Sustainability in Practice  

This series covers wide-ranging strategies for a greener future, from circular and low-carbon materials and building adaptation to net zero energy and urban megadevelopments.

Waste brick developed for the Design Museum Gent by Carmody Groarke.

Odd Duck

The University of Oregon’s architecture program transforms a disused 1950s gym into its Portland home

By Randy Gragg

Photo © Lara Swimmer

Photo © Lara Swimmer

Glazed entrances, and windows inserted into the brick facade (above), flood the interior with daylight (top). 

WHEN the Eugene-based University of Oregon bought the defunct Concordia University to house its Portland campus in 2022, department directors had to puzzle their programs into a dozen mostly 1970s and ’80s-
era buildings. The College of Design’s Portland architecture school decided to take the building widely regarded as the runt of the litter: a 1950s gymnasium converted into a theater three decades ago. “Nobody really wanted it,” says Justin Fowler, director of UO Portland Arch­itecture, but he and his colleagues saw potential.

UO tapped Portland’s Lever Architecture to transform the building. Upon first sight, the old gym-turned-theater’s proscenium stage, green rooms, and overall darkness, “reminded me of my junior high school auditorium,” says Lever founding principal Thomas Robinson. But when the team punched through the dropped ceiling and scraped away a patch of the floor’s black paint, a “diamond in the rough” emerged in rustic timber bow trusses, long-covered clerestory windows, and maple floors. 

Now reclaimed and renewed, the program’s new home—called Highland Hall—is a study in reuse, restraint, and economy. 

With a deadline of one year for design and construction and a tight budget, “we couldn’t afford to design too much,” Robinson says, “but we could spend a lot of time thinking about the design we were doing.”

At ground level, the 8,640 square-foot building was an almost windowless brick box, but also one of the few campus structures directly facing an adjacent residential neighborhood in North­east Portland. With simple insertions of glass entries at each end, the unassuming midcentury structure now provides gracious front doors to the neighbors and the campus behind it while serving as a visual portal between them.

Lever replaced the boarded-over clerestories with a glazing system that bathes the space in sunlight. Eleven new ground-level windows provide additional light, anchor the interior experience to its surroundings, and, for the tiny faculty offices, offer a sense of greater space. Rever­sible fans and ceiling vents draw air in or expel it, to moderate temperatures.

Now exposed and steel-reinforced, the bowstring trusses shape a barrel-vaulted ceiling, 32 feet high at the peak. Seminar rooms, spaces for pinups, restrooms, and a kitchenette are neatly tucked into the perimeter. A gallery positioned just inside the front entrance buffers studios from faculty and provides a gathering spot for lectures and reviews. “We didn’t want to be hovering over the students,” Fowler says.

The most notable architectural insertion is a series of 7-inch-thick mass-plywood slabs that frame the vestibules around the front and rear entrances. They also serve as partial-height partitions to divide the four studios and enclose the seminar rooms. The slabs lived their first life as floor panels used for seismic testing by the TallWood Design Institute’s Emmerson Advanced Wood Products Laboratory at Oregon State University. Robinson discovered that an enterprising OSU student had catalogued the remnants. Testing stresses precluded any structural reuse, so he convinced the Institute to donate the materials and the cost of  CNC machining. “We reused something that would have just been thrown away,” he says. Click here to read more....

Test the Waters

A mixed-use development aims for environmental and social responsibility on a grand scale

By Matthew Allen

In its best new megaprojects, Toronto has developed a distinct approach to urbanism that aims for environmental and social sustainability, but the characteristic modesty of local architects sometimes makes their city-building style difficult to see. This conundrum is epitomized by The Well, a 3 million-square-foot mixed-use development just completed at the edge of downtown, which involved six architects from Toronto and beyond. One office tower, three residential towers, and three stepped residential volumes sit atop seven chunky masses, all calibrated to fit the site’s many different adjacencies.

The civic importance of the development required careful negotiation among the players involved and added further complexity. The eight-acre site along Front Street—up until the 1850s, a waterfront promenade—was vacated by the Globe and Mail newspaper in 2016 following acquisition of the property in 2012 by a partnership of the real-estate investment trusts RioCan and Allied and the developer DiamondCorp. It was a rare large plot next to the financial district and along a major thoroughfare. “Potentially a once-in-a-career opportunity,” says Andrew Duncan, chief investment officer of RioCan.

The vision for the site was settled in 2014 by a master-planning team of Hariri Pontarini—a Toronto-based architecture practice founded in 1994 by Siamak Hariri and David Pontarini—plus the Montreal-based landscape architect Claude Cormier and the Toronto planning firm Urban Strategies. Early renderings promised a combination of mid- and high-rise, old and new, commercial and residential to bridge the divide between downtown and the surrounding neighborhood. In the architects’ site model, slabs of walnut established a roughly five-story datum matching nearby mid-rise buildings, with paper and plexiglass extrusions meant to echo the skyline of the financial district to the east. A pedestrian zone cutting through the center of the site completed the parti. “Blocks in this area were zoned industrial and are some of the biggest in the city,” says Michael Conway, Hariri Pontarini associate partner. “We wanted to make it porous by connecting to the alleyways of the neighborhood, and create the potential for discovery—like finding a hidden nightclub.”

Since then, all eyes in the city have been on the intersection of Front and Spadina Avenue. The Well is the most prominent of Toronto’s many current mega-projects. Its location is only half the reason. Just down the street is Fort York, where Americans achieved a pyrrhic victory in 1813. The other way is Union Station, and across the below-grade rail yard alongside Front Street is the most conspicuous development of a previous boom, CityPlace. The other half of the reason for The Well’s notoriety—at least among urbanists—is this juxtaposition. Completed between 2003 and 2020, CityPlace’s expanse of 30 residential towers on 45 acres with only 200,000 square feet of retail is functionally homogenous, and it often feels bereft of life. In comparison, The Well’s 320,000 square feet of retail on a site less than a fifth the size practically guarantees an energetic bustle.

Photo © BDP / Nick Caville

A shopping street covered by a glazed canopy connects the towers at ground level. 

The Well could easily have become a shopping island. Peering east, a stadium, an arena, and a convention center are all within walking distance—but close is still too far away for retail. Is The Well sufficiently enticing to draw in the crowds ambling home after a Jays game? The project’s big move is to open cavernously at the corner. Escalators invite pedestrians both up and down to shops and eateries in a three-story midblock atrium capped by a glass-and-steel canopy. The whole thing is open-air—in a big way at the three endpoints of its overall T shape, and through alley-like passages along the way. It’s not a mall, typologically, and not a shopping street either, but a distinct urban retail type fitting Toronto’s climate and population. Though not conditioned, a pleasant breeze cuts through the canopied atrium in the summer. In the winter, “you can unzip your parka, but you don’t need to take it off,” remarks Adrian Price, a principal at BDP, the British firm that designed the canopy and the retail environment. BDP has experience with similar spaces—for instance at Westgate in Oxford, England—but such glass-covered atria are also a Toronto specialty: the largest downtown mall is covered with one, and so is a nearby galleria by Santiago Cala­trava. Click here to read more....

Down to Earth

Locally sourced timber and components, and the excavated site itself, form a building with super-green goals

By Andrew Ayers

Photo © Maris Mezulis

Hortus

 

In terms of construction culture, Switzerland can appear a paradoxical place. On the one hand, it has some of the strictest codes anywhere with respect to building performance and energy expenditure, while on the other, the tiny Alpine country consumes vast amounts of carbon-heavy concrete. Indeed, its annual per-capita production is twice that of neighboring France, according to figures released by the Federal Office of Topography in 2020. With this in mind, it seems quite the paradigm shift when a renowned Swiss firm such as Herzog & de Meuron (H&dM), whose back catalogue includes all-concrete projects such as the Blue House (1980), the House in Leymen (1997), or the Schaulager (2003), sets out to construct a 150,000-square-foot office building using almost no concrete at all. But this was precisely the challenge H&dM took up when developer Senn tasked it with designing the multi-occupant rental project Hortus, located in a life-sciences business park in the Basel suburb of Allschwil. In fact, as project lead Alexander Franz explains, Senn asked for nothing less than “the most sustainable office building in Switzerland.”

Photo © Maris Mezulis

The five-story timber building (top) hovers just above grade and features lush plantings (above and below).

 

 

Photo © Maris Mezulis

 

“Instead of a classic program, they gave us sustainability goals,” Franz continues, an approach that entirely upended H&dM’s usual design process. “Normally you look first at the urban scale, the massing, etc., and at the very end you start to consider building components. Here, we started off with the building components, which had to be renewable and recyclable.” Though the architects could not avoid concrete entirely, they used it with extreme parsimony for the foundations, which comprise 6.5-foot-deep footings beneath each column. Above that, timber takes over, with a sturdy frame in locally sourced, engineered beechwood that is cross-braced diagonally to satisfy seismic code. The facade structure, meanwhile, is in spruce, a faster-growing softwood that can be felled much younger than the 100-year-old trees required for the principal frame.

Filling its plot to the perimeter, Hortus wraps around a central courtyard planted by Piet Oudolf to create a cooling microclimate. To ensure plentiful indoor daylight, five airy stories rise in place of the six that code allowed. Since wood might rot in contact with the ground, the first floor hovers just above grade, avoiding the need for any masonry. By eschewing floor-to-ceiling windows—for which Swiss code stipulates triple glazing—Hortus saves 33 percent in glass; instead, openable double-glazed units take their place in elevations that are half solid half void. Initially, H&dM planned to abandon mechanical ventilation, but the developer later backtracked, so the building includes forced-air columns that automatically shut off when tenants open the windows. Since Senn’s ambitions included counterbalancing the energy used to construct the building within a generation, the outer facades and the roof sport locally sourced solar panels; the electricity they generate more than meets daily needs, and the surplus is channeled to neighboring buildings run by Senn. In this way, claims H&dM, Hortus will achieve operational and embodied carbon neutrality by 2056.

Given its longstanding interest in materials and techniques, the firm could only delight in a brief like this. In lieu of screws, nails, and metal brackets, H&dM’s timber frame uses gravity and old-fashioned joinery to hold together, which will make for simplified disassembly at the end of the building’s life. Likewise, the fire stairs, which cannot be in a flammable material, are made from beautifully milled and folded steel, which is left entirely untreated—no paint or flooring—to facilitate recycling. Click here to read more....