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Recreation Building – Designed by EllisDon, the Clayton Community Center in Surrey, B.C., achieves the ambitious Passive House standard for energy efficiency—becoming the largest public building in North America to do so.doublespace photography/Handout
East Clayton was built without a center. New townhouses and condos are cramming block after block in this Surrey, B.C., neighborhood; under their gabled roofs lives a dense and diverse population. It’s as crowded as most North American cities, but it lacks a main street.
Recreation Building
Last year it acquired another kind of public space: the Clayton Community Centre. The 7,060-square-foot building combines a library, recreation center, art center and childcare in an energy-efficient black box dotted with playful triangular windows.
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Its design, led by Darryl Condon and Melissa Higgs of architecture firm HCMA, asks some big questions: Can a building create community? And what specific tools can make that happen?
Mr. Condon argues that the need for a public gathering place was clear. “There are a million kids in the area and there was nowhere for them to go,” he said as we pulled into the center’s parking lot with project architect Aiden Callison. “People’s homes are not big here and there are few alternative places. Where do you relax? Where do you do your homework?”
Passing through the building’s revolving doors, we found the answer in a spacious, two-story high room. A spiral staircase whirled upwards before us; light poured down from wood-framed skylights. An accessible, gender-neutral restroom occupied a visible corner of the lobby. And all around were people: a group of preschoolers marching behind their teacher, high school students sitting at desks with their laptops. What was this place? Something like a hotel lobby, but open to everyone. It was a place to just be.
Which was exactly the idea. The center offers many organized programs, but it also deliberately brings together the people who use them in more informal ways. Wide corridors provide places to linger. Windows and balconies let people see their neighbors.
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HCMA has been pursuing such sociable architecture for years. “We ask, what are the physical things we do that promote better social outcomes?” said mr. Condon. “We really focus on what we call the spaces. That’s where the community is built.”
Mrs. Higgs mentions some of the key ingredients. The scale of the spaces should be large, “but not too far beyond the scale of the human body,” she said. Intuitive wayfinding is essential. And so is furniture. “You have to imagine how your body feels in the room.”
In this, HCMA draws on Jan Gehl’s urban design theory. In 1971, the Danish architect published Life Between Buildings, in which he argued that good streets and squares encourage people to enjoy each other’s company. “We understand all that now,” said Mr. Condon, “but that thinking always stops at the edge of a building. So how can we design inside the building to enhance social activity?”
The architects found fertile ground for this thinking in fast-growing Surrey. “In the city, we’re talking about how we could work together and how our service areas overlap,” said Kelsey Swanson, a director of community and recreation services who was closely involved in planning Clayton. “We realized that when we’re all in the same building, people see us as a unit. We wanted to make these places feel unified, the way people experience them.” What if people could bring an iPad to the gym? Or bring a newspaper to do their cardio?”
North Delta Recreation Centre
Led by Scott Groves, the former head of civic facilities, the staff on the project was inspired by American sociologist Eric Klinenberg’s call to create “palaces for the people” – versatile and sociable public places.
The team faced challenges. North American design stubbornly favors fragmentation and separation: a mall over here, home over there. A library in one building; a rec center in another. Whether it is urban planning, architecture or facility planning, such conceptual walls are difficult to break down. Professionals know these divisions are counterproductive, but hierarchies and budgets say otherwise.
Even in Surrey. “City staff each came to the table and asked for their own set of seats,” Ms. Higgs recalled. “People originally wanted three separate receptions. It took a while to get all that on the table.”
In the end, the building has one reception – placed carefully at the far end of the lobby, so that visitors can enter without the hint of surveillance. The leisure center and the library share meeting rooms. The cultural center’s art workshops are adjacent to the lobby with large doors that can be opened for workshops or receptions.
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A few wrinkles still exist. The leisure center and the library have different opening hours, which required adaptations of staff and building operations. And the library is completely on the second floor, which creates challenges for accessibility. However, the public elevator is large and it is located right next to the public stairs, so visitors using both routes have a similar experience of the space. Once inside the library, visitors can enjoy a series of enclosed, semi-enclosed and open spaces, arranged in a long bar. A canopy of mature trees peeks through the irregularly shaped windows, which diffuse triangles and parallelograms of light.
The architectural touch shows the gentle hand of the architects. They’ve mostly tried to make the building’s interior simple and stark, ready for art and posters and stuff to fill it up. “We’re aiming for minimal but not cold,” says Ms. Higgs.
The building’s greatest design feature is its deliberately simple form: a rectangular box. Constructed by EllisDon, it achieves the ambitious Passive House standard for energy efficiency – becoming the largest public building in North America to do so. According to the architects, it uses 78 percent less energy than a typical B.C. building of this type, and 98 percent less carbon than an international benchmark for such buildings.
The community center’s design was led by Darryl Condon and Melissa Higgs of the architecture firm HCMA.doublespace photography/Handout
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Clayton achieves this through extremely high levels of insulation and airtightness. Light and heat from the sun are used strategically; and the various functions of the building are arranged according to how much heat they need and how much they create. Gyms put it out; the libraries embrace it.
That in itself is a feat of engineering and architecture that should be repeated. But if the passive house standard provides a measurement tool for a building’s energy performance, how is its social performance assessed?
For that there is no metric. Architects have to puzzle it out using anecdotes and precedents from other buildings. The profession is strangely lacking in such practical science.
But HCMA is trying to puzzle it out, and with the Clayton building, it looks like they’ve succeeded. Staff who have worked in it report high user satisfaction and staff collaboration. There used to be two separate baby story hours at the library and the center. Now there is one.
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This is not about flashy architecture; it’s about services that people like and spaces that are comfortable. Big, but not too big; daylight, but not too bright. And flexible. During my construction tour, we ended up in a spacious teaching kitchen located next to the main entrance. The kitchen has its own terrace, which is shaded by an overhang. The room was empty, its huge counters bare of food, and yet I wanted to stay there, with the doors open, watching people pass by.
Some recreational staff used the kitchen for a meeting recently, and at other times, Ms. Swanson, “you see people just hanging around. It’s the kind of place that makes people want to stay.”
We have a weekly Western Canada newsletter written by our B.C. and Alberta bureau chiefs, providing a comprehensive package of the news you need to know about the region and its place in the issues facing Canada. Register today. Nature Fresh Farms Recreation Center is a multi-use facility that provides and surrounding community a variety of recreational opportunities under one roof. The center is a place for people of all ages to gather for sports, fitness, meetings and community events.
Originally known as the Frank T. Sherk Aquatic and Fitness Centre, ‘The Sherk’ opened in 1985 and the twin pad Highbury Canco and Unico Arenas were joined in 2000 to form The Kinsmen Recreation Complex. A world-class facility of 179,000 square meters.
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In May 2020, a new collaboration was formed with the Municipality. New sponsorships and naming rights were approved for the complex to be named the Nature Fresh Farms Recreation Centre, which in turn helps support all the programs and activities offered in this amazing building.
Customers wishing to use photographic/video recorders in any registered or monitored program must obtain permission from the municipality. The use of any cell phone or other device designed to take pictures is prohibited in all locker rooms, restrooms, weight room areas in all municipal facilities.
By participating in public events
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