Words: Alison Smith, Rachel Sa, and Matt Stuart
Design: Peter Robertson
22
SPACE,
THE FINAL
FRONTIER
Tiny apartments, expansive ideas, and laser-focused
drones. How our experts are finding creative ways
to reorganize, reimagine, and redesign our spaces.
Big Ideas in Small Spaces
Downtown Dreams
Four hundred and fifty square feet
(42 square metres) is the size of a
bedroom for many. But for a growing
number of urban dwellers, it’s home.
“Many young professionals and empty
nesters want to live downtown but can’t
afford the properties there, not given
the size of these properties and their
value per square foot,” says architect
Aeron Hodges (Boston, Massachusetts).
“They wouldn’t mind—and could
afford—smaller spaces, which are more
sustainable and manageable.”
The problem? In Boston, city zoning
restricts the construction of small
apartments in much of the downtown.
But that hasn’t stopped Aeron and her
team. Under the leadership of US
New England Buildings principal
Tamara Roy (Boston), they’re working
with Boston’s mayor to make policy
changes and educate city officials,
designers, and the greater community
about why compact living should be
an option.
Aeron Hodges (far left) at the Architecture Boston
Expo 2015. Shown with (left to right) WHAT’S IN
collaborators Brent Leslie and Chris Cicchitelli, and
Stantec’s Kate Lux, Animish Kudalkar, and Andrew
LaFosse (Boston, Massachusetts).
From Small Beginnings
Thanks to Stantec’s influence, several
pilot units have already been built.
These units—all under 450 square feet
(42 square metres)—provide modern
amenities and attractive living spaces.
What’s more, they exist in parts of the
city where the average person couldn’t
afford a home—at least until now. In
November 2015, Boston’s mayor
recognized Aeron’s contribution to
improving housing by awarding her a
ONEin3 Impact award, recognizing her
as one of the city’s outstanding civic
leaders under 35.
Aeron’s commitment to small continues
with the WHAT’S IN housing research
initiative, a collaboration between
Stantec and other technology, housing,
and social organizations in the city.
With support from Stantec’s Research
& Development Fund, Aeron and her
team research and test new models for
smart urban living for WHAT’S IN and
share their findings in an annual exhibit
at the Architecture Boston Expo (ABX).
Their 2015 installation showed how real
people are adapting to living small and
how robotic architecture—mechanically
powered furniture parts that move to
accommodate different living needs
(e.g., from lounging to sleeping to
entertaining)—makes compact homes
feel larger.
“People dream about finding a home
in the location they want to live in.
In expensive markets like Boston,
achieving this dream can be challenging,”
Aeron says. “By bringing attention to
compact living, we hope to help make
these dreams a reality.”
We Are Driven to Achieve WINTER 2016 23
Bridgepoint Health’s 10th floor roof terrace is a
generative space that accommodates a variety
of activities that improve quality of life. The terrace
provides a sheltered space where patients and
visitors can enjoy the outdoors, rain or shine. The
space is also ideal for hosting hospital fundraising
events and offering patients clinical activities
like therapeutic gardening.
Tending the Garden of Generative Space
Planting the Seed
Imagine a space that goes beyond function. A space that continually
evolves to encourage better healing, learning, growth, care—whatever
you need. Welcome to generative space—a passion of Bruce Raber
(Vancouver, British Columbia), discipline leader for Stantec
Architecture’s corporate-wide Healthcare sector.
Bruce, a generative space practitioner, is actively involved in the
CARITAS Project, a global network founded by pioneer architect and
visionary, Wayne Ruga. Bruce is part of CARITAS’s Leading by
Design research project, which field-tests, documents, and spreads
environment design practices, such as generative space, and
systemically and sustainably improves health and healthcare.
Working the Rooms
Bruce explains how generative space works: “Generative space is an
environment or a place—both physical and social—that not only
meets the user’s functional needs but also materially improves quality
of life,” Bruce says. He likens such a space to a garden: “A well-tended
garden flourishes. What your garden looks and feels like drastically
improves every year as you continue to tend to the space. So it is with
generative space.”
“But, much like a garden, generative space takes work,” says Stuart
Elgie (Toronto, Ontario), Buildings principal. “A garden requires
weeding and watering. Likewise, generative space requires ongoing
effort by the institution: watching how people use the space, talking
with them to understand what they want from the space, and
24
Click here or go to http://sparkonline
to watch “A Bird’s Eye View” of
Bridgepoint Health.
recognizing the space’s potential. At Bridgepoint Active Healthcare
in Toronto, Ontario, the space now provides many places for patients
and their families to interact with nature and the community. Still,
there are incredible possibilities for different and more meaningful
interactions to occur—but achieving such potential requires work.”
Bridgepoint conducts ongoing interviews and surveys to evaluate the
building’s performance against the original design objectives and
considers what programming changes can be made to generate even
more benefits from these spaces. A great example is the civic court at
the hospital’s main entry. On weekends, the space could be used to
house a farmer’s market. Then the main entry would do more than
welcome patients and visitors: it would welcome the community.
Patients would have the chance to interact with their neighbors and
connect with the world outside the hospital—activities that support
the hospital’s vision of “transforming care” to help better the lives of
those with complex health conditions.
Bearing Fruit
This Bridgepoint design won us our second CARITAS Project
Generative Space Award; we won our first in 2014 for our work with
the Nanaimo Regional General Hospital in British Columbia.
Generative space has proven to be a successful design approach in
healthcare, but can it be transplanted? “Until now, the design
community has connected generative space only to hospitals and
healing,” says Elgie. “But generative design thinking applies to all
human environments—workplaces, schools, research laboratories.
We push our thinking beyond the project brief and ask what other
opportunities and possibilities exist in our spaces.”
Laser-sharp Visions
Bringing the Present into Focus
To imagine what a space could be, we must begin with what that
space already is. However, developing an accurate plan of existing
facilities can be tough, especially when as-built drawings don’t exist,
as was the case for the 786,000 square-foot (73,000 square-metre)
roof of an industrial building in Irvine, California. Using traditional
methods, the Irvine design team knew it would take weeks to
adequately survey and document the roof. So they asked our
Geomatics team of 3D specialists to find a better way to collect the
information using 3D Laser Scanning (3DLS) technology.
A 3D scanner, not much bigger than a basketball, can scan the
surrounding area at one million points per second, generating an
exact digital replica of whatever is within the laser’s 360-degree,
262-foot (80-metre) spherical radius. Using this technology, the team
scanned the massive roof in less than a week—at a much more refined
level of detail than would have been achieved using traditional
methods. Not only did 3DLS save our client money by shaving weeks
off the project’s schedule, but the detailed data also provided
designers with a precise digital roof replica to work with.
Shining Light on New Possibilities
If a scan was done after every project, we could actually create exact
digital, as-built reproductions of real-life facilities in 3D digital
environments. So why not scan every project? Importing one 3D scan
requires uploading massive amounts of data, something our current
design software isn’t designed to do well—yet. Our Geomatics team
in Edmonton is now using the Stantec Research & Development Fund
to support advances in software that will make it possible for
practitioners to upload data straight from scanners into Building
Information Modeling (BIM) programs like Revit to create
hyper-accurate virtual models.
“The technological advances we’re making to increase the amount of
area we can cover and improve our ability to streamline data uploads
means we can be more efficient in our design and construction than
ever before,” says Alberta North Geomatics discipline lead, Trevor
Pasika (Edmonton, Alberta). Because 3DLS is so much more accurate
and detailed than traditionally surveyed data, designers and
contractors who use BIM models built on 3DLS data will be better
able to identify and remedy potential design problems before
construction begins. This could save our clients money and reduce
their construction risks.
Taking 3DLS on the Road
And there’s more good news. New technology is continually creating
new applications for 3D laser scanning. Trevor and his team are now
working on overlaying data from unmanned aerial vehicle surveys onto
3D laser scanner data, which provides yet another perspective for
designers. The team is also looking into mobile scanning and now
works with terrestrial laser scanners mounted on a tripod; the team
must manually move and reset these scanners—a process that can
take up to 10 minutes—somewhere around 30 to 100 times to capture
all the angles of a single project. So while 3D laser scanning using
terrestrial scanners is faster than traditional surveying, the process
can still take significant time on major projects.
Mobile scanners can be mounted on any vehicle and scan on the go,
similar to how Google mounts cameras on their Google cars to capture
street level views on Google Maps. When you add cars, four-wheelers,
snowmobiles, boats, and even unmanned aerial vehicles into the
3D laser scanning technology mix, the possibilities for defining a
space and imagining what it could become are endless.
Stantec’s geomatics experts have used 3D laser scanners (shown below)to digitally
re-create everything from complex industrial sites in Canada’s oil sands to U.S. Government
Space Program rockets.
Click here or go to http://sparkonline to watch Trevor Pasika (Edmonton, Alberta) explain the advantages of 3DLS in “Survey Scanning: Lasers to the Rescue”.
We Are Driven to Achieve WINTER 2016 25