When architect Darin Harding starts a new project, he doesn’t simply want to build something that will be a part of a community – he wants to make the community part of the project.
“In the end, the building that you provide is for a community and so it’s important to take their considerations in,” Harding said during an interview with the Journal of Commerce at the Wood Solutions Conference in Vancouver recently.
Harding, director of community and sport with hcma Architecture + Design, gave a presentation on the firm’s approach to building in a local context.
He presented one of his architectural mantras: bend but not break.
“That bend can sometimes look, I think, as a negative but it’s really important to the process. It makes the end portion of your project a lot better when (public) considerations are taken into account and the community is heard,” Harding said.
Harding walked through several recent hcma projects.
“I think communities really respond in a positive way when they feel they have something that’s uniquely theirs,” he said.
“We hear it every time when we go into community engagement session, ‘We want something that’s unique to us and don’t give me a copy and paste of something else.’”
A prime example is hcma’s construction of Prince George Fire Hall #1 in 2020.
“This being a highly visible and prominent structure in the community, the goal for this project became to construct a building using materials and methods meaningful to its local context,” said Harding.
He studied the history of Prince George as a lumber boom town and drew on the history of prominent Prince George citizen Tom Wright, an academic and prominent member of the lumber industry in the mid-20th century.
“He found that, unfortunately, only 25 per cent of the timber volume logged was actually converted into lumber,” said Harding.
“As a result of this observation, multiple pulp mills opened in the area to make use of a large portion of the timber. And so, in part by this discovery by Tom Wright, the city of Prince George was radically transformed in just a few years.”
Harding wanted to channel this story into the fire hall and knew it had to be made of wood.
But there was a unique challenge for Harding’s team: fire halls are not typically spaces the public visits, though they are public amenities. So he and his team worked to make the effects of wood construction visible from a distance.
“We take the program of the fire hall that’s required and we push all of the living quarters for the firefighters, all the administrative spaces, we push it to one end and we lift up the corner,” he said.
“Then we say, ‘OK, we’re going to take this box on the right and this is going to be the fire apparatus base and we want it to be glowing warm with wood so that it becomes an important piece to represent the wood.’
“This became the vision of how we’re going to represent wood in a civic facility that people don’t really get to see from afar.”
Through emphasizing the visuals of the apparatus bay, the wood construction is evident from far off thanks to the large glass access doors for the station and well-placed windows along the building.
But there were specific challenges. Harding didn’t just want to represent wood for the Prince George community, he wanted to use wood produced by the community.
But “Prince George doesn’t really have mills that produce mass timber products,” he said.
Speaking with the Journal of Commerce, Harding said he needed to accept that he could source some products out of the community but still produce something unique for Prince George.
As community involvement in the project deepened, Harding saw emerge in local workers a philosophy he carries with himself: turning your work into a labour of love.
As bad weather closed in with the turning of the seasons, the hcma team realized they were going to need to seal the building before they could drop in heavy CLT pieces to build the central stairwell.
A local contractor, IDL Projects Inc. in Prince George, “stepped forward and they decided to take on this construction themselves,” Harding said about the stairs.
“It was remarkable,” he said.
“They aren’t experts, but they said, ‘we want to do this. This is this is important to us.’”
Harding said one worker built the entire stairwell himself, one two-by-six at a time, his definition of a labour of love.
“And that’s the opportunity to (engage community), is when they’re building it, when they’re putting their hands on it and their own stamp on it,” Harding told the JOC.
Follow the author on Twitter @JOC_Evan.
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