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06 VIEWPOINT

SMITH VIGEANT ARCHITECTES

CODRIN TALABA

TOWARDS NET ZERO

CANADIAN ARCHITECT

OCTOBER 2021 03

What will it take to reach net zero carbon in the buildings sector?

08 NEWS

#BuildingToCOP26 pushes for accelerated climate action; remembering Steve Cohlmeyer.

13 AIA CANADA JOURNAL Introducing the AIA Canada Society; AIA Canada’s annual award winners.

38 PRACTICE

19

35

Sheena Sharp presents Toronto District 2030’s research on the fuel-switching needed to decarbonize building operations.

44 INSITES

19 KEN SOBLE TOWER

In Hamilton, Ontario, ERA Architects completes North America’s first EnerPHit-standard deep energy retrofit of an apartment tower. TEXT Deborah Byrne

26 CHALK RIVER LABORATORIES

HDR is part of an IPD team innovating with mass timber in the construction of three new buildings on a nuclear research campus. TEXT Leland Dadson

35 FUTURE BUILDINGS LABORATORY KEVIN BELANGER, COURTESY OF CNL IPD NB POLY PARTY TEAM

Smith Vigeant architectes creates a building to field-test building envelope assemblies on Concordia University’s Loyola Campus. TEXT Shawn Moss

Vivian Manasc reflects on how the Cree Seven Grandfather Teachings can be applied to architectural practice.

48 BOOKS

New books on architecture and the climate emergency, contemporary Canadian architecture, and more.

50 BACKPAGE

The Aurora Armoury adaptively reuses a military shed as a hub for culinary teaching and community events.

Chalk River Laboratories Logistics Warehouse, by HDR, as part of CNL IPD NB Poly Party Team. Photo

by Kevin Belanger, courtesy of CNL IPD NB Poly Party Team.

COVER

V.66 N.07 THE NATIONAL REVIEW OF DESIGN AND PRACTICE / THE OFFICIAL MAGAZINE OF THE RAIC / THE OFFICIAL

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MAGAZINE OF THE AIA CANADA SOCIETY

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CANADIAN ARCHITECT 10/21

06

VIEWPOINT

EVERYTHING NEEDS TO CHANGE The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment report brings increased clarity and urgency to what we already know: the climate crisis is accelerating, with devastating effects. We are facing an existential crisis. We must turn this around, or face catastrophe.

If our emissions continue unabated, global warming will exceed 1.5°C in the next decade.

And unless deep reductions in CO2 and other greenhouse gases occur immediately, warming will still exceed 2°C this century. This means radical environmental changes within many of our lifetimes, and definitely in the lifetimes of our children and grandchildren.

As a recent book title puts it, Everything Needs to Change (see page 48). This is true of all aspects of how we live, but especially how we construct and operate buildings. Buildings are responsible for a whopping 40 percent of GHG emissions globally—three quarters coming from their operation, and one quarter from the embodied energy of materials used to make them. To meet the IPCC targets— which give us a slim pathway to avoiding the worst effects of the climate emergency—both of these figures need to come down, and fast.

Emissions from the buildings sector must be halved by 2030, and reach net zero by 2050.

Through her research with Toronto District 2030, architect Sheena Sharp explains that some of this shift—particularly on the operations side of buildings—will need to come from regional and national fuel-switching to zero-carbon energy sources (see page 38).

This will be most effective when paired with the deep energy retrofits of buildings. The endeavour will be expensive, but in a realm of cost that can be managed by most building owners. A strong policy direction is urgently needed to determine what fuel we will be switching to, and how it will happen.

More research also needs to happen on lowcarbon building materials and systems. The new Future Buildings Laboratory on Concordia University’s Loyola campus is one place where such research is occurring. Its design, led by Smith Vigeant architectes, allows for some 60 percent of the building’s walls and roofs to be fully removed and replaced with energy-efficient and energy-generating wall systems for field testing (page 35).

Architects are already ramping up knowledge on how to build and retrofit to net-zero carbon levels. ERA’s Ken Soble Tower, in Hamilton,

Ontario, offers one prototype: it’s the largest EnerPHit project in North America, and the first residential high-rise on the continent to obtain this Passive House certificate geared to retrofits. The revamped building nets a 94% reduction in GHG emissions. In her review of the project (page 19), Passive House specialist Deborah Byrne explains that this is primarily about detailing and building technique, rather than specialized products: “There is little new here—but achieving Passive House standards entails rock-solid specs and an expectation for a higher quality standard of build.”

Low-carbon innovation will be important for new builds, as well. Some architects are already advocating for the greater use of wood.

In creating three mass timber buildings for the Chalk River Laboratories research campus, HDR was able to iterate increasingly efficient structural systems (page 26). Key to their work was the project’s integrated project delivery (IPD) team, which brought cross-disciplinary expertise around the table throughout the design and construction process.

Collaborative practices are key to achieving buildings that are environmentally sustainable and also socially sustainable places, valued by their owners and communities.

In an excerpt from her new book, architect Vivian Manasc ref lects on how the Cree Seven Grandfather teachings can inform the work of architects—moving them from a place of presumed expertise, to one of dialogue and continuous learning (page 44).

“There are so many stories of the lessons drawn from working with Indigenous communities, on and off reserve, and these lessons keep showing up in the design of sustainable buildings—lessons of action that speaks louder than words, lessons of integrating many competing priorities into a design,” writes Manasc. “By integrating the needs of the planet, the risk of increasing warming through climate change and the voices of the scientists and Indigenous Elders who share their understanding of our fragile blue planet, we are called to act in a way that is Honest, Respectful and Truthful—and those values show up in the decisions we make through the poetry and the technics of our buildings.”

In this world where everything needs to change, we all have much to learn, and we’ll need to do it together.

Elsa Lam

EDITOR ELSA LAM, FRAIC ART DIRECTOR ROY GAIOT CONTRIBUTING EDITORS ANNMARIE ADAMS, FRAIC ODILE HÉNAULT DOUGLAS MACLEOD, NCARB, FRAIC ONLINE EDITOR CHRISTIANE BEYA REGIONAL CORRESPONDENTS MONTREAL DAVID THEODORE CALGARY GRAHAM LIVESEY, FRAIC WINNIPEG LISA LANDRUM, MAA, AIA, FRAIC VANCOUVER ADELE WEDER, HON. MRAIC SUSTAINABILITY ADVISOR ANNE LISSETT, ARCHITECT AIBC, LEED BD+C VICE PRESIDENT & SENIOR PUBLISHER STEVE WILSON 416-441-2085 x3 ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER FARIA AHMED 416-441-2085 x5 CUSTOMER SERVICE / PRODUCTION LAURA MOFFATT 416-441-2085 x2 CIRCULATION CIRCULATION@CANADIANARCHITECT.COM PRESIDENT OF IQ BUSINESS MEDIA INC. ALEX PAPANOU HEAD OFFICE 126 OLD SHEPPARD AVE, TORONTO, ON M2J 3L9 TELEPHONE 416-441-2085 E-MAIL info@canadianarchitect.com WEBSITE www.canadianarchitect.com Canadian Architect is published 9 times per year by iQ Business Media Inc. The editors have made every reasonable effort to provide accurate and authoritative information, but they assume no liability for the accuracy or completeness of the text, or its fitness for any particular purpose.

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PROJECTS Ottawa Library and Archives facility named Adisoke

On behalf of the Anishinabe Algonquin Nation, Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg and the Algonquins of Pikwakanagan First Nation, the Ottawa Public Library – Library and Archives Canada Joint Facility, designed by Diamond Schmitt in joint venture with KWC architects, will be named Adisoke.

Adisoke is an Anishinabemowin word that refers to the telling of stories. Storytelling is the traditional means by which Indigenous peoples share knowledge, culture and history over generations.

The site for the joint facility is located on the unceded, traditional territory of the Anishinabe Algonquin Nation. Elders and members of the Host Nation have been important partners in inf luencing the design of the facility and the selection of the name Adisoke.

As collaboration continues, other rooms in Adisoke will be given Anishinabe Algonquin names, such as the Children’s Discovery Centre, the Outdoor Gathering Circle, and a wigwam-inspired Circular Lodge and its adjacent exterior terrace. The project team will also continue to engage with the Anishinabe Algonquin Nation and other First Nations, Inuit and Métis individuals and organizations to inform the programs and services that will be offered in Adisoke.

The facility is set to open in late 2024. adisoke.ca

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ABOVE Located west of Parliament Hill in Ottawa, Adisoke is being designed by Diamond Schmitt in joint venture with KWC architects.

WHAT’S NEW Canadian War Museum to rename Regeneration Hall in honour of Raymond Moriyama

The Canadian War Museum has launched a campaign to honour its architect, Raymond Moriyama, by renaming Regeneration Hall, one of the building’s signature spaces, the Moriyama Regeneration Hall.

The Hall’s entrance will include a tribute wall that features interpretive content sharing Moriyama’s story, as well as the Hall’s key architectural highlights. The Museum invites friends and colleagues to contribute to the campaign to pay tribute to Moriyama’s contribution to Canadian architecture. The funds raised by the campaign will be used to sustain and enhance the Museum’s educational programming and outreach. www.warmuseum.ca

#BuildingToCOP26 Coalition accelerates climate action

Following the sobering message from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ( IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report, a coalition led

by C40, the Global Alliance for Building and Construction (Global ABC), The Resilience Shift, World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) and World Green Building Council (WorldGBC) have announced #BuildingToCOP26—a partnership to promote radical collaboration for climate action ahead of the Cities, Regions and Built Environment Day at COP 26.

Buildings are responsible for almost 40% of global energy-related carbon emissions and 50% of all extracted materials. By 2050, 1.6 billion urban dwellers will be regularly exposed to extremely high temperatures and over 800 million people living in more than 570 cities will be vulnerable to sea level rise and coastal flooding.

By 2050, the world’s building stock will double and almost 70% of the global population is projected to live in urban areas. By 2060, global material use is expected to more than double and a third of this rise is attributable to materials used in the building and construction system.

The built environment’s demand on natural resources accelerates climate change, and inefficient, unhealthy buildings negatively impact human health and wellbeing. However, efficient buildings are one of the biggest investment opportunities, worth an estimated $24.7 trillion by 2030.

Despite this, under $3 of every $100 spent on new construction goes to efficient buildings. Out of the 186 countries that have submitted Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, 136 countries mention

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buildings, 53 countries mention building energy efficiency, and 38 specifically call out building energy codes. Most countries do not include full building decarbonization targets.

To limit warming to no more than 1.5°C as set out in the Paris Agreement, the Coalition calls for emissions from building projects globally to be halved by 2030, and to reach net zero life-cycle emissions for all buildings by no later than 2050. In order to meet these targets, by 2030, 100% of new buildings must be net zero carbon in operation, widespread energy efficiency retrofits of existing assets should be well underway, and embodied carbon reduced by at least 40%, with leading projects achieving at least 50% reductions in embodied carbon.

By 2050, all new and existing assets must be net zero across the whole life cycle, including operational and embodied emissions.

In parallel to decarbonization targets, building resilience into the transformation of the built environment is critical to support urban populations and vulnerable communities in the face of future climate impacts.

The Coalition encourages all countries to include full building sector decarbonization targets, concrete policies and measures, and related implementation mechanisms in their NDCs. The Coalition also aims to include 1,000 cities and at least 20% of the largest built environment businesses by revenue in the UN’s Race to Zero by COP26.

“We can’t win the Race to Zero without winning the Race to Resilience as well,” says UN High Level Climate Champion for COP26 Nigel Topping. “Climate breakdown and the pandemic multiply inequalities— social, environmental and economic gaps are widening across nations and across the Global North and South. By 2030, we must catalyze action by non-state actors that builds the resilience of four billion people from groups and communities who are vulnerable to climate risks.” www.BuildingToCOP.org

IN MEMORIAM Stephen Cohlmeyer, 1946-2021

The classic vision of the architect is as a kind of a Renaissance man, with wide-ranging interests and skills, a gift for intellectual discourse, and of course, a passion for the arts. Winnipeg architect Stephen (Steve) Carl Cohlmeyer, who passed away on June 9, 2021, fits the description.

Cohlmeyer was a third-generation architect, and the co-founder of Cohlmeyer Architecture, which he led for 40 years. The firm is best known for its work on developing the masterplan for The Forks in Winnipeg, and has completed projects throughout North America, as well as in South America and Africa.

Cohlmeyer was born in 1946 in Lake Forest, Illinois. His father, Robert, was a senior architect at SOM, and his mother, Lois, was the daughter of a prominent Chicago architect, Frank Venning. Cohlmeyer completed a fine arts degree at Carleton College in Minnesota, where he met his future wife, Cynthia, who became a landscape architect.

During his architectural studies at Harvard, Cohlmeyer received a draft notice to serve in the Vietnam War. He and Cynthia moved to Toronto in 1970 as conscientious objectors to the war. He carried with him a letter of introduction to Jane Jacobs, who, along with her family, welcomed him and Cindy, becoming lifelong friends. During his time in Toronto, Steve worked at Craig, Zeidler and Strong.

Cohlmeyer completed his architecture degree at the University of Manitoba while working for Etienne Gaboury. He also worked occasionally for Robert Allsopp, who had taught Cynthia at the University of Manitoba and started an urban design practice in Winnipeg, before later moving to Toronto and co-founding DTAH.

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“What impressed me most about Steve was his intellect,” says Allsopp, who became a friend of the Cohlmeyers. “He was very widely read and saw architects as artists—he was quite a sculptor and painter himself. While he was in touch with what was going on in the architectural world, he was skeptical of fads and fashion in architecture.

His foundation was really firm.”

In 1981, Cohlmeyer founded architecture firm Cohlmeyer Hanson with his friend, Bob Hanson. He developed a reputation for his urban design and planning skills, and carved out a place in Winnipeg despite its “old boys’ club” of a few established firms claiming much of the work. Working with Cynthia, the firm was awarded an opportunity to develop the masterplan for the 14-acre Forks site, a historic meeting place for First Nations at the conf luence of the Red and Assiniboine Rivers.

“Steve and Cindy really started what people consider ground zero at the Forks,” says Paul Jordan, CEO of the Forks since 1991. “Back in the day, the Forks was a burnt-out brownfield; now, we have four million visits a year.” Jordan describes how the duo of designers envisaged the site first and foremost as a vibrant public realm “for people to just come and relax, and interesting things would happen.” For instance, visitors could sit in a plaza, and music in the distance would encourage them to explore the site—a vision different from the more common approach of creating rigidly programmed spaces, such as bandshells for scheduled concerts. “It was the kind of experimental placemaking that was far ahead of its time in the early 1990s,” says Jordan.

Another of Cohlmeyer Architecture’s Winnipeg landmarks is the Upper Fort Garry Heritage Wall, completed in 2016, part of a collaborative, award-winning project with HTFC. This project exemplifies the technical excellence and collaborative success typical of Cohlmeyer’s work.

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ABOVE Architect Stephen Cohlmeyer moved to Winnipeg in 1970, and became a champion for progressive urbanism in the City.

Cohlmeyer Architecture took on a variety of work throughout Canada, including commercial buildings, libraries, restoration, and correctional services work. Cohlmeyer’s work ranged in scale from the Pocket Suites—20square-metre rental apartments for disadvantaged adults—to a public space strategy for the UNESCO-designated historic city of Valparaíso, in Chile.

In 2002, Cohlmeyer collaborated with Montreal firm Jodoin Lamarre Pratte on a competition design for the Orchestre Symphonique de Mon­ tréal’s cultural and administrative centre. It was shortlisted among five finalists, selected from 112 entries to the design competition. The project was ultimately shelved.

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“I was immediately struck by the quality of the man,” recalls Marc Laurendeau, principal at Jodoin Lamarre Pratte, who collaborated with Steve Cohlmeyer over the six-month design period, and later became friends with his family. “He was very talkative, very energetic, very human: a man of integrity.” The design took form as a ring-shaped building set on a sloped site, and including interior columns inclined to resemble trees. “It was technically quite difficult, but Steve pushed through the idea to make it feasible,” says Laurendeau, recalling how Cohlmeyer was gifted and determined in tackling both the bigger planning ideas and the details of the design.

Cohlmeyer’s urban design work included planning for San José, Costa Rica, the masterplan for Martyr’s University in Uganda, work on Regina City Square, and planning for many small centres on Vancouver Island. He admired urban theorist Camillo Sitte, and believed in the power of cities created through an accrual of local decisions, rather than through a rigid overarching plan.

He put his belief in good city design into practice with his own office, which he insisted on always maintaining in downtown Winnipeg, despite the mixed fortunes of the core area. He taught at the University of Manitoba, ran art competitions, and was a contributor to the Winnipeg Free Press.

His involvement with the Manitoba Association of Architects (MAA) included serving as the organization’s president. He played an instrumental role, along with a select few other members, in a 15-year-long battle to regain the lawful recognition of The Architects’ Act within the province, and to restore the exclusive scope of practice of architecture to professional architects, as detailed in the Act. “He made an incredible contribution to the association and to the profession,” says Judy Pestrak, executive director of the MAA. At the end of the day, Steve’s greatest passion was for design.

“Design was everything,” says his son, architect Daniel Cohlmeyer, who now heads the practice. He notes that his father could complete a building plan at 1/8” scale within minutes on a napkin—“clients loved that.” He would also engage others in the design process. “He liked presenting his thought process, but he was always ready to absorb the ideas of others,” says Daniel. “If there was another approach that was better than his, he would be glad to incorporate it.” Cohlmeyer was also a dedicated woodworker, and did the millwork for his own house as well as pieces for other projects. He made the office’s models in his woodshop. “He believed in the power of the built model beyond any other method of presentation,” says Daniel.

Robert Allsopp says that Steve saw “the history of architecture as a continuum going back several generations”—a vantage point that may be intertwined with his background, coming from an intergenerational family of architects. “He saw the modern movement as an evolution, rather than a revolution,” says Allsopp. “His architecture never lost its sense of tradition, nor its sense of being from a particular place.”

Cohlmeyer was respected among his colleagues as a strong and steady architect, with a knack for problem-solving and for good judgement. “It was a point of pride that he would speak very quietly, and have people listen closely,” says Daniel Cohlmeyer. “He had the admiration of other architects because he was calm and process-oriented. Whatever the issue at hand, he was very good at taking in information and identifying the problematic.”

Steve Cohlmeyer is survived by his wife and working partner of 52 years, Cynthia; son Daniel and Daniel’s partner Catherine Demers; and their children, Paige and Jules. Also remembering Steve are his brothers, David (with wife Barbara), Jonathan (with wife Maggie), and Chris (with wife Sue).

—Elsa Lam

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Canada Journal Letter from the President

A Brief History of the AIA Canada Society

s my two-year term as president comes to a close in December, it’s time to reflect on a tumultuous period for the AIA Canada chapter and members alike. I’d like to think that we have risen to the challenges that the pandemic has thrown at us, and that we are quickly moving forward with new skills and ways of working, a greater understanding of climate change and how to tackle it, the knowledge to support our clients and improve the construction industry’s best practices, and an ability and drive to tackle the equity issues in our industry and at the very structures of our society. I can’t stress how grateful and impressed I am with how everyone has adapted to the most difficult of times.

We’ve learned new social connection skills, and no doubt will be using these in the future.

I’m pleased to announce that the AIA Canada Society has agreed to have Canadian Architect serve as the Official Magazine of the AIA Canada Society for a period of five years.

I look forward to seeing further Chapter advancements in the coming months and years.

On behalf of the Board of Directors and volunteer team, thank you for your contributions to the profession.

A

he American Institute of Architects Canada Society is the newest chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AIA). Established in 2017, AIA Canada connects AIA National with over 2,400 professional members belonging to the AIA’s International Region, including AIA Continental Europe, AIA Middle East, AIA Hong Kong, AIA Japan, AIA Shanghai and AIA United Kingdom.

The idea of a Canadian AIA chapter dates back to 2015, when Canadian architect Stuart Howard (AIA, FRAIC) was appointed as Director of Unassigned Members with the AIA-IR Board of Directors; the following year, Edmon-

T

ton-based Adam Pantelimon (FRIBA, Intl.

Assoc. AIA) was a member of the 2016-2017 AIA-IR Board of Directors. The 2016 AIA-IR Conference was held in Toronto, and Pantelimon was among its organizers.

In the fall of 2017, the Directors of the International Region, with help from the Formation Committee, successfully passed a vote to form the AIA Canada Society. The charter of the AIA Canada Chapter was formally handed to the first AIA Canada President, Som Bose (AIA), by 2017 AIA President Tom Vonier (FAIA) during the AIA International Region Conference in Prague, Czech Republic, on October 6, 2017.

AIA INTERNATIONAL REGIONS

Dr. Adam Pantelimon Intl. Assoc. AIA, FRIBA President, AIA Canada Society

NEWS

AIA Journal Oct.indd 13

AIA Canada Society Annual General Meeting to be held November 17

AIA International Region 2021 Annual Conference

AIA Canada Society will be holding its Annual General Meeting for members on November 17, 2021. In addition to General Business, the Society will announce the results of its Board of Officers Election and the winners of the AIA Canada Society 2021 Design Awards.

Registration is open for the AIA International Region 2021 Annual conference, hosted by AIA Middle East and AIA International Region, and held in the UAE during the Dubai World Expo on November 11 - 14. The theme of the conference is “Connecting Minds, Creating the Future” with the sub-themes of Sustainability, Mobility, and Opportunity.

We expect this to be AIA International Region’s strongest conference ever, with colleagues joining from all seven International Chapters and across the globe, where the AIA is proudly represented by more than 20 Country Representatives.

More details are available online about the conference’s speakers, tours, and continuing education opportunities.

This will be a hybrid conference, with some sessions offered both in person and online.

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AIA Canada Journal

The poster for the AIA International Region conference held in Toronto in 2016.

AIA Canada held a networking event at the Skyfall Lounge in Las Vegas, NV, during the AIA Annual Conference 2019.

Since the inception of the Chapter, the AIA Canada Board has taken essential steps to preparing the backbone supporting the Chapter’s operations. AIA Canada is a registered society with BC Societies and can operate across all provinces of Canada. The Board adopted the AIA Model Chapter bylaws, after extensive legal consultation to tailor the document for the Canadian jurisdiction. The Board also secured a no-objection certificate from the Architecture Institute of British Columbia regarding the use of the word “Architects” in the name used for registration. Subsequently, the chapter was registered with BC Societies as the “Amer-

ican Institute of Architects Canada Society”.

The AIA Canada Society has the objective to uphold a high standard of design, education and professional practice among its members, as well as to promote the importance of sustainable architecture and stewardship of the built environment in society, including achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

The next step for the Board was a focus on expanding chapter operations. To achieve this, the Board formed a framework of committees under the direct supervision of the board officers, with the intent of growing the Chapter.

These include committees for communication,

In 2019, AIA Canada joined with all of the AIA International Region Chapters and the International Region Leadership to sign a commitment to championing a sustainable urban future.

AIA Journal Oct.indd 14

membership, treasury and budget, professional development, events, sponsorship, marketing, and awards.

The Chapter’s international presence was also identified as a priority. AIA Canada hosted a networking reception at the 2019 AIA Annual National Conference. It has joined with all of the AIA-IR Chapters and the AIA International Region Leadership in a commitment to championing a sustainable urban future.

In 2019, AIA Canada organized its first election, electing a new Board of Directors with a two-year term, ending December 31, 2021.

2020 and 2021 represent important milestones for the Chapter, as it launched a new website and the inaugural AIA Canada Design Awards, including the “New Talent Discovery of the Year” award. As a Continuing Education provider, AIA Canada has hosted several webinars, and has been working in partnership with AIA-IR and the other IR Chapters to provide ondemand credit courses for members.

Chapter leadership members are engaged in different AIA Knowledge Communities, including Public Architects, Regional and Urban Design, and the Small Firm Exchange. The last is a national and international AIA member group made up of practitioners appointed to represent the needs of small architecture firms.

The Board is looking to continually expand the societal relevance of AIA Canada, and to partner with other professional organizations.

The Chapter is currently preparing for the 2021 AGM and for the Chapter’s leadership elections.

The AIA Canada Society Board of Directors will have three positions opening in January 2022: Vice-President, Secretary, and Treasurer.

AIA Canada is looking forward to a bright future!

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AIA Canada Award Winners EXCELLENCE he AIA Canada Honor, Merit, and Student Awards recognize best practices, innovative thinking, and design excellence in the work of AIA Canada members and future design professionals. The awards program promotes exceptional talent and celebrates those who are pushing boundaries using new technologies and materials, and developing our future environments in ways that will enrich our lives and advance health, inclusivity and stewardship. The AIA Canada Student Award is an annual program that celebrates current students and recent graduates in the fields of architecture, interiors, planning, landscape and urban design.

The jury members for this cycle of the AIA Canada Design awards were GW Design Consultant Group founder Greg Yager, FAIA, HKIUD, International Representative to AIA Strategic Council; co-founding principal of Schemata Workshop Grace Kim, FAIA; and Principal and Vice President at Ensight+ Architecture Sam Oboh, FAIA, FRAIC, International Region Representative of the AIA College of Fellows.

DOUBLESPACE PHOTOGRAPHY

T

TOM ARBAN

ED WHITE PHOTOGRAPHICS

Senate of Canada Building Diamond Schmitt Architects and KWC Architects, Architects in Joint Venture

BC Children’s Hospital & BC Women’s Hospital + Health Centre, Teck Acute Care Centre ZGF Architecture in association with HDR

TOM ARBAN

FUTURE LANDSCAPES / THE TRCA

Humber College Barrett Centre for Technology Innovation Perkins&Will

Ryerson University Daphne Coxwell Health Sciences Complex Perkins&Will

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The Meadoway Perkins&Will with FUTURE LANDSCAPES Design + Visualization

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AIA Canada Journal

HONOURABLE MENTION

NIC LEHOUX

CITATION

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Oak Ridges Library Perkins&Will

SCOTT NORSWORTHY

Smith Residence MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple Architects

SCOTT NORSWORTHY

Grandview Heights Aquatic Centre HCMA Architecture + Design

The Toronto Studio of Perkins&Will Perkins&Will

University of Toronto Mississauga Maanjiwe Nendamowinan Perkins&Will

AIA Journal Oct.indd 16

MICHAEL EVOLA

LISA LOGAN PHOTOGRAPHY

AIA CANADA STUDENT ARCHITECTURE AWARD

Framed Michael Evola

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RAISING THE BAR

CANADIAN ARCHITECT 10/21

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NORTH AMERICA’S FIRST ENERPHITSTANDARD RETROFIT OF A HOUSING TOWER BRINGS GREATER ENERGY PERFORMANCE, COMFORT, AND RESILIENCE TO 146 AFFORDABLE SENIORS’ APARTMENTS.

ABOVE The 18-storey Ken Soble Tower has been upgraded with a highperformance envelope, reconfigured interiors, and improved systems that reduce its GHG emissions by 94 percent.

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Ken Soble Tower, Hamilton, Ontario ERA Architects Inc. Deborah Byrne

PROJECT

ARCHITECT TEXT

As the effects of the climate crisis take hold, it is increasingly clear that to be good architecture, buildings must be sustainable. Conversely, even buildings that meet the highest standard of sustainability must be welldesigned to be considered successful.

There is a massive balancing act required between these two value systems. That balance is affected by numerous factors—including the dire need to achieve zero carbon in our buildings now, and the need to design the best possible architecture for people and communities. In other words, we must design for both the environment and for people.

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The Passive House EnerPHit certification—a version of the Passive House standard, adapted for retrofits—combines both of these considerations. It is the highest voluntary standard of building retrofit design, providing a science-based methodology that lays down specific humanfocused functional requirements. EnerPHit buildings provide for high levels of health, comfort, durability, resiliency against climate extremes and disease, and energy efficiency.

EnerPHit was the methodology of choice for CityHousing Hamilton and ERA Architects, whose recent rehabilitation of an 18-storey, 146unit seniors’ affordable housing tower has contributed to positioning Hamilton as the leading Passive House municipality in Ontario. It is fascinating that the Ken Soble EnerPHit Tower Retrofit—a first-of-its-kind in North America, as the continent’s largest EnerPHit building and first EnerPH it high-rise apartment—has happened in Hamilton, and not in Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver or even in New York or Chicago.

The Ken Soble project is being proffered as a prototype for the renewal of Ontario’s extensive stock of aging residential towers—there are some 2,000 similar concrete towers in the Greater Toronto Area alone, with more than a million inhabitants. This vision, advanced by the multidisciplinary, non-profit Tower Renewal Partnership, proposes not only to carry out energy retrofits to these buildings that are critical to our housing stock and energy ledgers, but to make them great places to live for the next 100-plus years.

Many towers lend themselves well to high-performance over-cladding of the building envelope, and to being elevated to a new level

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of architecture in the process. But for such an outcome, the design and coordination process must be envisaged holistically: incorporating both engineered solutions such as improvements in insulation, air tightness, the elimination of thermal bridges, and upgrades to mechanical systems, alongside considerations for human safety, comfort, occupation, and use. The sequencing and phasing of renovations is also critical to achieving the most effective long-term results.

“In the early years of building retrofits, a widespread measure-by-measure approach encouraged owners to undertake improvements to the ‘low-hanging fruit’—the measures with the shortest ROI (return on investment),” says ERA associate and project architect Ya’el Santopinto, who co-led the Ken Soble Tower Retrofit with principal Graeme Stewart, along with a specialized team of retrofit architects at ERA. (Santopinto and Stewart are also key collaborators in the Tower Renewal Partnership.) Unfortunately, says Santopinto, piecemeal upgrades—such as, for instance, replacing inefficient boilers like-for-like—have the unintended consequence of locking in carbon through extensive but ultimately inappropriate renovations. They also eat up funds that could have gone towards more comprehensive future retrofits.

“ERA’s tower renewal approach has always looked at buildings as holistic ecosystems, prioritizing the measures which improve comfort: indoor air quality, thermal comfort, and so on. This points us to an enclosure-first approach, where building systems can subsequently be downsized and ventilation improved,” says Santopinto. “Holistic retrofits always require an architect-led team.”

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OPPOSITE The building’s penthouse was reimagined as a solarium, with views across sections of green roof and towards the harbour. ABOVE Encouraging sociability among the resident seniors, the ground floor laundry and community rooms adjoin an accessible outdoor terrace and community garden.

At Ken Soble, ERA and its team of consultants (including Transsolar, JMV Consulting, and Reinbold Engineering) was faced with a semi-derelict, mould- and pest-infested building. Its mechanical and electrical systems were beyond their end of life. Typical of affordable housing projects, the budget for turning this around was extremely tight. Given these parameters, the completion of the project—and the added achievement of meeting EnerPHit metrics, which entail delivering energy performance up to 85 percent better than conventional builds—is remarkable. The renovated tower achieves a 94 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, and an 89 percent reduction in thermal energy demand intensity (TEDI).

The project is an outstanding example of balancing scope, cost, quality and schedule to turn a nearly 55-year-old building into vital, fresh, and healthy new accommodation for seniors in 2021. “Giving the Ken Soble tower a second life as a critical part of the affordable housing system in Hamilton is, for ERA, the biggest success of the project,” says Santopinto.

To the casual observer, the 1960s-era building has not changed significantly: it lost its balconies and the texture of its brick cladding, interspersed with exposed horizontal concrete slab edges. It received a new overcoat of air-seal, insulation and stucco combined with tripleglazed fibreglass windows. Indoors, there are more visible changes: each unit received new kitchens, bathrooms, flooring and lighting. One of every five units was upgraded to be barrier-free. The penthouse laundry room was re-imagined as a solarium, and a new ground-floor laundry room and community room connect to an outdoor terrace and gar-

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den. But the differences go far deeper: the Ken Soble Tower is now a very different animal than before, with very low energy consumption and a high level of interior comfort and health for its resident seniors.

One of the key principles of Passive House design is to create a tight building envelope, free of thermal bridges. An early decision was to remove the building’s balconies, which did not meet accessibility standards and were a major source of thermal bridging. They were replaced with Juliet balconies and full door-sized casement windows, which allow for cross-ventilation during the shoulder months. Other thermal bridges were addressed by surrounding the foundation with concreteboard-faced XPS, and retrofitting the sanitary stacks with a negativepressure-activated vent that automatically closes when the plumbing is not in use. The wall assembly was retrofitted with an exterior EIFS system, including some 10 inches of rigid mineral wool.

The high-performance building envelope does much to improve residents’ comfort and safety. It effectively eliminates drafts. It also enhances acoustics and prevents condensation and mould. As a result, relative humidity can be maintained year-round at a comfortable and pandemicresistant level of approximately 50 percent, without risk of damage to the building fabric. (Airborne pathogens, also known as aerosols, travel less easily when the relatively humidity is between 40 and 60 percent.)

The building’s HVAC systems are seen holistically, and include a Canadian-made, Passive House-certified Energy Recovery Unit, a centralized heat pump, new ductwork, interior ceiling fans, Canadianmade Passive House-certified fibreglass windows, and interior shades.

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ABOVE Inside the suites, operable windows and Juliet balconies allow for easy access to daylight and fresh air. The resolution of thermal bridges eliminates drafts, and each suite includes individual temperature controls for heating and cooling.

PASSIVE HOUSE RENEWAL: ACCESSIBLE UNITS

BASE CONDITIONS BASE CONDITIONS

PASSIVE HOUSE RENEWAL

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ASBESTOS-CONTAINING MATERIALS MOULD REMEDIATION REQUIRED AT ALL INTERIOR WALLS PERVASIVE PESTS

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DETERIORATED CENTRAL DUCTWORK DETERIORATED PLUMBING

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INADEQUATE VENTILATION

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DETERIORATED FLOORING GAPS IN FIRE SEPARATIONS BETWEEN UNITS

SYSTEMS

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ENVELOPE DETERIORATED BALCONY SLAB EDGE

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20% OF UNITS FULLY ACCESSIBLE WITH NEW WASHROOMS AND KITCHENS MEETING CSA STANDARD

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SYSTEMS DIRECT DUCTING FOR FRESH AIR SUPPLY IN UNITS HEAT RECOVERY NEW PLUMBING SYSTEM MODERNIZED ELECTRICAL SYSTEM UNITS

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NEW KITCHEN NEW FLOORING REPAIR OF WALLS FOR CONTINUOUS FIRE SEPARATIONS BETWEEN UNITS

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AND AIRTIGHT ENVELOPE WITH EXTERIOR AND INTERIOR INSULATION

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GROUND FLOOR

TYPICAL FLOOR PLAN 1 STUDIO

1 MAIN ENTRANCE 2 VESTIBULE 3 FRONT DESK 4 OFFICE 5 LAUNDRY 6 STUDIO 7 GARBAGE ROOM 8 LOBBY 9 MOVING ROOM 10 TRANSFORMER ROOM 11 ELECTRICAL ROOM 12 BOILER ROOM 13 STORAGE 14 COMMUNITY ROOM 15 TERRACE 16 GARDEN

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These work together to provide constant fresh air, keeping the tower cool in the summer and warm in the winter. Because the systems consume little energy, the tower has a built-in ability to better withstand extreme climate events such as heat waves.

Before the renovation, the tower’s HVAC system only provided air to the corridors, and pressure differentials drove air into the apartments—a solution common for post-war housing towers. As part of the retrofit, the building’s ductwork was modified to afford fresh air directly to the suites, and the original semi-centralized system was also resized accordingly. Providing air directly to the suites ensures the high quality, clean, fresh air required by the Passive House Standard, while also making the building pandemic-resilient—something most of us would never have thought necessary to consider two years ago.

The ERA team spent time investigating the best, simplest and most error-proof envelope solution using readily available materials that could meet the EnerPHit requirements. Typically, that entails increasing the wall thickness substantially—sometimes up to half a metre deep, most of which is insulation. The original plan was to retrofit the entire envelope from the exterior, but then, black mould was discovered on the interior drywall. The revised plans included adding mineral wool insulation to the interior of the exterior walls, and applying an exterior EIFS solution that was less deep—150 mm instead of 250 mm—creating a more typical detail for the trades.

Cap pieces for the exterior insulation still needed to be custom-made for this project, but subsequently they have become readily available to market. This highlights how a single building can change our supply chain and our access to quality materials.

CA Oct 21.indd 23

5M

Window installations also needed to be thermally broken. The windows sit outboard of the wall, strapped back to the brick, and rest on fibreglass angles. They are completely surrounded by mineral wool insulation. Silicone air barriers were used instead of tapes to maintain the requirement of user-friendly installation, and to reduce the risk of taping failure—and subsequent problems with air tightness.

There is little new here—but achieving Passive House standards entails rock-solid specs and an expectation for a higher quality standard of build. And while there are some examples in Europe where larger budgets enabled EnerPHit renovations with major changes to the building’s architecture, such changes are merely icing on the cake.

These additions were not needed or warranted in the case of the Ken Soble Tower. The achievement of EnerPHit standards provides a sense of wellness and calm to its interior spaces—attributes that are not automatically afforded by other design extravagances.

Notably, attaining EnerPHit performance levels was not a major cost driver for the project. ERA reported that 80 percent of the project’s costs went to capital repair work—including base building repairs, mould and asbestos abatement, accessibility upgrades, and interior fitout. Only 20 percent went to energy efficiency and systems upgrades.

Overall, ERA estimates that the added cost for Passive House-specific measures accounted for about 7.1 percent of the budget. They also recognize that much of this expense was tied to the risks taken on by the contractor, and an inherent cost of being “first adopters.” As the training of trades turns towards a focus on sustainability, and a mainstream understanding of EnerPHit and Passive House take hold, they anticipate that the perception of risk will greatly decrease.

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WALL DETAIL 1

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AIR BARRIER POLYURETHANE Z-GIRT SILICONE TRANSITION STRIP FIBREGLASS WINDOW ROLLER SHADE VAPOUR BARRIER HELICAL TIE FIBREGLASS ANGLE GALVANIZED STEEL GIRT FIBREGLASS CLADDING CLIPS

11 12 13 14 15 16

AIR BARRIER POLYURETHANE THERMAL BREAK Z-GIRT CONCRETE-BOARD-FACED XPS INSULATION DRAINAGE PLANE FLUID APPLIED BITUMINOUS WATERPROOFING WEEPING TILE

It’s conceivable—and would be desirable—for EnerPHit to be applied to all of Ontario’s similarly constructed housing towers. In the long term, such retrofits make financial and environmental sense: many of these buildings are nearing the end of their lifespan, and normally, a renovation will cost a lot less than demolishing and rebuilding, not to mention saving vast amounts of energy and carbon.

But owners of these towers are often slow to better their buildings.

There must be ongoing motivation for the municipalities and private sector players who own these buildings to undertake such retrofits.

Could such projects be supported by tax incentives, green mortgages or low-interest loans?

Needless to say, the occupancy, structure and condition of any particular building will determine its feasibility for an EnerPHit retrofit.

There are also other technical hurdles to consider. Ken Soble was vacant for the duration of the retrofit, but that is most often not the case for residential towers needing retrofitting. The Tower Renewal Partnership has published a Field Guide to completing similar retrofits with residents in situ, and there are numerous examples of Passive House retrofits in Europe where tenants were actively involved in the design and continued occupying their units during construction. The most successful of these 1. Air Barrierhave required a very high level of tenant engagement,2.combined with anZ-Girt extensive use of prefabricated and modular Polyurethane components to reduce the time of construction and inconvenience 3. Silicone Transition Strip to tenants, while also enhancing 4. Fiberglass Window the quality of the building envelope.

Keeping of Shade the retrofit work to the exterior of the building also 5. most Roller greatly in allowing 6.assists Vapour Barrier for continuous occupation.

The7.success of the Helical Tie Ken Soble Tower pilot project demonstrates that it is financially feasible and carbon-efficient to repair our country’s 8. Fiberglass Angle aging9. housing towers. Investment Galvanized Steel Girt and funding in renovating these towers needs happen urgently. don’t need IPCC reports to tell 10. to Fibreglass CladdingWe Clips 11.

Barrieris currently in crisis, nor do we need special research us that ourAir climate Polyurethane Break to tell12. us that the currentThermal Net Zero targets are coming too late. Ken Z-Girt to show owners, asset managers and government bodSoble is intended 13.can Concrete-Board Faced XPS to do it. ies what be done, and what it takes Insulation One hopes that the Ken Soble Tower Retrofit may also shift the 14. Drainage Plane conversation from ROI to a broader perspective on what architecture 15.Project Fluid improvements Applied Bituminous can do. of this scale will rarely pay for themWaterproofing selves in the short term, especially at a time when fossil fuel energy 16. relatively Weepinginexpensive.

Tile remains This could begin to change as society undertakes a needed shift towards clean energy and carbon pricing, and invests in the preservation of aging housing. Meanwhile, the rehabilitated Ken Soble Tower is having an immediate, and perhaps even more significant, effect: it’s providing its occupants with a safe, secure, comfortable, healthy and resilient place to live. That’s something we all need and deserve.

Deborah Byrne is COO and Director of Passive House Design at Kearns Mancini

“In the absence of clear guidance for retrofit standards, EnerPHit provides the best path forward—in terms of energy and GHG emissions, but also health and comfort,” says ERA principal Graeme Stewart. “Modifications to address micro-challenges in the Canadian context aside, we would certainly advocate for this as a benchmark to strive toward, and recommend several more showcase projects to further kickstart industry readiness.”

The client for the project agrees. “CityHousing Hamilton has demonstrated that comprehensive modernization of aging housing stock is viable through a holistic approach to deferred maintenance, which can unlock funding-enabled measures when guided by a human-centred design standard like EnerPHit,” says Sean Botham, the development lead for the municipal affordable and social housing provider.

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Architects. The firm has been working on Passive House since 2009, and is an advocate for its use as the basis of design for all high-performance buildings.

CLIENT CITYHOUSING HAMILTON | ARCHITECT TEAM GRAEME STEWART (FRAIC), YA’EL SANTOPIN-

TO (FRAIC), MIKAEL SYDOR (MRAIC), CAROLINA STREBER (MRAIC), RUI FELIX, LEAH GIBLING, DANIELLE MCINTYRE, ABBI KUSCH, LAUREN MARSHALL | STRUCTURAL ENTUITIVE CORPORATION | MECHANICAL REINBOLD ENGINEERING GROUP | ELECTRICAL NEMETZ (S/A) AND ASSOCIATES LTD. | LANDSCAPE ERA ARCHITECTS INC. | INTERIORS ERA ARCHITECTS INC. | CONTRACTOR PCL CONSTRUCTION | PASSIVE HOUSE CONSULTANT JMV CONSULTING | THIRD-PARTY PASSIVE HOUSE CERTIFIER HERZ & LANG GMBH | ENVELOPE ENTUITIVE CORPORATION | ELEVATOR SOBERMAN ENGINEERING | CODE LMDG BUILDING CODE CONSULTANTS | COMMISSIONING CFMS WEST CONSULTING | HAZARDOUS MATERIALS PINCHIN LIMITED | SECURITY/TELECOMMUNICATIONS ZEROBIT1 | CONSTRUCTION CONSULTANT SCR CONSULTING | AREA 7,698 M2 | BUDGET WITHHELD | COMPLETION JUNE 2021 ENERGY USE INTENSITY (PROJECTED) 70 KWH/M2/YEAR | THERMAL ENERGY DEMAND INTENSITY (PROJECTED) 23.5 KWH/M2/YEAR

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INNOVATION HUB THREE NEW BUILDINGS AT THE CHALK RIVER LABORATORIES CAMPUS DEPLOY MASS TIMBER AND AN IPD TEAM TO DELIVER INNOVATIVE RESULTS.

Science of Tomorrow The Chalk River campus sits on unceded Algonquin Anishinabek territory, on a picturesque 3,700-hectare plot at the edge of the Ottawa River. The site is relatively remote—a choice that was likely strategic when the facility was established in 1944. Today, security remains a critical concern, given the sensitive nature of work and material on site. Chalk River Laboratories has had a rich and complex history of nuclear research since its establishment under the purview of Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (AECL), a federal Crown corporation.

Canadian Nuclear Laboratories (CNL) now manages and operates the site on behalf of AECL. Among other things, Chalk River Laboratories was engaged in the operation and sales of CANDU reactor technology, as well as the production of a meaningful percentage of the world’s supply of radioactive isotopes for medical use.

Today, it is among Canada’s key sites focused on technological innovation to support clean energy technology, including materials research and sustainable power generation. For instance, Chalk River’s vision for a Clean Energy Demonstration, Innovation and Research Park (CEDIR) is focused on advancing low-carbon hybrid energy generation systems, including small modular reactors. That spirit of innovation also shows in the campus’s recent approach to planning and architectural development.

© 2020 KEVIN BELANGER AND HDR

PROJECTS Canadian Nuclear Laboratories (CNL) Site Entrance Building, Support and Maintenance Facility, and Science Collaboration Centre, Chalk River, Ontario ARCHITECT HDR, as part of CNL IPD NB Poly Party Team TEXT Leland Dadson PHOTOS Kevin Belanger, courtesy CNL IPD NB Poly Party Team, unless otherwise noted

In February 2020—during simpler pre-pandemic times—I had the rare opportunity to visit the construction sites for a series of three projects

by HDR at the Chalk River Laboratories Campus, about 200 kilometres northwest of Ottawa. The innovation taking place at Chalk River relates not only to nuclear energy, but also, surprisingly, to two trends in architecture: mass timber construction and integrated project delivery (IPD) team processes.

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Fostering a Campus In 2017, CNL engaged HDR and Urban Strategies to develop a master plan for the campus, envisaging how, in parallel with its broadening research, the physical fabric of Chalk River Laboratories might become more like a university-style science and technology campus. Despite the secure nature of the work on site, there was a goal to foster a sense of public space that would support Chalk River’s academic-based community of researchers. Toward this goal, the plan considered key metrics such as walkability, health, security, safety and wellness. Ultimately, the master plan recommended investment in site infrastructure, and the addition of several new buildings, which would be coordinated with the decommissioning of aging facilities.

HDR was retained as the lead architect for the first phase of this work, which included the construction of three key buildings, all of which are now complete or underway.

The completed 4,650-square-metre Site Entrance Building serves as the public face for the Chalk River Laboratories, with a smaller front volume providing refined spaces to welcome both visitors and staff, and a larger section behind that supports procurement, warehousing and logistics services across the entire Chalk River site.

The similarly sized Support and Maintenance Facility provides flexible open space, allowing a consolidation of resources to support both maintenance and manufacturing activities. When I visited, this building was at an earlier point in construction, providing the tour with a very clear reading of its structural elements in isolation.

The Science Collaboration Centre was not yet out of the ground in early 2020, but is now well underway. This will be largest of the three buildings, providing six storeys of multi-use space that includes large, open plan studios. Once complete, it will act as the campus heart, offering the site’s most outward architectural expression of innovation.

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Mass Timber Fortune Early concept schemes for the three buildings proposed sculptural forms that would not look out of place on a forward-looking university campus. They would be poised to capture architectural design awards—but perhaps not yet grounded in the spirit of innovation of Chalk River Laboratories.

The introduction of mass timber as a structural element—at the suggestion of the client—was clearly a turning point in the evolution of the buildings’ design. HDR design principal Donald Chong was no stranger to wood. Prior to joining HDR , Chong was one of three partners at Williamson Chong Architects (now Williamson Williamson), and he shared the Professional Prix de Rome for the firm’s research project, Living Wood. The prize enabled the firm to travel internationally to visit manufacturers and designers working on the cutting-edge of crosslaminated timber (CLT) technologies.

Chong built the sustainability case for Chalk River by highlighting mass timber’s ability to both divert carbon (by replacing materials such as concrete and steel) and to sequester carbon (a function inherent to the natural growing process of trees). A Sankey diagram served to illustrate the impact—using metric tonnes of carbon as a measure that could be easily understood by all parties—and helped to secure roughly $4 M in funding through the Green Construction through Wood (GCWood) program, administered by National Resources Canada (NRCan).

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IPD Serendipity Perhaps serendipitously, this development roughly aligned with the introduction of Integrated Project Delivery ( IPD) to the project, through the involvement of constructor Chandos, a pioneer in the field.

IPD is a process in which the project’s owner, contractor, designers, key consultants and trades explicitly agree to share in the project’s risk and

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An image of the Site Entrance Building blends model and photograph, showing the accuracy inherent in working with an IPD process and prefabricated mass timber. OPPOSITE TOP Inside, dropped ceilings are minimized, acting as service trays for principal HVAC system components.

OPPOSITE BOTTOM The carefully considered spacing of columns allows for a flexible configuration of the building’s work and collaboration spaces. ABOVE Early in the IPD process, architect Don Chong made the case for mass timber by using a diagram that indicated the carbon-reduction impact of using wood.

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reward. If managed effectively, it creates a collaborative and transparent mechanism for decision making—particularly for complex and innovative projects, such as those at the forefront of wood construction technology.

Paired together, IPD and mass timber served to advance the project in ways that were mutually beneficial to all parties involved. In fact, Chong argues that mass timber and IPD needed each other to succeed.

It was through the IPD “big room”—a physical or digital space wherein the whole team gathers, breaking down large decisions into smaller ones in a decision matrix, and then putting proposals to vote—that the case for wood was validated.

Though not necessarily binding, the decisions made through this collaborative process speak to a trust in the group’s wisdom, a factor inherent to the success of IPD. It is this trust that fosters an engaged team, with all parties invested, both metaphorically and contractually.

In the case of Chalk River, the team collectively found that the premium on the cost of wood (compared to steel or concrete) was offset when broadening the comparison to consider factors such as fire protection, interior finishes and speed of construction.

Mutually Beneficial Beyond the initial confirmation to proceed with mass timber, IPD also allowed for critical collaboration between trades, suppliers and the design team to help de-risk the material selection. While wood construction is ancient, mass timber is relatively nascent, and requires early, detailed, and ongoing information regarding price, supply, and available technology in order to take advantage of key benefits, such as speed and accuracy of construction.

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Nordic Structures acted as the trade partner in the integrated team, and early on, toured the team through its dedicated forest lot and factory operation. Throughout the process, they continued to provide a depth of knowledge that would otherwise have been absent from the team.

This included such details as offering analyses of the grain structure within their black spruce tree stock, which informed explorations into routing out material from structural members. During design and construction, Nordic worked within the studio-like IPD big room, collaborating closely with key members, such as structural engineers LEA Consulting, to optimize the design to the specificities of their supply chain.

Another early example of big room collaboration was in establishing the spacing of the column grid. By seeking input from all parties—from the mass timber supplier to the furniture systems manufacturer—the team optimized the grid to best meet spatial, structural, envelope, services, and fabrication requirements simultaneously. Whether through IPD or a different contractual relationship, early interaction with suppliers such as this is crucial for the success of any mass timber project.

This was true before the pandemic—and is even more true now, as the wood market continues to experience price volatility.

On the other side of the equation, as a new industry, mass timber also allows for a reconsideration of many current construction practices—often for the better. By rethinking sequencing and staging requirements, the construction timeline could be optimized. For instance, the team benefitted from the fact that structural mass timber members and panels can be lifted in place directly from a flatbed truck, with no intermediate staging zone required. Moreover, a successful IPD process demands a high level of precision and accuracy, from the extensive

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The Support and Maintenance Facility’s mass timber structure can be clearly seen during construction; office spaces are located in a loft above part of the maintenance and manufacturing area; a slit window provides a view of the Boreal forest surrounding the campus.

ABOVE Construction on the largest of the three buildings—the Science Collaboration Centre—is currently underway, with completion expected in 2023.

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digital planning stage through to erection. Mass timber is particularly suited to capitalizing from such a demanding coordination process, since the material is prefabricated to very tight tolerances. These types of opportunities encouraged all team members to keep an open mind, and fostered a spirit of innovation throughout the project.

Innovation through Rationalization The integration of mass timber in these three buildings oriented HDR’s design towards rectilinear compositions, focused on building systems and elements. The resulting buildings deliver a high degree of structural legibility, beginning with the articulation of their timber systems.

Regular grids of columns also set these buildings up as flexible, futureproof structures that can easily accommodate changes in use.

Above the glulam columns, a system of girders, beams, and purlins is carefully orchestrated to allow for the unimpeded integration of building services tight to the timber deck. To minimize operational energy use, the designs opted to avoid using raised access f loors or dropped ceilings for distributing services—the solutions most commonly chosen in mass timber structures. Instead, the three buildings leave mechanical and electrical elements exposed, in keeping with a tradition exemplified in Canadian works by the likes of Barton Myers, Ron Keenberg, and Carmen Corneil.

Small areas of dropped ceiling are present mainly around the core, where principal services—including main duct lines and fan coil units—are grouped. The minimal dropped ceilings act as service trays, and allow for easy side access for servicing or for future adaptation.

An array of distribution lines—including ducts, sprinklers and conduit—then run throughout the f loorplate. They are aligned parallel to the purlins, and above the larger structural members, in what are

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essentially service troughs framed by the layered timber structure.

Beyond creating an aesthetically appealing and spatially optimized solution, this decision had the added benefit of allowing for more exposed wood structure, saving time and money by reducing finishing and coordination requirements.

Much of the buildings’ structure can be read on the exterior. On the nearly complete Site Entrance Building, the columns clearly establish a visual order that informs the organization of the façade, while the beams and roof structure evoke a building entablature behind the glazing. Drawing inspiration from projects such as Mies van der Rohe’s IIT College of Architecture and Peter Behrens’ Turbine Factory, the elevations are a thoughtful, ordered composition of glazing, ceramic tiles and insulated metal panels. The minimalist façade treatment allows for a strong legibility of the structure, and is in keeping with the concept of flexible open space behind.

Campus as Opportunity for Iteration One key advantage of working through a collection of campus buildings is the ability to iterate, learning from previous designs. Aided by the rigorous tools of IPD, HDR worked to refine their designs, details and techniques as they progressed from the Site Entrance Building, to the Support and Maintenance Facility, to the Science Collaboration Centre. This had a notable impact on the evolution and refinement of the timber construction systems used.

This process is particularly notable in the development of the buildings’ column design.

The evolving design of the structural columns was informed by the thinking that led to a simplified distribution of building systems through the x and y dimensions of the ceiling. Over the course of the three projects,

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ABOVE The structural column design in the Science Collaboration Centre, at left, has been refined since the initial structural columns were built in the Site Entrance Building, at right. In the newer column design, notches provide bearing support for the beams, while a vertical channel allows for surface-mounted conduit, which continues along the ceiling in a service pathway framed by a pair of purlins.

the column designs came to more tightly integrate vertical pathways for conduit distribution, completing the circuit with the z dimension.

The culmination of this process is the fluted column of the Science Collaboration Centre. Visually, it appears as a split column, which allows for conduit to be surface-mounted within a reveal on its face, in keeping with the exposed aesthetic of the ceiling. This vertical channel also has the advantage of connecting to a space on the ceiling between a pair of purlins. This pair has been reorganized from the Site Entrance Building system—in part to simplify erection and to optimize timber deck spans—but has an added benefit of providing an organized service pathway on the ceiling.

The innovation of the column design goes beyond this, by extending to its interaction with the structural beams. In the Site Entrance Building, the columns used a steel-chair-and-knife plate connection off the side of the columns to support the beams—a very typical connection detail. However, through a cost-benefit analysis, the team determined that the process of erecting the structure could be simplified if the connection was created through the articulation of the column itself.

Taking cues from Japanese joinery and barn construction, the team introduced notches at the top of columns to provide the beam bearing support. The result is an elegant detail that simplifies fireproofing strategies and speeds construction.

The three mass timber buildings currently underway at the Chalk River Campus are a study of architectural innovation—in terms of both wood construction systems and the IPD project delivery method. The symbiosis between mass timber and IPD allowed for an active refinement of details that collectively inform an elegant, efficient system for building in wood.

What is the ultimate legacy for this project? Architect Don Chong sees the buildings less as specialized facilities, and more as prototypes

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for how mass timber can most effectively be deployed for standardized commercial and institutional structures. With an optimized prototype, Chong believes, mass timber buildings could become the brick-andbeam warehouses of the 21st century. HDR’s three buildings will doubtless expand the collective body of timber knowledge—even if few architects are able to visit them—with impacts that may go far beyond the security gates of Chalk River.

Architect Leland Dadson is a mass timber specialist at MJMA. He is involved with mass timber projects including the University of Toronto Academic Wood Tower (in association with Patkau Architects), and the Queen’s University John Deutsch University Centre Redevelopment (in association with HDR).

OWNER CNL | BUILDER CSJV (CHANDOS SULLIVAN JOINT VENTURE) | ARCHITECT HDR | ARCHITECT

TEAM DONALD CHONG, SUSAN CROSWELL, JUSTIN PURDUE, PAUL HOWARD HARRISON, JEREMY VAN DYKE, SOMAYEH MOUSAZADEH, MIN HOO KIM, SEBASTIAN WOOFF, SHELLEY GREENAWAY | STRUCTURAL LEA | MECHANICAL/SUSTAINABILITY INTEGRAL GROUP | ELECTRICAL/CIVIL JP2G | TIMBER NORDIC STRUCTURES | ENVELOPE (BUILDER) FLYNN CANADA | MECHANICAL/ELECTRICAL (BUILDER) JMR ELECTRIC | FRAMING/DRYWALL/CEILINGS (BUILDER) MARCANTONIO CONSTRUCTORS INC. | SYSTEMS FURNITURE (BUILDER) ADVANCED BUSINESS INTERIOR | BUILDING CONTROL (BUILDER) SIEMENS CANADA

SITE ENTRANCE BUILDING AREA 5,016 M2 | ESTIMATED BUDGET $30.6 M | COMPLETION SEPTEMBER 2020 | ENERGY USE INTENSITY (PROJECTED) 101 KWH/M2/YEAR SUPPORT AND MAINTENANCE FACILITY AREA 4,800 M2 | ESTIMATED BUDGET $32.8 M | COMPLETION MARCH 2021 | ENERGY USE INTENSITY (PROJECTED) 143.3 KWH/M2/YEAR SCIENCE COLLABORATION CENTRE AREA 8,918 M2 | ESTIMATED BUDGET $62 M | COMPLETION MARCH 2023 | ENERGY USE INTENSITY (PROJECTED) 130.4 KWH/M2/YEAR (WITHOUT DATA CENTRE); 373.8 KWH/M2/YEAR (WITH DATA CENTRE)

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© 2021, Tarkett North America

Surfaces shaped around us.

Tarkett Human-Conscious Design™ supports our planet, as well as its people: using healthy ingredients, recycled materials and renewable energy to minimize our impact. The result is a broad portfolio of products that can cover every part of a commercial space— while remaining mindful of our one mutual residence. commercial.tarkett.com/en_US Education • Healthcare • Retail • Workplace

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FIELD TEST A NEW BUILDING AT CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY’S LOYOLA CAMPUS IS DESIGNED TO TEST BUILDING ENVELOPE COMPONENTS IN YEAR-ROUND, OUTDOOR CONDITIONS.

Future Buildings Laboratory, Concordia University, Loyola Campus, Montreal, Quebec ARCHITECT Smith Vigeant architectes TEXT Shawn Moss PROJECT

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As an architect working for Concordia University’s facilities management department, my projects include the renovation of classrooms or offices where our department, along with external professionals, are the experts.

In the case of a recent project though, the architects were the learners.

Concordia University’s newest—and smallest—pavilion, designed by Smith Vigeant architectes, may look like a building. But this research facility is essentially an instrument designed to test building envelopes and efficiency under real-weather operating conditions.

The pavilion was created for the University’s Centre for Zero Energy Building Studies (CZEBS), part of the Gina Cody School of Engineering and Computer Science’s Building, Civil and Environmental Engineering department, and was informed by the CZEBS’s researchers. That group is directed by one of the world’s foremost experts in solar buildings, Dr. Andreas Athienitis; the construction project was led by Dr. Hua Ge, an expert in field-testing building envelopes.

The pavilion is designed, among other things, to test building-integrated photovoltaics, motorized shading devices, hybrid renewables, urban wind energy, and smart nanogrids. It brings these technologies out of the lab, and into the field, allowing researchers and students to experiment with these technologies and serving as a demonstration of what is possible as we develop advanced concepts for carbon-neutral buildings.

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The Future Buildings Laboratory is currently enclosed with semi-transparent photovoltaic curtain walls and building integrated photovoltaic/ thermal collector panels. ABOVE 60 percent of the building’s walls can be removed and replaced with other assemblies; the building also is designed to test electric vehicles as a means to store extra solar or wind power.

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To perform this kind of research, the house-sized pavilion incorporates large removable sections of exterior wall and roof—approximately 60 percent of its walls, including two corners, can be removed. This allows the performance and efficiency of various wall and roof assemblies to be assessed, along with their effects on occupant comfort in the corresponding enclosed spaces. Sensors embedded at various points throughout the wall composition allow data to be collected. The exterior envelope components will be changed every one or two years, depending on the research. Our research turned up only a single precedent for this unusual program—the Energy Flex House in Denmark by Henning Larsen Architects, which does not have removable walls or roof sections—and seeing it successfully realized required a number of unique details.

The facility is situated on the northern edge of Concordia’s Loyola campus, and is clad in pine to harmonize with a nearby residential neighbourhood. But its appearance will change over time—a portion of the pine-clad wall can be swapped out with any number of envelopes, from a brick cavity wall, to glazing studded with photovoltaics.

Vertical steel C-channels frame the openings into which the wall test panels can be inserted, and double as a support for future shading devices. The channels are aligned with structural columns which are set back from the slab edge to allow wall thicknesses varying from 50 mm to 570 mm to be tested. Earlier in the design process, these openings were thought of as windows or doors which would slide or swing into place. Due to the need to monitor the temperature and humidity performance of the envelopes being tested, however, it was

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decided to treat the openings as sections of wall, accepting that membranes and caulking will have to be redone with every change in wall composition. The way the building is framed allows for such changes.

The facility faces south to optimize solar exposure, and contains four south-facing bays, each delineating a room within. This configuration can also change, with multiple rooms combining to create larger spaces.

The only fixed walls on the interior enclose the mechanical and electrical rooms to the north, providing lateral bracing. Three of the bays are currently enclosed with semi-transparent photovoltaic (STPV ) curtain walls developed by CZEBS researchers in collaboration with industry partners. The last bay is enclosed by spandrel panels, with building integrated photovoltaic/thermal collector (BIPV/T) panels installed on the exterior of them—an experiment that aims to recuperate the heat generated in the cavity between the spandrel and BIPV/T panels to preheat the fresh air supply.

A steel structure on the roof was built to support future photovoltaic panels, and equipped with masts that will host a weather station and wind turbine. The roof slopes at 45° on the south side to maximize solar exposure. A shallower 14° incline on the north side facilitates rooftop access, and allows for double height spaces within. Those double-height spaces are capped with a skylight, in order for researchers to test and quantify the effects of passive cooling.

Planned additions also include an electrical vehicle (EV) charging station. The building’s large access ramp is equipped with a removable handrail, allowing it to double as a pathway for a small electrical

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PLAN DETAIL LAMINATED WOOD COLUMN PERMANENT STRUCTURE DYNAMIC VAPOUR BARRIER

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STEEL ANGLES TO ANCHOR ENVELOPE TEST PANELS TO STRUCTURE SEALING STRIP INTERIOR FINISH

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mast for roof equipment MINERAL WOOL INSULATION ENCLOSED WITH maintenance RESILIENT BACKER RODS AND SEALANT walkway for roof equipement

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ENVELOPE TEST PANEL : GLAZED ASSEMBLIES WITH AND WITHOUT BIPV/T

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vehicle—so that researchers can test certain aspects of the relationship between building and automobile, such as using the EV as storage for permanent structure excess electricity generated from photovoltaics or from the wind turbine.

One of the main challenges of the project was to persuade the structures gener- and assemintermediate blies al contractor and builders that this was not a house, and that it had to be built in ways that were unconventional. Smith Vigeant and our team test assemblies spent close to a year in design, and conveying design intent to the builders was often an arduous process.

This experimental building was a challenge to design and build—but also a learning process in itself. We believe that our efforts will pay off, and this highly adaptable “building to test buildings” will help shape and improve our future constructed world.

Shawn Moss, LEED AP, is an architect and project manager with Concordia University’s Facilities Management department.

CLIENT CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY, GINA CODY SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING AND COMPUTER SCIENCE

permanent structure

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intermediate structures and assemblies

test assemblies

– DEPARTMENT OF BUILDING, CIVIL AND ENVIRONMENTAL ENGINEERING | ARCHITECT TEAM STÉPHAN VIGEANT, CECILIA CHEN, ROXANE ROUTHIER-AUDET, SALSABIL MAAROUFI, ERIC LALONDE, SABRINA CHARBONNEAU | STRUCTURAL POINCARÉ EXPERTS-CONSEILS (PAUL-HENRY BOUTROS) | MECHANICAL PAGEAU MOREL ET ASSOCIÉS (DANIEL PICARD, MARC-ANTOINE JEAN) | ELECTRICAL PAGEAU MOREL ET ASSOCIÉS (JÉRÔME RIVARD, ABDEL KADER) | LANDSCAPE SMITH VIGEANT ARCHITECTES | INTERIORS SMITH VIGEANT ARCHITECTES | CONTRACTOR CONSTRUCTION DOVERCO | PROJECT MANAGEMENT CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY, FACILITIES MANAGEMENT | CIVIL FNX-INNOV (JADE BOSSÉ BÉLANGER) | CODE GLT+ | SIGNAGE SAIC | ACOUSTICS DAVIDSON ACOUSTIQUE & INSONORISATION | SITE SURVEY ARSENAULT LEMAY ARPENTEURS-GÉOMÈTRES & FNX-INNOV | DEMOLITION CONTRACTOR DÉMOLITON PANZINI | AREA 125 M2 | BUDGET $1.3 M | COMPLETION JUNE 2021

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WHAT WILL IT TAKE TO DECARBONIZE BUILDING OPERATIONS? TEXT

Sheena Sharp

USING DOWNTOWN TORONTO AS A TEST BED, TORONTO 2030 DISTRICT RESEARCHERS MAP OUT THE COSTS AND LOGISTICS—FOR BUILDING OWNERS AND CITIES—FOR GETTING TO ZERO OPERATIONAL CARBON IN THE BUILDINGS SECTOR.

AED professionals are becoming increasingly adept at improving the energy performance of individual buildings. But meeting global carbon reduction targets will require much more than creating new buildings to higher standards, and retrofitting existing ones piecemeal. In provinces like Ontario, it will mean a wholesale switch away from the present carbon-intensive natural gas heating systems. While governments must decide what fuel will replace gas, architects need to understand what is coming—as it will influence the way they design in the future, and the advice that they give their clients today.

To better understand what will be needed to achieve a low-carbon future, I’ve been working with the Toronto 2030 District: a privatepublic initiative with 63 members, including building owners, operators, and investors; service providers like architects, engineers, and suppliers; and community groups like the OAA. The Toronto 2030 District is part of a North American network of 23 similar districts, linked to the non-profit organization Architecture 2030.

Using downtown Toronto as a test bed, we have taken on the challenge of exploring the wicked problem of reducing the operating emissions of buildings, which account for some 30% of global GHG emissions. The District’s physical area contains most of the building types found in Ontario: low-rise residential, high-rise residential, low-rise commercial and office towers, as well as Ontario’s Legislature, two stadia, a hockey arena, two universities, many hospitals, two city halls, hotels and restaurants. We are primarily addressing what to do about existing buildings, but we also expect the findings to influence regulation and leadership when it comes to new buildings. The Toronto 2030 District’s members are not new to greening buildings and have insight into what could work, and what will not.

Finding the Right Solution It was once believed building owners could make individual decisions that, when added together, would save the planet, but it’s become clear that this idea is not working. Progress has stalled at about 30% oper-

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ational energy savings. The savings achieved so far have relatively good paybacks, like the widespread implementation of lighting retrofits.

However, achieving the next 30% savings will be a lot more costly—involving moves like envelope or mechanical retrofits—and businesses going it alone will be at a competitive disadvantage.

Programs like the LEED rating system have sometimes performed better, but LEED has penetrated only about 1% of the new construction market, and affected much less of our existing building stock. Even this program has struggled to achieve deep carbon reductions because of its measuring system—based on reference buildings and proposed alternatives—rather than real-world results.

Overall, what we have been doing thus far amounts to essentially random acts of energy efficiency. We have no idea if our efforts are addressing the climate imperative. We are like mountain climbers in a fog at the bottom of a mountain: we know we are going up, but we do not know if our path leads to the summit, or to the top of a foothill. If we are taking actions to reach a target for 2030, then we should be sure the efforts are in line with what is needed to reach the 2050 targets, and will not need to be undone. Nonetheless, what has been done todate is not wasted. Our experience with LEED projects can be used to imagine what is required to take super-efficiency to scale.

It is becoming clear that what we urgently need is a political solution, rather than a consumer one. There is precedent for the work that needs to happen. In the 1950s and 60s, many governments (including Ontario’s) supported the conversion of “city gas” systems to natural gas, and continue to regulate the development and expansion of our natural gas system.

Just as happened then, the new solution will be first and foremost about fuel switching, and next about energy efficiency. In meeting our carbon reduction targets, there is no scenario where natural gas—whose primary component, methane, is a potent greenhouse gas, and which creates carbon dioxide when burnt—can continue to be used in its present form to heat buildings. There is no way to capture the resulting CO2 at the building level, and without doing so, we cannot meet the global tar-

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HEATING RETROFIT AVERAGE COST COMPARISON BY FUEL TYPE 8.00$/sf/yr

Occupancies, left to right Office class A, Office class B&C, Hotel, Stand-alone retail, Mall retail, Pre-2004 apt, Post-2004 condo, Single-family home

FUEL COST CAPITAL (ELEC.)

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7.00$/sf/yr 6.00$/sf/yr 5.00$/sf/yr 4.00$/sf/yr 3.00$/sf/yr 2.00$/sf/yr 1.00$/sf/yr

Natural gas baseline

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gets of reducing our carbon emissions to 50 percent below 1990 levels by 2030, and reaching carbon-neutrality by 2050. We need to change fuels.

A New Vision The Toronto 2030 District has already completed a utility data project that accounts for the annual energy use of all 7,216 buildings within its borders (www.toronto2030platform.ca). We are now researching the pathways to creating a decarbonized energy supply that meets the needs of buildings in the District. For this exercise, we chose a process developed by the Transition Accelerator, a Canadian non-profit whose work includes projects in Ontario, Quebec and Alberta. The process is a good fit because, like the District, it is driven by stakeholder engagement and defined goals.

To date, Toronto 2030 District has worked at understanding existing systems, co-developing an alternative vision, and analyzing some of the pathways to achieving that goal. Our group of private and public sector partners looks at the UN climate targets from the point of view of the options and costs to individual building owners: we don’t think it’s an option to say “it’s too expensive,” but rather, we have embraced the goal of showing how we can make it happen.

Notably, the project’s vision is not solely about airtightness, insulation, and efficient fans. We need to recognize the social and economic context for energy efficiency. We need to look for co-benefits—like increased value and comfort—which could pay for improvements.

The District encompasses assets that are rich sources of data and ideas that can also be leveraged, like universities, research institutes, building organizations, and government agencies.

Fuel-Switching Study Our first in-depth analysis concerns fuel switching scenarios. We know for sure that we cannot achieve the UN climate targets while burning fossil-fuel-based natural gas as a primary heating source for buildings.

Between now and 2050, we will need to fuel switch. Likely, we also

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Electric resistance

Air source heat pump

Ground source heat pump

Hybrid (ASHP & RNG)

will need to make buildings more energy-efficient to reduce costs.

To switch fuels, we will need to change the heating equipment at each building, as well as providing an energy system that can meet the shifted demand.

The fuels and technologies that are contenders for replacing natural gas are: electricity, hydrogen, and renewable natural gas. For electricity, the District looked at different heating technologies: electric resistance heaters, cold climate air source heat pumps (ASHPs), and ground source heat pumps. For the gaseous fuels, we also examined different production methodologies: blue hydrogen (created by splitting natural gas into hydrogen and captured carbon dioxide), green hydrogen (produced from water, using renewable electricity), and a hybrid of electricity and renewable natural gas (the latter captured from decomposing organic waste at farms and landfills).

Estimating the cost of the on-site building changes was very challenging. The over 7,000 buildings in the district come in a in a broad variety of shapes and sizes. Further, we wanted to work with real costs for switching out boiler, chiller and rooftop units.

To stand in for the building stock, we developed a set of 13 representative building occupancy typologies, each with typical f loor plates and mechanical systems, to approximate the averages for the District’s building stock. We used public Energy Use Intensity (EUI) data for each occupancy type, and cross-checked this against actual consumption measures from our earlier data platform project.

The result is a realistic, if approximate, model of how the District’s buildings are consuming energy, and the mechanical systems needed to support this.

In the analysis, we then replaced each typical mechanical system with appropriate equipment for the new fuels. We obtained current prices from an equipment supplier, and included soft costs and the cost of borrowing in our replacement estimates. Then, we translated this into square foot costs for each building type, which building owners could use to estimate their own costs and the impact on their businesses.

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To estimate future utility bills, we calculated the amount of heat currently made by burning natural gas in each building type, and calculated how much electricity, hydrogen, or electricity and renewable natural gas (in a hybrid system) would be needed to generate the same amount of heat. We worked with a variety of reports and estimates to develop fuel costs that ref lect the costs to generate the fuel and to build the needed energy plants, including carbon capture and storage in the cases where natural gas is the base fuel.

Adding together the capital costs and the fuel costs results in a total per-square-foot cost. This showed that blue hydrogen is the cheapest replacement for the combustion of natural gas. This is followed by a hybrid of standard air source heat pumps (accommodating heating peaks at -10°C) and renewable natural gas, then ground source heat pumps, then electric resistance heaters, then cold-climate air source heat pumps (accommodating heating peaks at -20°C), and finally, green hydrogen. The figure below shows the average cost per square foot across the eight most common building typologies.

Looking at this figure suggests that the decision is clear. But not so fast: cost is only one consideration. We also need to consider the potential for cost changes, as well as the likelihood we can make the system conversion before 2050.

To understand what a fuel-switching transition might look like from a larger perspective, the District 2030 partners and researchers devised a thought experiment, using the principles of project management to schedule the transition and gauge feasibility.

A Blue Hydrogen Strategy Blue hydrogen, the least expensive option in our initial analysis, is the name for hydrogen made with natural gas. The hydrogen and carbon in natural gas (methane) are split, the carbon is stored underground, and the hydrogen is sent by pipeline to be burned for heat at the building level.

However, there are two main issues with blue hydrogen. First, not all carbon from natural gas can be captured in the process: estimates range from 70% to 95%. We used 90% for our exercise, giving the benefit of the doubt to industry. Because of this problem, in order to be emissionsfree, we would eventually have to switch to the more expensive green hydrogen (made with water and electricity) sometime in the future.

The second issue is that though it has successful pilot projects, blue hydrogen does not exist. While we have a lot of natural gas in Canada, we don’t currently make hydrogen with carbon capture and storage at this scale.

Hydrogen is a smaller molecule than natural gas. In a hydrogenbased fuel system, parts of the natural gas infrastructure could be reused, but all of the main distribution lines, as well as some of the local distribution lines, would have to be rebuilt. In Toronto, about a third of the local distribution would have to be replaced, meaning a lot of ripped-up roads.

Our natural gas infrastructure was not installed through a process of individual owner decisions. The provincial governments installed the system neighbourhood by neighbourhood, replacing old equipment alongside new equipment. Switching to hydrogen will require a similar process.

While we know how to manufacture the required boilers and furnaces for a hydrogen-based system, and may be able to make dual-fuel equipment, we don’t currently do it. There is no supply chain, no standards, no available safety monitors, design codes or regulations.

There are also concerns about our capacity to safely store CO2, and about the social acceptability of building or rebuilding pipelines.

These amount to non-trivial project risks.

To meet the UN targets, a project schedule might look something like this. We allow two years to develop policy, consensus and regulations, which would be incredibly fast. We would then need to complete

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the following tasks: build the generation capacity; rebuild local infrastructure as required; manufacture heating equipment; and start switching over customers. Finally, we would need to replace the blue hydrogen with green hydrogen.

Because we would have to first build the supply system, the available time to convert would be a few years, and we would have to do so at an initial pace of 950,000 building plant renovations per year, followed by a more reasonable pace of 150,000 per year.

An Electrification Strategy Electricity has a different issue than hydrogen: it has existing infrastructure, generation, codes, design standards and supply chains.

But does it have the capacity to serve all of the heating needs of current natural gas customers?

When designing buildings, we do not size boilers or furnaces based on the total heat we will need in a year. Rather, we size them based on the maximum heat we will need to produce on the coldest day of the year.

Similarly, when we are adding to the electricity supply system capacity, it’s the peak demand that matters, not the total load. Since electricity, unlike gas, cannot be stored, we need to size the generation system for the coldest day. The development of economical grid-scale storage is hotly pursued, and there are many pilot projects, but it is not widely deployed.

Either electric resistance technology (like baseboard heaters) or heat pump technology (a refrigerator run in reverse) can be used. Heat pumps work by taking either air or water, at some temperature, and squeezing heat out, exhausting cold water or air. Heat pumps are more efficient when the temperature difference between the incoming air/water and the desired temperature is smaller. Heat pumps are optimized for different incoming temperatures: the cold climate ones are rated to -20°C, and can handle our climate without backup heating systems.

What will happen to the peak loads if we convert to heating electrically? We based our scenario on converting all buildings to cold climate airsource heat pump technology, which although the most expensive system, gives us the lowest peak demands. In our test bed of downtown Toronto, the peak would switch from summer to winter, and increase by 100%.

The electric system, as it stands right now in Ontario and most provinces, has additional peak capacity. We could start electrifying gas customers right away, and ramp up clean electricity generation at the same time.

Although electricity is sold by the kilowatt, the majority of the cost is in building the plants and distribution system. The marginal cost to produce additional clean kilowatts from existing plants is very little. It’s very likely that an all-electric system will generate additional revenue to offset upgrade costs, unlike with hydrogen.

What would a project schedule look like?

Again, we’ve assumed two years for consensus, policy and regulation.

Fuel-switching in buildings could start immediately, as would building increased system capacity: we would not have to convert systems neighbourhood-by-neighbourhood like with gas. The pace of conversion up to 2032 would have to average 393,000 buildings per year, followed by 150,000 per year up to 2050. Not all of the provinces have clean electricity generation, so at some point, the coal and natural gas plants would have to be closed and replaced with clean electricity sources.

The Hybrid Gas/Electric Strategy This solution combines the benefits of the first two fuels, and takes advantage of the fact that “standard” heat pumps, which operate to about -10°C, are much less expensive than cold climate heat pumps. The idea is to electrify heating with the standard pumps, and use the existing gas system for the peaks.

Natural gas is the common name for methane extracted from the ground. Renewable natural gas (RNG) is also methane, but made from

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HEATING RETROFIT AVERAGE COST COMPARISON BY FUEL TYPE Today

Blue Hydrogen Implementation

50% Emissions Reduction International Target

100% Emissions Reduction International Target

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Policy in Place

Sell only Duel Fuel Appliances Build Hydrogen CCS Plants Build Main Distribution Lines Beside Existing Lines Map Existing Local Distribution Systems Replace Local Distribution Systems as Needed Convert 56% Customers to Hydrogen, Incl.

Burners, Meters, Detection (3.33M total or 950k/yr)

Electrification Implementation

Convert the Remaining 2.66M customers at 150k/yr Build Decarbonized Green Hydrogen Plants

Policy in Place

More Robust Supply Chain Development Build New Generation & CCS Capacity Augment Main Distribution Lines Beside Existing Map Existing Local Distribution Systems Replace Local Distribution Systems Convert 56% of Buildings to Heat Pumps (3.33M or 393k/yr) Convert the Remaining 2.66M customers at 150k/yr Replace Gas-Fired Generation Plants

RNG Implementation Policy in Place

Build Renewable Natural Gas Generation Capacity Convert 53% of Buildings to Heat Pumps maintaining RNG back-up (3.18M or 362k/yr)

Energy Efficiency First

Convert the Remaining 2.82M customers at 156k/yr Replace Gas-Fired Generation Plants

Policy in Place

Renovate 100% of Buildings to 60% Efficiency (5.06M or 632k/year) Select and Build Out Clean Fuel System Convert 100% Of Buildings to Selected Clean Fuel (5.06M or 562k/yr) 2021

2025

2032

bio-based processes, such as capturing methane emissions from organic waste, landfills, and wastewater treatment. It is molecularly identical to natural gas, so infrastructure would not have to be rebuilt.

The downside of RNG is that we only have the feed stock to make about 15% of the methane that we currently use. This problem goes away if we are only using it for peaking, as peaking loads will require only about 5% of what we currently use. Furthermore, the operating costs would be high: RNG would likely cost the same as electricity.

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2050

We would need to add a carbon price on top, to ensure that RNG was only used in peak periods.

The biggest project risk is that RNG would be a very flexible fuel, and the building sector will be competing with heavy industry and aviation for access to it, so operating costs could be high. Currently, natural gas use by industry is greater than its use by commercial and residential buildings. This would be a huge project risk. Another project risk is that if the conversion deadlines are not met, we would be forced to continue to use

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PRACTICE

SUMMARY OF KEY CONSIDERATIONS BY FUEL TYPE Blue hydrogen

Green hydrogen

Electric resistance

Air source heat pump

Ground source heat pump

Hybrid (ASHP & RNG)

Cost$/sf/yr Potential for fuel cost change Emissions Potential for end-use cost change Supply chain maturity Required system expansion

fossil-fuel based natural gas, and would therefore miss the UN targets.

This would have the lowest building-level capital costs, and low stranded assets. After policy is in place, it could start right away.

The Efficiency First Strategy The premise of this solution is that we continue to use natural gas, but meet our targets by reducing emissions through energy efficiency measures. When we have gone as low as we can, we fuel switch at a lower level, thus reducing stranded assets in the energy system.

This strategy reduces gas use with more efficient mechanical equipment, by using controls to reduce unneeded heating, and by reducing the amount of heat lost through building envelopes. But how much efficiency is enough before you fuel switch? The City of Toronto has just released a study looking at this question. By their calculations, a 60% reduction is possible through deep energy retrofits, with energy efficiency similar to a net zero energy renovation.

Again, if this solution was proposed, we could allot two years for consensus, policy and regulations, and start renovations for gas customers immediately. In order to achieve a 60% reduction in emissions by 2032, we would need to renovate ALL gas customers in 8.5 years, or 706,000 buildings per year in Canada. Once that is done, we could change out their mechanical equipment to allow for fuel switching.

A 60% reduction in gas use cannot be achieved only with new windows and caulking. It would require significant envelope improvements.

A City of Toronto report estimates the total value of renovating the building stock in Toronto to be $4.4 billion above what is currently spent on renovations. At a pace of completing all buildings in 8.5 years, this would amount to $517 million per year—for Toronto alone.

After the 60% reduction in gas use was complete, we would swap out the mechanical equipment in all of the buildings for fuel switching, at the more moderate pace of 562,000 per year.

Conclusion “The scale of the challenge is huge, but that does not make achieving the goal impossible,” writes U.S. political scientist Roger Pielke Jr. “What makes achieving the goal impossible is a failure to accurately

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understand the scale of the challenge and the absence of policy proposals that match that scale.”

Architects and engineers do not make the final decisions about how to spend a building owner’s money—let alone drive larger policy changes—but it is our job to offer informed choices and insights to our clients. At minimum, we should stop calculating the net present value of energy savings measures based on today’s cost of natural gas. Instead, we should offer a sensitivity analysis including the potential years of available natural gas. We should offer envelope retrofits as a more expensive, but less risky option as they will serve all the future pathways.

While compromise is beneficial in human relationships, we cannot negotiate with physics. We need to comply with the UN targets, or we will fail, with catastrophic results for humanity. We should be looking for stronger government policy that includes a carbon tax of $340 per tonne or more, a commitment to develop agreements for one or more clean fuels in no more than two years, a commitment to set performance-based building renovation targets at the net-zero or Passive House level, and a commitment to streamline compliance using existing professional licensing systems and to provide the right data to support lowenergy design.

Our conclusion? In the coming years, natural gas will cease to be used in buildings. When it comes to alternatives, there is no clear winner.

Still, we have a clearer idea of the magnitude of the costs, which could be reduced with building energy efficiency measures. Whatever energy systems Canada ends up choosing, the only thing we know for sure is that to address the global climate challenge, change will need to come soon.

Sheena Sharp, FRAIC is founder and principal of Coolearth Architecture. She is a former president of the Ontario Association of Architects (OAA), and a past chair of the OAA’s Sustainable Built Environments Committee (SBEC).

The Toronto 2030 District research team for the fuel-switching study includes Co-Chair Sheena Sharp, Coolearth Architecture; Bruno Arcand, Carleton University; Peter Halsall, Purpose Building; Anton Kogan, SvN Architects & Planners; James Meadowcroft, Carleton University; Birgit Siber, retired principal, DSAI; Cara Sloat, Hammerschlag & Joffe; Geneva Starr, Purpose Building; Victor Tulceanu, BDP Quadrangle; and Svetan Veliov, Arup.

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What is Renewable Natural Gas (RNG)?

Carbon dioxide Carbon dioxide dioxide Carbon and methane and methane methane and are collected are collected collected are

Purified methane methane (RNG) (RNG) is is Purified Purified methane (RNG) is added to to our our existing existing system system added

Waste Waste

What makes RNG carbon neutral?

customers Delivered to to customers customers Delivered

= As waste decomposes, As waste waste decomposes, As it releases gases into into it releases releases gases it the atmosphere. atmosphere. the atmosphere. the

Where does RNG come from?

Purification Purification

Farms Farms Farms

To produce produce RNG, RNG, those those same themfrom from same gases gases are are captured captured (preventing (preventing them them from To entering the the atmosphere), atmosphere), then thesame same then purified purified and and used used in in our our system system the the same entering gas without without adding adding more more greenhouse greenhouse gases way as as conventional conventional natural natural gas greenhousegases gases way into the the atmosphere. atmosphere. into

Landfills Landfills

Wastewater water Waste

Woodwaste waste Wood

Municipal organics organics organics Municipal

As our RNG supply grows, less conventional gas is used. In 2020, we added a third more RNG compared to the previous year, and we have plans to continue growing that supply. That’s energy at work.

Learn how RNG can help buildings meet strict emissions guidelines at fortisbc.com/rngbuild.

Connect with us @fortisbc

FortisBC uses the FortisBC name and logo under license from Fortis Inc. (21-110.9 07/2021)

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INSITES

TIFFANY SHAW-COLLINGE

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THE SEVEN GRANDFATHER TEACHINGS TEXT

Vivian Manasc

IN HER BOOK OLD STORIES, NEW WAYS, ARCHITECT VIVIAN MANASC EXPLORES HOW THE SEVEN CREE GRANDFATHER TEACHINGS CAN INFORM AN ARCHITECTURAL PROCESS FOCUSED ON INCLUSION AND RESPECT—CREATING BETTER OUTCOMES FOR BOTH INDIGENOUS AND NON-INDIGENOUS COMMUNITIES. The Seven Grandfather Teachings were first shared with Manasc by the late Elder Peter O’Chiese. Manasc was introduced to Elder O’Chiese by Diana Steinhauer, one of the building committee members for the Saddle Lake Junior Senior High School. “As I was inspired by Vivian’s vivacious capacities, so too will you be upon realizing the capacity that architecture serves in reclaiming our place and spaces,” writes Steinhauer in a foreword to the book. “This book reminds people of the stories and the processes of coming to consensus and about persevering.”

Many years ago, one of the Elders at a planning meeting asked me, “So explain to me: What is the sequence of making a building? How do you get from an idea to a building?”

I responded by drawing a typical linear timeline: We work with you to develop a concept, then we complete the schematic design, then we work with our engineering team to integrate building systems, and then we prepare construction documents, and then we get a contractor to proceed into construction.

The Elder looked at me and said, “I understand what you mean—but you have it all wrong. This process of planning and designing a building shouldn’t be illustrated in straight lines. It should be told in a circle.” He took the chalk on the blackboard and drew a circle with four parts and then with seven parts—showing that the beginning and the end of the story are connected. He offered the gift of framing the story of how we make buildings by telling the stories in a circular way. There can be four parts, or there can be seven parts, depending on how you

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share the teachings. Over the years, I have found that the seven Cree Grandfather Teachings have helped me to frame the story of architectural practice and the process of planning, design and construction that is at the heart of our work. These seven teachings are described in turn, and each is connected to a specific phase. This is how the circle of architecture has emerged for me.

The Seven Grandfather Teachings First, as architects, we need the Courage to explore our purpose and people’s vision. Once the vision is articulated, then we do planning, with Love for the community who will inhabit the space. Then we draw in the Wisdom of the knowledge that we have developed as designers to pull the best design strategies to the forefront. With Respect for the craft of making and building, we then develop the detailed instructions for building, and then the moment of Truth—we build and implement the vision.

Then we move in and celebrate with Humility what we have accomplished and give thanks to all those who have been part of the journey.

And finally, with Honesty, we evaluate and review, and then we start all over again.

Courage Visioning together requires Courage on the part of the community.

At Peguis, north of Winnipeg, at Saddle Lake and Driftpile, in Alberta, and in other communities, we set out to design new schools. Each time, we invited the community to share their vision. We asked them to imagine the

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COURTESY MANASC ISAAC

Courage is needed to envision a future for the children in the school—and the creating of a school that embodies Cree teachings was the starting point at Saddle Lake.

The sculpture Eaglechild by Stewart Steinhauer is at the heart of Saddle Lake School, in Saddle Lake First Nation, Treaty 6 Territory.

ABOVE A workshop held at Kipohtakaw (Alexander) First Nation School, at Kipohtakaw First Nation, Treaty 6 Territory.

OPPOSITE

future of learning environments. At Peguis, over two hundred people came together in a large room with magazines, markers, flip charts and scissors.

Making collages together allows community members to share their ideas, and their dreams, amongst themselves and with us, to co-create imagery that resonates for the whole community. These visions include light, warmth, bright and meaningful colours, natural materials and animal images. Years later when we go back to visit, these schools are still loved and cared for.

In the early 1990s at Saddle Lake, we learned about ways to interpret the vision. The school was eventually called Kihew Asiny, which means Eaglechild. The vision of this particular story emerged as we began to work with the community. The story of the Eaglechild is about a child who goes out for a quest to find out who he is. He ends up coming back home full circle to find out that he is who he is. We asked for the gift to interpret that story. We were taught that the story couldn’t be written or drawn literally. It had to be understood in the telling. To this day, Diana Steinhauer, who was the director of education at Saddle Lake at the time, is sharing the story of the Eaglechild and of how that story is to be understood and interpreted in the context of the community.

To understand yourself and your institutions, you have to understand your community and your relationships. By being given the gift of that story, we were able to interpret the story in the planning and design of the school, creating patterns on the floor and patterns in the building that integrated with Stewart Steinhauer’s powerful sculpture, enabling a continuous telling and retelling of that story.

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Love Why do we create these buildings, and why do we plan them? In order to give form to the community’s vision, we interpret the connection between people, the connection between spaces, the connection between place and building, and the connection between community and building. The sense of Love is that sense of connection—of knowing how all the people in the community relate to one another and so to the building being designed.

The health authority in Edmonton decided to buy a vacant, old, red-brick schoolhouse to build a new integrated community health and primary health care centre. However, the neighbours rather liked their little brick schoolhouse and the adjacent green space, and they didn’t want any new buildings there. The health authority thought that tearing down the school could make way for a new and attractive community health centre. It seemed an impossible situation in which the health authority had made a decision, and the community seemed intractably opposed. Struggling to find a space of shared values, we drew on our tradition of inviting as many people as wanted to be there to a workshop about the future of the site.

Anxious that there would be voices and contradictory opinions that we couldn’t manage, we heaved a sigh of relief after the first design charrette. Starting with blank sheets of paper, we explored the needs and wants and fears of the neighbours. With about 125 people, we moved from anger through Love and created a shared vision that identified their fears and aspirations for this place.

A lot of people were afraid that we were going to tear down the redbrick school. So we managed to convince the health authority that it was worth considering how we could keep the brick schoolhouse. There were fears about needle exchanges and about after-hours disruption, fears of the loss of green space, and of too much surface parking, and fear by the non-Indigenous community of attracting too many Indigenous people from surrounding neighbourhoods to the new community health facility. For each of these challenges, there was an opportunity to design an integrated solution.

In the next day’s Edmonton Journal, an article reported that we were able to build the trust needed to move the project forward. And then once we had that trust, we got to work. We designed a strategy for economically integrating the red-brick schoolhouse into the health centre. Underground parking was proposed to protect trees and preserve green space. And we designed a link between the old building and the new building, complete with a circular room to serve as a gathering and prayer space for the Indigenous community. The health centre met the neighbourhood’s needs for green and heritage spaces, as well as being a very effective health clinic.

Clinical spaces were placed in the new building and the office spaces and community spaces in the old building. To this day, the East Edmonton Health Centre is a well-loved and well-used member of the community.

Wisdom The Wisdom of architects and artists is often seen through their ability to draw. And with that Wisdom comes the temptation to draw before listening. It’s sometimes easier to draw, so we can see what the options might be. When that Wisdom of drawing is balanced with the Wisdom of listening to stories, we create shared images that build trust and understanding. We draw because it is a powerful way to reconcile all the contradicting requirements of a given reality. We draw together, because it is in the Wisdom of shared images that we can build an alignment around shared vision.

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INSITES

Drawing together can bring deep understanding. In the heart of Edmonton’s river valley is a site that many agreed concealed a historic burial ground. Located beside one of the Fort Edmonton locations, it was an area without clear boundaries, criss-crossed by roads and traffic islands. To the east, the Rossdale Power Plant loomed large, with switchyards, fences, and a gatehouse. To the south is the riverbank of the North Saskatchewan River, far below the hill. To the north, steep river roads lead to the downtown core of Edmonton, and to the west, views of the setting sun are framed by the meandering river valley.

Métis people, Europeans, Blackfoot people, Cree people and Dene people came together and appealed to the Wisdom of the City Council to honour the burial ground that was known to be at that location, just outside the walls of the historic Fort Edmonton, and build a memorial on this site.

The challenge was to create a form for this memorial. We brought together a divided group of people who each had a clear idea about the design of that burial ground. Blackfoot and Cree people felt strongly that there should be no Christian symbolism because they were reminded of the repression experienced at the hands of the churches.

Descendants of fur traders and settlers argued that their Christian ancestors are buried here as well, outside of the edges of Fort Edmonton, and that a cross of some sort would be essential.

How do you have a cross and not a cross at the same time? Drawing images of crosses, broken circles and other forms, architects Shafraaz Kaba and Myron Nebozuk at Manasc Isaac arrived at a memorial that is both legible and abstract. In the landscape, we set benches in the form of the Métis symbol of infinity. The elements on the site would sit on the surface of the Earth, without foundations, as we weren’t sure where the bodies were buried. The City also rerouted the roads, creating a space where contemplation and reflection could take place.

The memorial, if you see it from certain angles, could be a cross, but if you look from another angle, it is a three-dimensional, very lighton-the-landscape sculpture. From the air, it looks like a broken circle.

The Wisdom of drawing is a gift shared by many people over the years.

Its Wisdom is to allow us to synthesize in a thoughtful way, the ideas, visions and plans of the community and create a single, dynamic, everchangeable image. Now designated as a burial ground, with its memorial and interpretative site, this decades-old place is still being modified, to reconcile the needs of the many stories that are told there.

Respect The fourth of the seven teachings of the Elders is about Respect. We are probably most familiar with this step as detailed design, or construction documents, or detailing. As architects, this is the phase at which we’re thinking about how things really go together, how materials go together, how sometimes abstract ideas manifest in built form and how we can illustrate those ideas and assemblies.

A reference point is the traditional teepee form. And I don’t know how many photographs I have of teepees, but from all my travels, I seem to have hundreds. I am really fascinated by how beautiful that form is against the sky, and how just so simple, functional and lovely it is. It reminds us that we do have to pay attention to the details and how it all goes together to have a coherent and refined design. Respect for the people who make things, and Respect for the knowledge that they have accumulated in that making, and Respect for the stories that are embedded in the object are also embodied in both teepees and in buildings.

Detail exists at every level, whether we’re interpreting a feather falling to the ground, or whether we’re interpreting beadwork. In the case of the O’Chiese community, the only Saulteaux community in Alberta,

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ABOVE The design for the Rossdale Burial Ground Memorial in Edmonton honours the stories of different groups whose histories cross on the site.

the Elders felt very strongly that the craft and art of beadwork should be reflected in the design of the building. In that case, our team, led by Richard Isaac, incorporated colours and patterns drawn from beadwork into the design of the graphic elements inside the building.

Often the detailing is in a larger context. For example, the Centre for World Indigenous Knowledge and Research at Athabasca University was planned for the Academic and Research Centre (known as the ARC). The space had to be circular, but as we learned from Indigenous faculty, there could be nothing above that space, only the sky. So there is no second floor above that part of the building, even though the rest

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of the building has three storeys. Every time we work with Indigenous leaders, whether it’s as part of the design of a larger building or as a stand-alone facility, we learn new stories, and each new story has layers and more layers of meaning.

Truth So what about building, the fifth dimension called Truth in the Elder tradition? There are endless stories about buildings. We all have them.

The building is the moment of Truth for the design process. You have come to grips with the planning, the design and detailing. Does it come together? Does it make sense? Is it Truthful? It’s also the moment of Truth in that the building’s ownership grows, as there are many contractors, tradespeople and suppliers engaged in the process of making.

I want to share a story about a construction experience from a long time ago. This one is from northern Saskatchewan, in Stony Rapids, on the Athabasca River. The Athabasca Health Facility was a replacement hospital for the one that was closed in Uranium City. The new building was to serve five communities and was to be located at Stony Rapids. We flew into each of the five communities for one day. In each community, we held a large-scale design charrette, and we tried to understand how we would plan and design and build this centralized facility. This particular health facility has birthing rooms, emergency rooms, and Elder care; so it is a full-care facility, with both acute and long-term care under the same roof. At a time before email and cell phones, it was unlikely that people were in constant, instant contact with one another. Yet we heard the same thing in each community.

The patient rooms should face the river. Not because you’ll be able to see the river, but rather because you would be able to hear the river.

And so we designed it with all the patient rooms facing toward the river so you could hear the rapids. And in Stony Rapids, even when it’s sixty below outside, you can hear the water running—it never freezes.

So we went ahead and designed it and then began construction.

Because of distance, I didn’t go out very often, and when I did go, I was largely anonymous. One day I was out on site and while I was walking around, I overheard the tradesmen during their lunch remarking, “You know, it’s really cool. You can hear the river running around here from this room. That’s amazing.” The tradesmen just got it. It wasn’t anything we told them to listen for, wasn’t anything we made them aware of; it was just there. Those are the kind of magical construction stories that let you know the planning was right, the design was right, and the detail was right. Those people, because they cared about the building, and because they understood that the river sound was important and that it was healing, did a really good job of building this building.

Another construction story is from Peguis Central School, just a couple miles north of Winnipeg. They had a masonry trades training program, and we were asked to design the building to give these masonry students work experience. At the end of the project, eight journeymen masons were ready to graduate, using the experience they gained by working on Peguis School. The purpose of the building was a lot more than just making a building; it was about making a community, about making a future for those young people.

Humility We are now at the sixth teaching—that of Humility—moving in and celebrating. When you finally finish construction and open a building, it is quite humbling. Any of you who are practitioners know that to see a building completed, to see people moving in, is surrounded by a real sense of Humility. You have been part of co-creating something that is going to be there for a very long time. It is now given over to the custody of the community. It has to be something that people not only want to celebrate, but also something that people want to take ownership of.

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Amiskwaciy Academy, the Aboriginal high school in Edmonton, was originally Edmonton’s municipal air terminal building. When the Edmonton Public School Board decided to develop an Aboriginal high school, it realized that it couldn’t afford to build it from scratch.

There wasn’t a school building available, so we worked with them to try to find a building in the community that was vacant, available and 80,000 square feet. There weren’t that many 80,000-square-foot buildings just sitting around vacant! But we knew about the airport terminal. It just so happened that we had done a renovation of it before it closed. It was a circular story for us as architects—to come back and re-renovate a building that we had just renovated.

We started with the key question: Why are we creating this Aboriginal school? It’s a junior–senior high school, a school where all of Edmonton’s youth have access to Cree language and culture.

It was exciting to fit it into an air terminal building because all those baggage rooms really make great shop spaces. Really robust environments make perfect schools. But turning an airport terminal into a school was a complex transformation. Again we started with imagining, dreaming and envisioning.

These Grandfather Teachings are circular. What I’ve learned is that all these stories connect, whether they are about grand openings, whether these stories are about dreaming, or about design or construction. They keep looping around, reinforcing each other. So the main entry of Amiskwaciy reflects the many different Indigenous communities that this school serves. The images are not Cree, not Dene, not Saulteaux; they are a composite set of images that ref lect the visions of many of the different nations that come to this particular school.

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Honesty The seventh element of the story, Honesty, which completes the circle, is the evaluation. We often speak in the world of architecture about evaluating buildings, and post-occupancy evaluations, basically reviewing how we’ve done. And it’s harder to do that than to talk about it. But we do make it our practice to come around and visit. After the Humility of opening a building, there is the Honesty of evaluating how we did.

Did we really achieve what we set out to achieve? Did we miss the mark? How can we do better the next time?

An example is the Greenstone Building in Yellowknife. The Greenstone Building was the first Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Gold building north of sixty. We had the opportunity to integrate a lot of firsts into it. It’s a building that performs extremely well. It’s basically net-zero for water, creating enough water for its needs from rainwater. It has a green roof and a high-performance building envelope. It’s also a delightful, comfortable environment for Government of Canada employees from thirteen different departments. At the grand opening, they invited a Haida drummer.

This is really unusual in a Dene community, but it spoke to the fact that Indigenous Peoples are connected across Canada and share values. This was a story the Government of Canada and the Indigenous people wanted to share.

So ultimately, what’s worth emphasizing in our shared work with Indigenous people is that it teaches us as architects about embodying the stories of our time, of our community, of the particular and of the general. The particular needs of the community are important, but so are the aspirations of the larger community. Our buildings stay around a long time, and it’s so important that the stories reflect and resonate for an equally long time.

This text is excerpted from Old Stories, New Ways: Conversations about an Architec-

ture Inspired by Indigenous Ways of Knowing (Brush Education and Red Crow College, 2020, edited by Frits Pannekoek).

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BOOKS

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Everything Needs to Change: Architecture and the Climate Emergency Edited by Sofie Pelsmakers and Nick Newman (RIBA Publishing, 2021) REVIEW Terri Peters

Over the last 18 months, we have all thought a lot about change: with Covid-19, wildfires and record-breaking extreme weather in many areas of the country, and global political and social upheavals. The idea of “building back better” is a positive message—and in any case, there is little chance of things going back to the status quo.

Such is the ethos of Everything Needs to Change: Architecture and the Climate Emergency, the first in the Design Studio book series from the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA). The well-illustrated book has an unmissable brightly coloured front cover, and is edited by Sofie Pelsmakers, professor and author of The Environmental Design Pocketbook, and Nick Newman, climate activist and director of Studio Bark.

The book features essays, interviews and case studies of new global approaches to sustainable buildings. For example, there is a profile of the UK office Mikhail Riches, an award-winning environmental architecture firm that focuses on designing projects that achieve zero-carbon targets while promoting zero-carbon lifestyles. Projects exploring ideas of resilience include the work of Indian office Samira Rathod Design Atelier, whose inspiring spaces beautifully combine passive strategies, simple forms, and local materials such as terracotta brick. Danish office Lendager Group explores building-scale reuse strategies, including in the innovative Resource Rows: a series of three-storey apartment blocks that use upcycled bricks from a nearby brewery as well as waste wood from the nearby metro construction.

The book’s overarching message is that the buildings of the future are being built right now. There is no point in architects waiting to get the perfect project, or holding out for some new technology, or for some ideal next project. We need to treat this as an emergency. We are seeing “future” climate scenarios happening all around us and need to design accordingly. In the introduction text, Pelsmakers and Newman state the obvious: we have likely about 10 years to transition into

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ABOVE Dorte Mandrup Arkitektur’s Ilulissat Icefjord Centre, in Greenland, is expected to be completed by the end of this year. Its steel and timber construction is based on local conditions, ensuring sustainable solutions suited to the context.

a climate-neutral society. So, yes, basically everything needs to change.

While the book focuses on professional practice, there is also the question of how well architectural education is preparing students in terms of climate change and sustainable buildings. This theme was also the focus of the recent ACSA Teachers Conference, entitled “Curriculum for Climate Agency: Design (in)Action.” The book discusses the volunteer-run network Architects Climate Action Network (ACAN), which calls for increased universal integration of environmental design, radical activism, and increased collaboration. It argues that schools must equip students with the tools to reduce carbon emissions linked with the built environment to zero by 2050. One article includes graphics of results from a number of studies: instructors scoring student understanding of sustainable design, analysis of modules offered in the current curriculum relevant to the climate emergency, and student scores of their own understanding of key terms.

The book raises some relevant questions for Canadian educators, some controversial. Should architecture students learn and be assessed on their ability to design carbon-neutral buildings? Or do educators have enough to do in just teaching the required topics to continue to meet accreditation requirements? The Architects Registration Board (ARB) in the UK recently announced that schools of architecture must start teaching sustainability and fire- and life-safety design from this fall onwards. While changing the conversation in schools and in practice is not this simple, this is a step in the right direction.

It’s a solid example of the change we need to see.

Terri Peters is an Assistant Professor at Ryerson University in Toronto. Her research project launching this fall includes collecting national data about how Canadian architecture students feel about the climate change and sustainability aspects of their design educations.

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Canadian Architecture: Evolving a Cultural Identity

GHETTO

By Leslie Jen (Figure 1 Press, 2021).

By Henriquez Partners Architects and Wei Li (Blue Imprint, 2021).

What is Canadian architecture? For author Leslie Jen, a former associate editor at Canadian Architect, there is no single satisfactory response—but exhibiting sensitivity to local contexts, creating socially minded places, responding to urban intensification, designing for health and aging, and meeting ecological challenges all play a role. This book profiles 68 recent projects that address these themes, testifying to the country’s thriving design culture.

The 33 architects represented here are a who’s who of contemporary Canadian architecture: from bigger players like KPMB Architects, Diamond Schmitt Architects, and Lemay to smaller firms such as Akb Architects, Ian MacDonald, and BattersbyHowat.

The range of projects is equally wide: spanning from national landmarks like Moriyama & Teshima’s Canadian War Museum in Ottawa (completed in joint venture with GRC Architects), to small but impactful works of placemaking, such as Brook McIlroy’s trio of Indigenous Cultural Markers at indoor and outdoor locations across Humber College’s two campuses.

Each firm and project is introduced with a cogent analytical text by Jen. The book also includes superb photographs by Doublespace, Ema Peter, James Brittain, Tom Arban and Adrian Williams, among others. Key drawings make this a useful reference for both designers and students.

Henriquez Partners Architects was one of several architects invited to exhibit their work in Time Space Existence, an offsite exhibition organized by the European Cultural Centre for the Venice Biennale. Instead of showing built work, they took the opportunity to propose a speculative project—a series of Habitat-like developments that would be positioned in various places in Venice, split between time-share vacation units and refugee housing.

This graphic novel presents the proposal in a compelling set of parallel narratives.

“For Sale” follows a vacationing family, at first skeptical and uncomfortable staying alongside refugees at GHETTO. Gradually, they connect to their new neighbours—and even become inspired by their experiences and courage. “Sanctuary” tells the story of a refugee family arriving to GHETTO for the first time, after a harrowing sea journey. The development’s social supports—and even the sometimes awkward presence of tourists—helps them to adapt to their new lives and contend with the trauma of their displacement.

A third section of the book uses the graphics of sales brochures to present the development, complete with floor plans and a financial pro forma, inviting readers to suspend their disbelief in the radical proposal. The authors take Alberto Pérez-Gómez’s challenge to heart, which they quote in the book: “To take a leading role in contemporary issues, the architect of the 21st century must

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be a social activist, a realist, a poet, a political technician, and a utopian.”

“In this theoretical development model for Venice, the city’s historical saturation of tourists is leveraged as an economic opportunity to house refugees in need,” writes principal Gregory Henriquez. “Our project’s intention is to encourage a meaningful dialogue about the relationship between citizens and cities in a global context. What does it mean to be a ‘citizen’? What is a city’s inherent accountability to an individual’s humanity? What is the role of the architect in building an inclusive city?”

A Natural Balance: The K.C. Irving Environmental Science Centre and Harriet Irving Botanical Gardens at Acadia University

By Alex Novell and John Leroux (Acadia University, 2021).

This handsome volume documents a wellloved part of Acadia University—the publicly accessible Irving Centre and Gardens, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary in 2022.

Architectural historian John Leroux’s essay on the building chronicles its design, led by American architect Robert Stern, who chose a classical style that wed the Centre to the earliest buildings on the nearly 200-year-old campus. Critic Vincent Scully deemed the resulting building to be “one of Stern’s most memorable interventions in a campus,” and Leroux believes that, following a lacklustre period for Atlantic campus architecture in the 1970s to 1990s, it was the first in a wave of excellent new institutional buildings in the Maritimes.

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BACKPAGE

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AURORA ARMOURY TEXT

Elsa Lam

GOW HASTINGS ARCHITECTS TRANSFORMS A CLOSED-DOORS MILITARY SHED INTO AN OPEN-ARMED VENUE FOR COMMUNITY, FOOD, AND CELEBRATION. “Every small town has a military shed,” says architect Jim Burkitt. He’s met me at the Aurora Armoury, just north of Toronto—a recent transformation of one of those sheds, led by Gow Hastings Architects, where Burkitt is Design Director.

The Town of Aurora’s armoury building dates back to 1874, when a wood structure was constructed to support the local military unit, the Queen’s York Rangers. Infantry used the building for meetings and drills; the adjacent Town Park doubled as their parade ground.

In the early 1900s, a thick concrete floor was added, allowing military equipment to be brought into the building for training cadets.

Now, the building has been converted from the country’s oldest active drill shed to the town’s newest community hub. To do this, the Town formed an unusual partnership with Niagara College’s Canadian Food and Wine Institute, which operates the building as a teaching space for aspiring chefs and community members, a catering service for park users, and a venue for weddings and other special events.

For the central event area—which hosts up to 200 guests—the architects exposed the

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building’s original post and beam structure.

This majestic space emerged part by design, part by luck: the architects didn’t know what they would find when they removed the drywall ceiling, which had hung under the beams. “We were hoping that the existing structure was glamorous,” recalls Burkitt.

When they discovered that the original wood structure was in good condition, they made the most of it. Subtle uplighting draws attention to the wood rafters, emphasizing the building’s barn-like volume. They refurbished the concrete floor, and adorned the walls with supergraphic images drawn from the Town archives, chosen to commemorate the building’s history.

Facing the park, three automatic bifold doors create a 14.6-metre-wide connection between the event area and an outdoor patio.

The doors fold up into an awning—a signal to park users that the Armoury is open for business. The building also received a highly insulated wall envelope, Accoya wood cladding with vertical battens, and a zinc roof.

An addition to the south side of the building, facing the park, houses the most technical part of the program: the event kitchen,

ABOVE A 147-year-old wooden ceiling crowns a new culinary-focused, park-adjacent community hub, created within Aurora’s former armoury building.

which Burkitt describes as “the high-powered engine inside the building.” The generously sized space can host workshops and chef ’s table events for anywhere from two to 24 people. (For teaching to larger groups, there’s a demonstration kitchen in the main event space; both areas have built-in equipment for simulcasting the chef ’s actions to overhead screens.) The architects purposefully decided to put the main kitchen on prominent display, facing the park and surrounded by glazed walls.

The most important part of the project is perhaps the symbolic transformation it enacted. In the First World War and Second World War, the Armoury was a muster point for troops—a place that mingled anticipation, bravery, and tragedy. For decades after, the Armoury’s doors seemed constantly closed. It was the building that everyone knew—yet nobody knew what it looked like inside. That fraught history remains part of the building, but now, the Armoury serves to nurture and connect residents. It’s a place for learning, for sharing food, and above all, for celebrating community.

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C R E ATO R

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