The new Aurora Emergency & Transitional Housing is a 5-storey + basement, 40,000 sq. ft building nestled in a forest in Aurora, Ontario.
The vision of the building seeks to synergize the forest of the site as an extension of the visual and the physical amenities for the building occupants. The ground floor and the second floor comprise a series of formal and informal spaces and provide a flexible programmability for the occupants that reside in the building as well as for the daytime and drop-in users.
The upper floors have 65-units of studio, one-bedroom, and three-bedroom suites using a modular planning strategy to stack all the load-bearing walls effectively and efficiently. This strategy allows the owner with an option to pursue a traditional “stick-build” or prefabricated systems such as CLT or panelized walls with minimum changes to the building design and infrastructure.
The exterior of the building proposes +/-40% window-wall-ratio, using ultra high-performance triple pane windows. The walls and the roof are designed to achieve R35+ and R50+ thermal value. The project design is seeking to achieve Passive House Certification, LEED Gold, and Net-Zero Carbon.
The new building is a much-needed emergency and transitional housing and offers programs for supportive counselling, life-skills training and wellness resources via visiting healthcare and wellness professionals and in-house staff.
Team:
Architect: Kearns Mancini
Mechanical and Electrical: Quasar Consulting Group
Structural: RJC Engineers
Landscape: Fleisher Ridout Partnership Inc.
Traffic: McIntosh Perry
Civil: MGM Consulting
Acoustics/Vibration: Thorton Thomasetti
Project Team: Frank Park, Natalie Krakovsky, Irene Rivera, Esther van Eeden and Claire Tam
