We are thrilled to announce that the Moryiama Teshima Architects’ designed Centre for Urban Innovation (CUI) at Toronto Metropolitan University has earned LEED Silver Certification!

This is an incredible accomplishment for such a highly complex project, which was completed in downtown Toronto in 2018. The design team was able to apply innovative, sustainable building strategies into this complex undertaking, including maintenance of a heritage structure, discovery and removal of various contaminants, as well as addition of wet and dry laboratories – all on a dense urban site with construction staging, access, and planning challenges.

Many of the crucial programmatic elements of the CUI were placed in the original building, which was largely preserved in order to reduce the embodied carbon of the project and celebrate the historic value of the site. The new building additions were designed to maximize natural light where possible, using a curtainwall with a protruding profiled channel cap to add depth, texture, and shadow. The CUI adaptively reused the existing building and its embedded energy resources, significantly reducing its construction footprint and waste.