Building Publics: Where Design, Community and Climate Collide
For more information, please contact:
Andrea Chin, Communications Director
Email: [email protected]
Caroline Inglis, Architect
Email: [email protected]
Marpole Community Centre is featured in “Building Publics: Where Design, Community and Climate Collide,” an interview with Caroline Inglis for Passive House Canada. The feature highlights how the project balances rigorous sustainability and accessibility standards while responding to the needs of the community.
“When we are presented with these buildings and we see them in magazines, you see the beautiful pictures and all of these incredible things that they’ve achieved, but when you’re actually in the design process, you have to make difficult decisions, and you have to negotiate with clients and consultants and trades, and that’s not as easy as it looks.”
The project combines Passive House certification, LEED Gold targets, a 40% embodied carbon reduction goal, and Rick Hansen Foundation Accessibility Certification. Landing these impressive targets while keeping the community at the heart of the project has come with trade-offs, but also amazing learning opportunities, says Caroline.
Careful coordination between architects, envelope consultants, mechanical engineers, and the community led to a design that could help reach these goals, while ensuring that the experience remains human-centered. Design solutions include simplifying the building’s massing, optimizing large indoor–outdoor openings, relocating the parking garage elevator outside the insulated envelope, adding canopies and covered walkways, and reducing underground parking to lower concrete use.
One of the main reduction strategies involved the use of mass timber for the building’s structure, with recent bylaw changes allowing more of the timber to remain exposed.
“We worked diligently to expose all of the timber in the Main Hall which is the primary circulation spine that connects all of the program spaces in the community center so that you could really appreciate the beauty of the material and see all of the joinery,” said Inglis. “So with the new codes, we were able to remove a lot of that gypsum so that you can start to appreciate more of it.”
Read the full article in Passive House Canada.
Caroline will be sharing more about this project at the upcoming Passive House Conference in May. Learn more and register here.