One of the first projects of its kind developed by the City of Calgary, the Varsity Multi Service Redevelopment (VMSR) is an integrated facility adjacent to the University of Calgary, the University Research Park, and the Varsity neighbourhood in Northwest Calgary. The project’s primary programmatic components include the a station for Calgary Fire Department, affordable housing units administered by Calgary Housing, City of Calgary corporate accommodation spaces, a commercial retail unit, and a household hazardous waste drop-off.
The co-location of such a diverse range of programmatic elements in a challenging context requires a careful balance between meeting the needs of the individual project components and finding synergies between them.
From a site planning perspective, the design creates a formal, public front that is characterized by the absence of parking, the presence of formal and informal soft and hardscapes, and honorific urban and architectural elements that signal the presence of the project’s various programmatic elements.
As an urban form, the building mass is a manifestation of the three adjacent contexts and their primary typologies. Specifically, the form of the building echoes the ‘objects in a landscape’ typical of the University Research Park and the University of Calgary, but also emulates the front yard condition characteristic of the residential fabric of Varsity. The design pushes the major mass to the ‘back’ of the site, away from the small-scale residences to the west, and uses the public podium and related landscape development as a scalar threshold and ‘front porch’ area, providing a gradation of public to private appropriate to the context as well as the building’s uses.
The programmatic synergies necessary for the success of this integrated facility are most directly manifest in the two-storey podium, a brick-clad form that transforms to create site and program-specific spaces and places while maintaining an overall legibility. Use-specific formal transformations within the brick podium include the heroic cantilever of the fire station, the extension of the podium wall into a habitable landscape wall incorporating the building name and address and emblematic flag poles, the canted brick retaining wall which houses the bike parking, the outdoor play areas for the childcare spaces, and entry deformations that protect against inclement weather. The primary materials employed in the podium (brick and curtainwall cladding) are robust and of institutional quality, appropriate for high-use public areas.
Above the podium is the affordable housing block, a simple volume clad in a durable and high quality glassfibre reinforced concrete panels. This overall volume is punctuated by balconies, expressed as both subtractions from and additions to the block. These balconies, composed in an asymmetrical manner on the facade, are an expression of the individuals and individual families living within the facility and are clad in terracotta tile, a material that is natural, robust, and honorific of the importance of the lives the facility supports.
One of the first projects of its kind developed by the City of Calgary, the Varsity Multi Service Redevelopment (VMSR) is an integrated facility adjacent to the University of Calgary, the University Research Park, and the Varsity neighbourhood in Northwest Calgary. The project’s primary programmatic components include the a station for Calgary Fire Department, affordable housing units administered by Calgary Housing, City of Calgary corporate accommodation spaces, a commercial retail unit, and a household hazardous waste drop-off.
The co-location of such a diverse range of programmatic elements in a challenging context requires a careful balance between meeting the needs of the individual project components and finding synergies between them.
From a site planning perspective, the design creates a formal, public front that is characterized by the absence of parking, the presence of formal and informal soft and hardscapes, and honorific urban and architectural elements that signal the presence of the project’s various programmatic elements.
As an urban form, the building mass is a manifestation of the three adjacent contexts and their primary typologies. Specifically, the form of the building echoes the ‘objects in a landscape’ typical of the University Research Park and the University of Calgary, but also emulates the front yard condition characteristic of the residential fabric of Varsity. The design pushes the major mass to the ‘back’ of the site, away from the small-scale residences to the west, and uses the public podium and related landscape development as a scalar threshold and ‘front porch’ area, providing a gradation of public to private appropriate to the context as well as the building’s uses.
The programmatic synergies necessary for the success of this integrated facility are most directly manifest in the two-storey podium, a brick-clad form that transforms to create site and program-specific spaces and places while maintaining an overall legibility. Use-specific formal transformations within the brick podium include the heroic cantilever of the fire station, the extension of the podium wall into a habitable landscape wall incorporating the building name and address and emblematic flag poles, the canted brick retaining wall which houses the bike parking, the outdoor play areas for the childcare spaces, and entry deformations that protect against inclement weather. The primary materials employed in the podium (brick and curtainwall cladding) are robust and of institutional quality, appropriate for high-use public areas.
Above the podium is the affordable housing block, a simple volume clad in a durable and high quality glassfibre reinforced concrete panels. This overall volume is punctuated by balconies, expressed as both subtractions from and additions to the block. These balconies, composed in an asymmetrical manner on the facade, are an expression of the individuals and individual families living within the facility and are clad in terracotta tile, a material that is natural, robust, and honorific of the importance of the lives the facility supports.