With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.
Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/1514012
17 BC BU S I N E S S .C A F E B R U A R Y 2 0 24 T h e S t a c k : J a m e s K M C h e n g A r c h i t e c t s and heat pumps do most of the air heating and cooling, though gas is still needed for getting tap water to high enough temperatures and for the few days a year when the pumps can't warm the building enough. Those heat pumps, which feed a hydronic system (a.k.a. water in tubes that run through the building), have been placed on the roof to create easy access for future expansions or modifications. It is constructed from a version of low-carbon concrete. It has triple-glazed windows and the glass is tinted in a way that lim- its overheating on sunny days. And Cheng takes the con- cept of resilience even further. A good, resilient building is flexible and adaptable, so that it can take on different uses over the decades and even centuries. It's not a single-use box that needs to be torn down if the world changes and that kind of industrial or office or ti- ny-condo-type space becomes outdated. It anticipates future uses. And, most importantly, it's a building that people want to continue working or living in for a long time. So when he took over designing The Stack for Oxford Properties (after two other firms had come and gone), he incorporated elements that would help the property meet those goals. It's an office building, so it may never have the flexibility of what Cheng sees as the ulti- mate resilient building—old in- dustrial spaces that have been repurposed multiple times over the past 100 years. But he's tried to build in resilience in other ways. "People don't want to work in a box anymore. They want to be close to nature," Cheng says. So each of the stacked boxes has an outdoor terrace that allows people to bathe themselves in real air as they look at the spectacular views of the mountains, ocean and city from the 37-storey tower. It has windows that can be opened. It was also designed to mesh with the system of mid- block alleys and plazas in that area. There's a sloping path (so wheelchair-accessible) along the eastern side, with a mas- sive sculpture by Indigenous artist Lawrence Paul Yuxwe- luptun, complemented by plants that are local to B.C. And it has an unusual fea- ture on its alley side: a ground- level entrance for cyclists to roll up and get direct access to showers and bike storage— a far cry from the chain-link cages in parking garages that used to be the norm for the two-wheeled set. That alley en- trance also has covered spaces for delivery trucks and taxi or limo pick-ups and drop-offs that are now integral to 21st- century transportation. It's all part of what Cheng calls social sustainability. Ultimately, both the en- gineering and the social side are important to what Sean Pander, the City of Vancouver's green building manager, calls the ultimate goal: producing buildings that age well. Resilient buildings will need, of course, to be built and operated in an energy- efficient way. They'll need mechanisms to protect people from overheating and from the smoke that is becoming a regular feature of summer fire seasons—often both at the same time, meaning that open- ing a window to cool down isn't possible. "We don't want people trapped without any way of protecting themselves," Pander says. But Pander also talks about a building's flexibility, which makes it desirable because of how it can be used in so many different ways rather than hav- ing to be torn down in order to adapt to a new way of working or living. It's one of the reasons large suburban homes can sometimes be more resilient, because of the numerous ways they can be used: housing multi-generational families, renting out part of the space to non-family members, using the yard or a room for running a small business. That kind of flexibility is something that needs to be built in to other forms of housing. "If you don't have to tear it down, if you can repurpose it and have it age well, then you're avoiding all those new materials," says Pander. Not what the concrete and lumber manufacturers neces- sarily want to hear. But where the world needs to go. " People don't want to work in a box anymore. They want to be close to nature." BUILDING BLOCKS Downtown Vancouver's The Stack is now Canada's greenest office tower