Ask the Expert: Graham Girard

Every year, the CAGBC Award for an Inspiring Home recognizes a high-performing residential project for demonstrating a commitment to sustainability and addressing social equity issues such as affordability and accessibility. Sponsored by Enbridge, the 2024 award went to SFU Affordable Housing, a high-performance, community-oriented housing project in the UniverCity neighbourhood at Simon Fraser University’s Burnaby campus.

We recently sat down with Local Practice Architecture + Design associate architect and project team member Graham Girard, to discuss the project design.

This space was designed for inclusivity with the idea of getting to know your neighbours and with community considerations in the forefront. How does it help cultivate community connections? And what are the larger implications for the community for this project?

I think the community aspect really goes back to the client: SFU Community Trust. They’ve essentially been tasked with building an entire livable neighbourhood at the top of SFU’s Burnaby campus, a commuter campus where people only spent the day and bused or drove back down the mountain at night. Up until that point, there wasn’t much in the way of housing on campus for families or people with disabilities. This was a target demographic that the Trust really wanted to champion by utilizing that last property on in their new master plan. They were the driving force behind this, and they came to us with this challenge.

Twelve-15-story concrete towers is kind of the typical typology in the University neighbourhood, and we wanted to scale that down. [We] split it into two different buildings to keep smaller cohorts of people on individual floors so residents can really get to know each other through random interactions, just seeing people in the hallways, seeing people in the stairways and be active on the site rather than focusing on elevators like they would in a taller building. Up to six stories is easily walkable and social stairs encourage people to interact while moving up and down.

Also, every floor has a studio-size space that’s set aside, not as a residence, but a fully glazed shared community study room to bring light into the corridors and serve as a bit of a living room for that floor where kids can play and students study together late at night. Rather than having laundries in every single suite, we wanted to focus again on the community building aspect by having one shared laundry room in each building, another opportunity to see your neighbours spark up a conversation. Residents can watch their kids out the window in the courtyard playground, a bookable space that’s also used for daycare, parties and all sorts of events that SFU residents and housing put together.

The project faced several challenges, including uneven ground, shared jurisdiction on land, global supply chain shortages, a rich biodiversity to protect and ensuring affordability for occupants. How did the project team manage all these priorities?

This deep site was a real challenge, and probably one of the reasons why this final site within the university neighbourhood wasn’t given over to developers, but really was the last one to be developed. It was really a challenging site. It drops three full stories across the length, that’s a fairly steep grade to traverse and keep integrated with the surrounding. Our approach was to break down the project into two distinct masses, and the Amenity Building as a third building and a courtyard in the middle that helps us navigate some of that grade. The buildings are kind of staggered vertically, really sort of stepping down the site and allowing us to open up to the north on a tree covenant that we treated as a zero-lot line. This brought that natural ecology down into the courtyard with native biodiversity and native planting. We’ve got some wild strawberries, yarrow and all sorts of native wildflower species for residents to pick and bring back home. These native species are drought and climate resistant and will support the site’s natural biodiversity.

On the affordability front, there’s a couple of key strategies that we use, the first one being the simple massing: three keeping it as simple as we can with three masses stepping down the site. Thermal bridging helps with detailing and construction. The second strategy was to focus the budget where it could have the biggest impact. About 90 percent of the project budget went into foundations structure and a high-performance thermal envelope. That was the big-ticket item. This leaves 10 percent to deliver high quality finished materials that are healthy and create a quality home for people to live in.

Supply chain issues were a big challenge as we were building during the pandemic, with all physical distancing as well. Trades couldn’t be in the same space at the same time, even different people from the same crew would have to be sort of separated and it did cause a lot of scheduling delays. Several materials were not available anymore with supply chain shortages. We had entire shipments of flooring getting stuck and others just vanished, so we had to work quickly and collaboratively with the construction manager. That was a major challenge but the collaborative approach and good working relationship with the general contractor got us through.

Could you describe some of the key GHG and energy reduction features on this project?

I think the biggest one is simplifying the thermal envelope, simplifying the massing. One thing you’ll notice looking at the project is the simplicity of shapes. Each building is an extruded rectangle and we’ve kept the window-to-wall ratio down to about 25 percent [of] the thermal envelope to gross floor area. We don’t have windows that kind of bulge out or step back, no balconies and no roof access to keep it minimal with thermally broken roof hatches. We’ve also excluded the parkade from the thermal envelope. Second strategy, like I alluded to already was providing articulation with features like stairs, canopies over doors, and sunshades over any south and west-facing windows, and then cladding so every single mass has a unique identity. Third strategy was designing thick walls for a highly refined thermal envelope. We really worked hard with BCIT and RDH to refine our assemblies and details so we could keep it pretty robust, pretty simple, but really just maximizing thermal value and keeping it really airtight. That brings me to the next point: airtightness. It’s really easy just to dial up airtightness in an energy model and say, we’re going to achieve great results, but then it’s harder to actually build that on site. We had one person we called the Air Boss, and his job was just finding every single hole, every single fish mouth, and just working with the trade to make sure that those were fixed. Every potential source of air leakage that we could find was patched up before the installation went on. For our windows and our doors, we really got as high quality as we could. We didn’t want to skimp out there.

A video of the full interview will be available soon, so stay tuned.