Students’ wishes came to fruition in a five-storey, metal-clad building so porous that students feel interconnected no matter how they use it
When it comes to postsecondary student union buildings, they’re usually crummy, ill-fitting hand-me-downs: “Hey, SU, it’s the Faculty of X here, we just built ourselves a sexy new building, so you can have the one we deemed unfit for human habitation, okay?”
The five-storey, metal-clad building is anything but a cabin-in-the-woods: An almost fully glazed two-storey atrium filled with food services, a pub and other hang-out areas tucks into a small, grassy knoll while, above, three more storeys containing club meeting spaces, quiet rooms, a massive fitness facility with an indoor running track, and a large, tech-filled space suitable for lectures, seems to float effortlessly above.
That, however, influenced the design of the building, says Mr. Ling: “This is a suburban context; there’s Cineplex across the way, Square One over there, all kinds of retail, we’ve got condos – so a lot of visual noise. When we looked at this building … we thought that it needed some quiet restraint, kind of an understated look; from the outside, you get glimpses of the programming inside, but not everything is visible, so to draw you in.
Why? Because the entire building was paid for by students – final construction cost was a very reasonable $31-million – through fees paid to the incorporated student union organization . And while silly things such as slides didn’t make the cut, the students held strong on certain premium items, such as the wood strip ceilings when it was suggested that aluminum would save them considerable money.
It’s difficult to take a building as large and multipurpose as this and find ways to make it warm and homey; it’s also no mean feat to create isolation spaces that don’t feel like prison cells, or big communal areas that don’t feel like a cacophonous shopping mall.
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