DANIELS BUILDING AND YORK REGION ANNEX: Resilience Through Design

THE DANIELS FACULTY OF ARCHITECTURE, LANDSCAPE AND DESIGN. PHOTO BY RITA WONG.

INTRODUCTION Climate change is introducing today’s buildings to ever more strenuous natural hazards, as well as creating uncertainty in the design process over how best to approach these changing demands. Designing buildings that are sustainable, in that they better protect their interiors from the elements, have a lower reliance on energy and external resources in general, and re-use and re-adapt existing materials, in turn allows these buildings to foster more resilient operations that are less susceptible to the effects of climate change. The following case studies are just two examples of projects in the Greater Toronto Area where structural and building envelope considerations in collaboration with a like-minded team contributed to a sustainable and innovative building.

DANIELS FACULTY OF ARCHITECTURE Located at the historic One Spadina Crescent, the new Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design (DFALD), designed by NADAAA with Adamson and Associates serving as Executive Architect and E.R.A. Architects as Heritage Architect, presented a unique sustainability challenge both from a building envelope and a structural perspective. Phase One of the project was the rehabilitation and retrofit of the existing historic building, formerly Knox College, which ties into the adjacent Phase Two new construction. The first challenge was the adaptive re-use of existing materials to suit the new structural and building envelope demands placed on the building. Structurally, historic mass timber trusses throughout the existing building were assessed for their capacity and generally reinforced for new loads and new spans.

By Matthew Smith

SPRING 2018

Toronto FOCUS 23