of bills in support of a provincial ten-year target to build 1.5 million homes. In October 2022, there was the More Homes Built Faster Act (Bill 23) and the More Homes for Everyone Act (Bill 109). Now, 2024 has seen the introduction of the Cutting Red Tape to Build More Homes Act (Bill 185).

A key theme in these Acts is the streamlining—and quickening—of approvals. Bill 23 removed the public meeting requirement for plans of subdivision, exempted developments of up to 10 units from site plan control, prevented third-party appeals on minor variance applications, removed the ability of municipal staff to require changes in exterior materials, and limited the role of conservation and heritage authorities.

Next, Bill 109 required site plan approvals to be completed by municipalities in 60 days, and to review projects requesting a by-law amendment within 90 days (or 120 days if the decision was concurrent with an official plan amendment application). To respond to what William Johnston, Toronto’s Interim Deputy City Manager of Infrastructure and Development Services, characterized as the “punitive legislated timeline provisions” of this bill, the City of Toronto hired an additional 150 staff to manage the workload. The new timelines did not allow staff to provide even a single round of comments about matters as basic as a building’s height or the size requirements of a new sanitary pipe, so comments were pushed to a mandatory pre-application consultation phase.

Bill 185, if passed, will remove the requirement for mandatory pre-consultations—reducing the ability of municipal staff to make any meaningful comments on applications, unless a developer voluntarily opts-in to this process. In many cases, this will have the effect of further shortening the timeline with which developers proceed along the well-trod route of appealing an application rejected on the municipal level to the Ontario Land Tribunal, which has the authority to override local decisions.

While this may be helpful in smaller centres where staff are less well equipped to evaluate applications, in larger cities, the move to further reduce the review and oversight process for development applications will almost certainly have an overall negative effect on the quality of buildings. Perhaps this is a worthwhile trade-off for a rapid influx of new homes. But will quicker approvals ultimately get us more housing? 

A 2023 report from Gregg Lintern, Toronto’s Chief Planner and Executive Director of City Planning, suggests that the answer is: no. It found that 103,638 residential units had been built between 2017 and 2022, and that there were an additional 203,793 residential units—twice that number—that had already been approved, but not yet built. Many of these properties, presumably, are held by speculators who strategically upzone without ever having the intention to build. An additional 409,896 units were still under review at the time of Lintern’s report. If all of those units were realized over time, this would increase the total number of dwellings in Toronto by one half—exceeding the city’s projected 2051 population of 3.66 million by 14%. 

The same year, the Regional Planning Commissioners of Ontario undertook a similar exercise. It reported that, province-wide, there were already over 1,250,000 housing units approved before Bill 23 even came into the picture. If stakeholders were to collaborate in getting these already-approved units built, the report implied, the province would get to its goal without rushing further approvals or removing environmental controls.

In response, a report commissioned by developer lobby groups Building Industry and Land Development (BILD) and Ontario Home Builders’ Association (OHBA), countered that there were only 331,600 “shovel ready” units, and that an additional 731,000 were in the application process, needing additional approvals, requiring a servicing allocation, or awaiting decision from a municipal council.

Perhaps a balance will come into place with an additional provision proposed in Bill 185—a “use it or lose it” provision that will give municipalities the option to specify the expiry of site plan approvals after three years.

All of this points to problems in housing supply that go beyond what can be solved by cutting red tape alone: a meaningful acceleration in homebuilding would require addressing systemic problems such as inflation and the lack of tradespeople. As Lintern concluded in his 2023 report: “Provincial targets are aspirational and their pursuit will not result in actual completed homes without a complete rescaling of the capacity of the development industry to construct new homes.”

As appeared in the June 2024 issue of Canadian Architect magazine

The post Editorial: Why the Rush? appeared first on Canadian Architect.

PROJECT Promenade Samuel-De Champlain, Phase 3, Quebec City, Quebec

ARCHITECT Daoust Lestage Lizotte Stecker

TEXT Odile Hénault

In 2008, as Quebec City celebrated its 400th anniversary, its citizens received a major birthday present from the provincial government: a stunning 2.5-kilometre park along the St. Lawrence River. It was Phase 1 of Promenade Samuel-De Champlain (see CA, November 2008), named after the French explorer who founded the city in 1608. Designed by Montreal-based Daoust Lestage (now Daoust Lestage Lizotte Stecker) in collaboration with Williams Asselin Ackaoui and Option aménagement, the project was met with great enthusiasm as people flocked to it at all times of the day and in all seasons. 

Extending the Promenade

Fifteen years later, in 2023, a second stretch of this waterfront park has opened to the city’s residents. (A short connecting path west of the initial phase was completed in 2016, so the current project is technically the Promenade’s Phase 3.) Thankfully, the consortium led by Daoust Lestage Lizotte Stecker was once again commissioned to design this recent leg of the project. This meant continuity: in terms of philosophy, attitude to design, and architectural language. As in the 2008 project, wood was the signature material used for the Promenade’s pavilions, large and small, and for the urban furniture provided throughout. 

During the first phase, the architects had faced a number of challenges related to reclaiming the site from its previous industrial uses. To reconnect Quebec City’s residents to the river, they created a linear park, with a pedestrian path, bicycle trails, and access to the shore. The design was punctuated by thematic pier-shaped poetic gardens, evocative of the St. Lawrence’s tidal waters, windy storms, misty days, and the centuries-long presence of humans on the river. Phase 1’s focal point was the Quai des Cageux, a reference to the courageous raftsmen who floated logs down the St. Lawrence towards the coves of Sillery, the final destination for enormous quantities of timber bound for England.

Two decades later, preparations for the Promenade’s recent extension were equally—if not more—challenging. Significant infrastructural changes were needed to open up the site, including the relocation of the road—a process initiated in Phase 1—and its transformation into an urban boulevard with integrated parking. On another front, negotiations with CN authorities led to the shifting of a freight rail corridor closer to the nearby cliff. Thanks to these two major changes, some 37 acres of land were unlocked for recreational use. 

A design shaped by history

As the concept for the new 2.5-kilometre addition to the Promenade was being developed, it became obvious that history would play a significant role in the design. Remnants of former wharves were still present, severely damaged from decades of neglect. One of these was Frontenac Pier, a favourite spot for Sunday strollers in the first half of the 20th century. Then there was Foulon Beach, once a major summer attraction: traces of it were still visible along the shore, but, more importantly, memories of it endured in older citizens’ minds. Finally, a few hundred metres east from the beach, an existing marina was to be upgraded and incorporated into the new park. These three locations became the focal points of a triad of distinct sectors, each of which is served by a new pavilion: the Pavillon de la Côte, at the western end, the Pavillon des Baigneurs, serving the beach area, and the Pavillon de la Voile, next to the marina. 

The surrounding park was designed to reflect current ecological concerns. Major efforts were made to preserve and revitalize existing ecosystems, including ecologically sensitive marshlands. This led to the planting of over 1,000 trees and 29,000 shrubs, as well as the widespread re-introduction of plant species such as lyme grass, native to the St. Lawrence shores. Much appreciated by the public are three giant “pebbles,” placed along a sinuous path, which provide perfect observation posts for enjoying the new landscape and watching ships passing close by.  

The Promenade’s brightest jewel is its central sector, where the historic sand beach was resuscitated in the form of an infinity pool, cleverly inserted in the St. Lawrence River. There is an obvious reference to the seaside basin (1966) designed by a young Álvaro Siza Vieira in his native Matosinhos, Portugal. Of course, six decades—and the Atlantic Ocean—separate the two. The Portuguese pool is inserted among the rocky shores of a wild Atlantic—a stark contrast to the park setting of the Promenade’s pool, and the relatively tame shores of the St. Lawrence—which in part explains Siza’s use of robust monolithic concrete walls.

The Pavillon des Baigneurs expresses strength in its own way. The two-storey volume is much more elaborate than the smaller wood pavilions that Daoust Lestage Lizotte Stecker has placed elsewhere along the Promenade. The added level of complexity relates to the pavilion’s program, but also to the site’s topography, since the building acts as a transition point between the new urban boulevard and the shore, four metres below. A break in the pavilion’s stark granite walls marks the entrance to an upper-level restaurant, with an outdoor terrace facing the river. It also opens to an exterior stair leading towards the beach. 

At the bottom, a sandy expanse is capped by the pool, whose infinity edges create the illusion of its being part of the St. Lawrence. It’s a source of absolute delight, particularly for those of us who were children in the fifties, and who still remember the original beach. Younger generations—and new residents—are just as thrilled to discover this unusual bathing spot, more akin to a riverine beach than to a typical sports facility.

In actuality, the pool, 1.2 metres at its deepest point, is totally contained within concrete walls that, even at high tide, prevent the St. Lawrence waters from flowing into it. Adjacent to the pool is a shallow basin—just a few centimetres deep—where intermittent water jets are an attraction for young children or those just wanting to wet their feet. 

Faced with pool safety requirements and wanting to avoid the ubiquitous chain-link fence, the architects went on a worldwide search for a barrier that could disappear when the pool was open. They found what they were looking for in Poland, where they sourced retractable post fences that they were able to adapt to the needs of the project. The elegant solution matches the pool area’s bespoke lifeguards’ chairs and echoes the minimalism of the portals used throughout the Promenade to help break down its scale.

A new phase, an old conclusion

In 2008, I concluded my first article on the Promenade Samuel-De Champlain with the following words: “The project truly shows what can be accomplished when enlightened professionals manage to convince politicians to move towards the completion of a visionary concept. […] One can only hope this project will be a source of inspiration for professionals and politicians around the country as waterfronts and former industrial areas are being adapted to the 21st century’s new realities.” 

Unfortunately, the inspired vision that has led to the success of the Promenade Samuel-De Champlain continues to be rare. This April, the Crown Corporation which oversees Montreal’s Old Port announced that, for “financial reasons,” its 2017 project to revitalize the area would not be implemented as designed. The project, also by Daoust Lestage Lizotte Stecker, is a refined proposition that would have gone a long way to mend the unfortunate, piecemeal approach adopted in the Old Port since the destruction of Silo no. 2 in 1978. 

The same firm also authored an admirable proposition for the National Memorial to Canada’s Mission in Afghanistan. Last fall, the project was declared the jury-selected winning entry of an architectural competition held by the federal government, only for the decision to be overturned by the same administration in favour of an approach focused on more literal imagery.

What is obvious from these two recent events is that the message is not getting through to politicians. Fortunately, professionals continue to champion quality architecture at the urban scale: the Promenade Samuel-De Champlain was the recipient of the Ordre des Architectes du Québec’s Grand Prix d’excellence, the highest honour in its awards program. It is a well-deserved recognition of the value of contemporary, urbane architecture as practiced by Daoust Lestage Lizotte Stecker.

Odile Hénault is a contributing editor to Canadian Architect.

CLIENT Commission de la capitale nationale du Québec (CCNQ) | ARCHITECT TEAM Daoust Lestage Lizotte Stecker—Réal Lestage, Eric Lizotte, Caroline Beaulieu, Lucie Bibeau, Grégory Taillon, David Gilbert, Mélissa Simard, Luca Fortin, Maria Benech | CONSORTIUM  – LANDSCAPE Daoust Lestage Lizotte Stecker, Option aménagement et Williams Asselin Ackaoui | PARTNER Ministère des Transports et de la Mobilité durable  | ENGINEERING AtkinsRéalis, WSP, Tetra Tech | PROCESS ENGINEERING François Ménard | CONSTRUCTION MANAGER Pomerleau | CONTRACTORS Construction BML (Station de la Côte, station de la Voile and Boulevard); Construction Deric); Station de la plage, mirror of water and the swimming area); Construction Citadelle (Pavillon de la Côte and Pavillon de la Voile); Bauvais & Verret (Pavillon des Baigneurs) | AREA 150,000 m2 (Promenade) + 1,200 m2 (Buildings) | BUDGET $135 M | COMPLETION July 2023

As appeared in the June 2024 issue of Canadian Architect magazine

The post Down by the Riverside: Promenade Samuel-De Champlain, Phase 3, Quebec City, Quebec appeared first on Canadian Architect.