The Vancouver suburb of Surrey, British Columbia, is a city in high-minded transition. Newly aware of the financial, logistical, and environmental costs of its low-density, car-oriented sprawl, its municipal leaders have recently taken steps to transform the bedroom community into a better-defined and more fully equipped modern city. The harbinger was the construction of Surrey Central City: a shopping, office, and educational complex, designed by Bing Thom Architects (BTA), that created a sense of a downtown within Surrey. Now the city has two new public aquatic centers, each with a program that is the very epitome of urban vitality. Like the public library, the community swimming pool serves as a modern-day church of sorts, a gathering place empowered by North America’s dual obsessions with fitness and fun. 

Community indoor swimming pools—natatoria, in the lingo—pre­sent logistical and technical challenges that require architectural ingenuity. First and foremost is height, in order to accommodate the high-divers and water-sliders, as well as to disperse the chlorine-­saturated air. And for obvious reasons, the large interior space must have a long, clear span.

Near the city’s southern border, HCMA Architecture + Design has designed an aquatic center with an Olympic-size competition pool, diving platforms, a family-oriented leisure pool with water slide, hot tubs, a sauna, a steam room, and a weight room—all that in an area that until very recently has been sparsely populated agricultural land, but is slated to be developed into a vast residential neighborhood. HCMA has designed seven other aquatic centers in the Vancouver region. But the Grandview Heights commission posed a new kind of challenge. “We had a completely blank slate,” says Darryl Condon, HCMA principal. “We were asked to build the centerpiece of a community that doesn’t exist yet.”

HCMA’s answer to this problem was a roof that reads like a series of giant cresting waves from the outside and a billowing sheet of fabric from the inside. The undulating form, so dramatically evocative, was functionally driven. Devised with the help of structural engineers and timber specialists Fast + Epp, the roof is made of improbably long and thin ribbons of glue laminated wood. These slender elements (comprised of pairs of 4-inch-wide by 10-inch-deep beams tied together) are anchored at either end by post-tensioned concrete buttresses and a row of enormous canted V-shaped concrete columns at midspan. They perform in tension, much like the cables of a suspension bridge, notes Condon, allowing an area free of vertical supports for the 50-meter-long, 10-lane-­wide pool. They also create catenary curves that reach a maximum height of 49 feet to clear the diving platforms, falling to 29 feet at the roof’s lowest points.

At the other end of Surrey, its northeastern corner, the Guildford Aquatic Centre bookends the evolving city. Designed by BTA in partnership with Shape Architecture, the Guildford pool expands an existing recreation center on the site. Like Grandview Heights, the Guildford natatorium contains a lap pool suitable for competition, plus a leisure pool, a water slide, and a “lazy river.” It too is visually defined by a roof with an innovative wood structure engineered by Fast + Epp and in keeping with British Columbia’s “wood first” policy, which promotes (though does not require) the use of engineered timber in new buildings; the material is also better suited than steel to the potentially corrosive pool environment.

But despite the two facilities’ similarities—both serve as community magnets and have innovative wood structures—there are striking differences. The Guildford facility’s architectural introversion, with its rectilinear, mostly opaque exterior of precast concrete panels, contrasts starkly with the exuberant volumes of its counterpart at Grandview Heights, enclosed in a curtain wall of glass and translucent polycarbonate.

Where Grandview’s ceiling ribs wow the visitor with their long and slender proportions, Guildford’s roof system impresses for different reasons. BTA’s 95-foot-long ceiling trusses—22 in all—evoke the underside of a train trestle, painted white but with the barely visible grain of the laminated strand timber showing through. The structure animates what would otherwise be a straightforward, shoebox-like volume.

Ingeniously, the trusses conceal infrastructure such as mechanical equipment and sprinklers—and, at 10 feet high and 8 feet wide, they are large enough for maintenance staff to walk inside to service these systems.

Linear fluorescent lighting is also hidden within the trusses. Along with subdued daylight that seeps in through small skylights at the roof’s perimeter, the indirect electric illumination helps create an almost meditative atmosphere.

This contemplative environment is reinforced by the site strategy. To mute the cacophony from an adjacent traffic-filled artery, the design team created a large berm that serves as an aural and visual barrier, giving the illusion that the addition is partly submerged in the ground.

Leading from the main entrance, the architects devised an interior catwalk-like bridge that runs through the building, over the pool—for modern flaneurs, gazing at the swimmers—and out the building’s other side into the parking lot. The bridge-walkers don’t have to pay admission: they can be commuters taking a shortcut to a nearby bus stop. The idea, says BTA principal Venelin Kokalov, the lead designer on Guildford, is to “project the future” by making pedestrians feel as welcome as possible.

What form that future development takes will be key to the full success of both projects. Like much of Surrey, the Guildford and Grandview Heights neighborhoods still require much more density and astute urban planning to be considered truly pedestrian-oriented. Fortunately, the city now has two more important anchor buildings that can help foster a lively, more walkable community—someday.


Grandview Heights Aquatic Centre

People

Architect:

HCMA Architecture + Design
400 - 675 West Hastings Street
Vancouver BC   V6B 1N2
604 732 6620

Personnel in architect's firm who should receive special credit:

Principals Darryl Condon, Stuart Rothnie - Registered Architects
Project Architect Melissa Higgs - Registered Architect
Design team (in alphabetical order)
Aiden Callison (Registered Architect), Alexandra Kenyon, Steve DiPasquale, Craig Lane (registered architect), Craig Simms (registered architect), Nicolas Worth

Engineers:

Structural Fast + Epp
Mechanical AME Consulting Group
Electrical AES Engineering Ltd.
Civil RF Binnie

Consultants

Landscape PFS Studio
Acoustical Daniel Lyzun & Associates

General contractor:

EllisDon

Photographer:

Ema Peter 604-789-6339

Client:

City of Surrey

Gross square footage:

95,000 sq ft

Total project cost:

$55 million

 

Products

Structural System

Concrete and glulams (roof)
Steel (curtain wall)

Manufacturer of any structural components unique to this project: Best Choice Construction (RB) Ltd. - concrete and formwork
Western Archrib - glulam supply
Seagate Consulting Ltd. - steel connections for glulams (supply), and install of glulams
Solid Rock Steel - steel structure

Exterior Cladding

Metal panels: Alucobond
Alpolic (yellow at the entry canopy only)
Kingspan (on the east elevation only)

Translucent Glazing: CPI Daylighting

Curtain wall: Columbia Glazing Systems Inc.

Roofing

Elastomeric: TPO Roofing by Firestone

Interior Finishes

Acoustical ceilings: Tectum - between the glulams in the natatorium and the Fitness Centre

Cabinetwork and custom woodwork: Morinwood Mfg. Inc.

Plastic laminate: Formica

Floor and wall tile: Daltile (public area floors, pool tanks, change rooms)
Buchtal (specialty pool tiles)

Raised flooring: IXL Glazed block (interior of natatorium)

Special interior finishes unique to this project: IXL Glazed block (interior of natatorium)

Lighting

Downlights: GE Powerspot - Lights on the glulam ceiling in the natatorium

Conveyance

Elevators/escalators: Schindler

Energy

Add any additional building components or special equipment that made a significantcontribution to this project: Pool bulkheads - Natare
Moveable pool floor - KBE
Leisure features - Vortex, Raindrop (tot slide), Whitewater (main slide)

 

Guildford Aquatic Centre

People

Architect:

BINGTHOM | ARCHITECTS
1430 Burrard Street
Vancouver BC
Canada V6Z 2A3
T 604 682 1881
F 604 688 1343

Personnel in architect's firm who should receive special credit:

Bing Thom, Michael Heeney, Venelin Kokalov, James
Brown, Shinobu Homma, Ling Meng, Francis Yan with
Lisa Potopsingh, and Apollinaire Au, Alexander Buss,
Nicole Hu, Marcos Hui, Amirali Javidan, Johnnie Juo,
Eileen Keenan, Arthur Tseng, Andy Yan.

Architect of record:

Bing Thom Architects Inc

Associate architect(s):

Shape Architecture

Engineers:

Structural Fast + Epp
Landscape PWL Partnership
Mechanical Consultant AME Consulting Group
Electrical Consultant Applied Engineering Solutions

Consultants

Structural Fast + Epp
Landscape PWL Partnership
Mechanical Consultant AME Consulting Group
Electrical Consultant Applied Engineering Solutions

Photographer:

Building Photography Ema Peter Construction Photography Isaac Epp, of StructureCraft Builders Inc. Drawing and Diagrams Bing Thom Architects Inc

Client:

City of Surrey

Gross square footage:

112,000 sq ft

Total project cost:

$38.6 million

 

Products

Structural System

Manufacturer of any structural components unique to this project:

WOOD TRUSS SYSTEM

The main feature of the natatorium is the prefabricated
wood truss system, generated from the City’s ‘Wood
First Policy’ initiative. We worked closely with the designbuilder
to create a pre-assembled truss fully integrated
with lighting, mechanical services and acoustic absorption.
The prefabrication process also greatly reduced the
construction time. As the prime architectural feature in
the natatorium, the wood truss provides both economical
and unique solutions to the structural and operational
requirements of the facility.
The 22 wood V-shaped trusses were prefabricated and
installed with the services in place. This allowed for rapid
on-site assembly with no scaffolding. The design approach
taken by the team to use wood trusses has many benefits,
among them corrosion resistance, ease of maintenance, as
well as being a material that is renewable and sequesters
carbon.

 

Trusses

StructureCraft (Glulam top and bottom chords, Laminated Strand Lumber (LSL) panels, pressure treated plywood decking)

Exterior Cladding

Precast concrete: Centura Building Systems Ltd.

Glazing

Glass: Glatech Glazing Contractors Ltd (Kawneer 1600 Classic series)

Skylights: Glatech Glazing Contractors Ltd (Kawneer 2000 series)

Interior Finishes

Acoustical ceilings: ROCKFON Sonar acoustic panels

Lighting

Interior ambient lighting:

LIGHT

Early in the design process, it was determined that
lighting would be used as one of the principle elements
of the natatorium. The desire was to maximize the
impact of sunlight while acknowledging the heavy energy
consumption notorious with this building type, notably the
challenge of managing heat gain and loss from expansive
glazing. To address this, the design team chose to limit the
amount of glazing and to be very deliberate in its placement
in order to maximize daylight impact and minimize glare at
the water level.
Windows are located at pool deck level allowing selectively
framed views to the surrounding gardens. As the natatorium
is entirely lit by indirect lighting from the truss, the interior
wall finish was carefully selected with specific tint and
gloss levels, in order to achieve the desired reflectivity. The
continuous ribbon of skylights allows beams of sunlight
streaking across the walls and moving with the time of day,
enhancing the animation of the natatorium.

 

Guildford Aquatic Centre Truss Fabrication and Installation

Video courtesy StructureCraft