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Lighting the community: this luminous centre carefully responds to the topography, climate and the needs of the community

Architectural Review, The, Oct, 2004 by Brian Carter

The new Community Centre at Gleneagles, a suburb of West Vancouver, combines a familiar mix of social and recreational activities on a site that was created as a result of the realignment of a main road. On a long strip of land that was formerly the old road, the building faces the new road and an existing electrical substation to the east and backs onto the local golf course to the west. The response of the architects was to plan a linear barn-like shed under a sweeping timber roof, and to use the 1.5m slope on the site to create two ground levels and a three-storey building that accommodated both the large volumes and smaller spaces required. A new courtyard and the main entrance, which front the road, bring visitors into the middle level of the building. In addition to the entrance hall and reception area, a community living room includes a cafe, meeting room and lounge together with administrative offices and a childcare centre. The cafe and lounge overlook the largest space in the building, a gymnasium used for both sporting and social events, which opens to a paved terrace on the west side. While such large multi-purpose areas are often anonymous internalized rooms, this main hall is an elegant and lofty space, clearly visible at the heart of the building and with views out to the lower terrace which has been cut into a landscaped bank at the lower edge of the site. High up under the sloping roof, exercise rooms are located in a glass enclosed attic that overlooks the main hall.

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A stair slices through the building to give the childcare centre a discrete space, and to separate the gymnasium from a second community room at the lower level that is used for a variety of activities--receptions, children's programmes and adult education classes. The slope of the site makes it possible to tuck lockers and service spaces into the dark areas of the lower level plan alongside the gymnasium, and this subterranean world also extends beyond the building to the north to form a series of studio workshops that open onto an outdoor work court.

The form of the building is a simple extrusion constructed with a series of parallel reinforced concrete walls under an oversailing heavy timber roof. The architects speak of how the design of this centre, with its large volumes and modest budget, led them to look to the construction industry for inspiration. By using tilt-up concrete panels for the tall spine walls, they were able to capitalize on a familiar and inexpensive construction system that is widely used and consequently thoroughly tested in North America. However, at the same time, they chose to investigate the potential of the thermal mass that concrete offers to condition the environment. Working closely with the engineers and subcontractors they were able to design structural panels that, in addition to creating the building envelope, also provide radiant heating and cooling. Each 12in (30mm) thick sandwich consists of an inner layer of concrete with water pipes embedded in the panel, insulation and an outer layer of concrete that provides the external finish. The thermal energy required to charge this system is supplied by water-to-water heat pumps via a ground source heat exchanger, which maintains the concrete walls at a constant 70 degrees Fahrenheit (21 degrees Celsius)--moves that create a high performance building envelope. The system utilizes geothermal energy via a network of coils buried five feet below the surface of the new car park that serves the building.

The curving metal clad roof has a simple but elegant structure of deep curving laminated timber beams, which are braced and supported on either side of the gymnasium by tubular steel V-shaped columns. Pallet-like prefabricated trays of rough-sawn heavy timber span between the main beams to form the roof deck. All of this structure has been carefully designed and is exposed internally--a move that creates an overriding sense of order and legibility that offsets the building's programmatic complexity. It also introduces an emphatic rationalism that recalls some of the vernacular buildings--barns and large sheds--that were traditionally built within this region and contrasts with the more fragmented and episodic structures in some of the Patkaus' earlier work.

Externally, the sweeping roof extends beyond the face of the building to create overhangs that help to prevent glare and shelter the external wall from both sun and rain. Without gutters, these overhangs are also designed to discharge rainwater into rock piles that have been created as an integral part of the new landscape on the site and into a linear pool in the entrance courtyard. This stepped pool of flowing water and the extended roof also help to mask both the noise and the view of passing traffic and the transformers in the electrical substation opposite.