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J UNE 2019 | 59 Mayfair Shopping Centre Mayfair Shopping Centre by ROBIN BRUNET I nevitably all shopping malls must be upgraded, but the modernization of the 56-year-old enclosed Mayfair Shopping Centre in Victoria, B.C. came about primarily because additional space was required for new retailers and existing tenants – and because a refresh was in order. Mayfair is one of Vancouver Island's largest regional shopping centres with a gross leasable area of 454,000 square feet – a figure that would increase by 100,000 square feet with the expan- sion. "There were challenges and advantages to the project,"says Graeme Silvera, VP development, retail for own- ers Ivanhoe Cambridge. "An example of the latter was the fact that the exist- ing facility already had terrific amounts of natural light thanks to skylights and windows. As for challenges, the main one was knitting together the existing mall with the new additions." Abbarch Architecture Inc. was retained to design the $72-million upgrade, and early on it was decided that Mayfair's most noticeable exterior change would take the form of a three- storey extension along Douglas Street as well as a 200-foot frontage along Finlayson Street. Abbarch came up with a deceptively simple solution of matching the mall additions to the existing structure by creating new flooring throughout the entire complex, and Silvera explains the reasoning behind this decision: "Shoppers in malls tend to look down constantly or at least ahead, simply because this facilitates navigating among so many other people. So the flooring became our major solution, and it enabled us to avoid the time and expense of designing a fancy new ceil- ing – which would have been wasteful." Bonifacio Enriquez, project manager for PCL Constructors Westcoast Inc., notes that the project broke ground on December 2016 with sequential closure of three main entrances and temporary new entrances built to maintain access and exiting to the shopping centre, while 172 cast-in-place concrete caissons were installed at and below grade. This was followed by a multitude of reinforced pile caps and grade beams in prepara- tion for the concrete precast structure. Douglas Bain, project engineer for RJC Engineers, says, "The existing mall had undergone several major expan- sions and modifications, and it required further changes to facilitate the new layout. This included the relocation and upgrading of three existing shear walls, removal and reconstruction of three stairwells, and the tying of a 1989 expansion to a portion of the new addi- tion to meet the current seismic code." Another major component of the expansion was parking: to provide more parking spaces, precast beams had to be cantilevered by PCL over the existing building on the Douglas Street side and an additional level added to the south east corner of the existing mall. "As the external wall profile of the existing mall stepped in and out, it led to some interesting geometry, particularly in maintaining seismic isolation while providing continuity of new vehicle ramps from the existing rooftop parking," says Bain. PCL adhered to stringent proj- ect specifications, while allowing the mall to stay operational during the entire duration of construction, and some construction activities were re- sequenced to accommodate the busy holiday shopping season. The new facade on Douglas Street was made of PHOTOGRAPHY COURTESY IVANHOE CAMBRIDGE 2:06 PM

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