The Clayton Community Centre Is the First of Its Kind 26
It’s good to be first. That’s an accolade Surrey, BC, knows all about. The city, about 40 km southeast of Vancouver, is home to the first community center and largest non-residential building in North America to achieve Passive House status. Completed in February 2021, the 78,000-sq.ft., two-story Clayton Community Centre features a double-height social gathering space at the main entry, providing a hub for community engagement. It combines a mix of spaces into one facility: arts and culture programming (including performing and visual arts spaces), recreational activities (including a gym and fitness center), and a branch library. There are also spaces for communityled programming, including a community kitchen and garden, a workshop, a café, and preschool and childcare spaces. “The design process is quite different for Passive House,” says Melissa Higgs, architect with hcma and principal of the project. “You have to really understand how the client will be using the building, the occupant load, the type of equipment they’re going to have. All this must be considered in the very early stages of design. “We went into it designing on the basis of what a residence would suggest,” says Higgs, “which would be to super-insulate the building.” But the first modeling indicated that the facility would only have to be heated less than a week a year. “The heat generated by occupants in the building, the lighting systems, and the equipment – but mostly the people – meant that we had a cooling problem, not a heating problem. We were trying to reduce the energy load associated with cooling the space.” That’s the opposite issue for a Passive House residence. “You don’t have enough people in [a residence] to generate their own heat to heat the building.”
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