Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation Headquarters
To have meaningful impact on the urgent climate emergency, building design must not only adapt and innovate but aspire to change the culture and expectations of all those connected to the building.
This includes everyone from those involved in the act of building and design, to the end users themselves. Architecture can influence our daily lives and behaviours, and architects, builders, and clients not only have responsibility but also agency in shaping this.
Recently, the conversation on sustainability has been shifting from energy to carbon – this is a sound and necessary shift, however, the job of reducing energy consumption is not done yet, and it will be years before the transference to clean grids in our urban centres is realized.
Holistic approaches to reducing consumption, and seeking renewables in all aspects of a building, must be considered as industry and infrastructure makes its transition to decarbonizing. Moriyama Teshima Architects have been working on a number of high-performance buildings that take a multi-pronged approach to achieving sustainable targets.
The façades play a significant role in not only the performance of the building, but in making the building operations intuitive for its users and occupants. We feel this is one way of addressing the issue of changing expectations and culture.
One of these projects is the Ontario Secondary School Teachers’ Federation (OSSTF) Headquarters and Multi-Tenant Complex. This buildings is a mass timber structure achieving the highest levels of our municipal targets, well in advance of the 2030 TEDI, TEUI, and GHGI reductions. Key project team members in achieving these are targets are Fast + Epp structural engineers, Transsolar KlimaEngineering, and Introba. The constructors, whose services are instrumental in achieving LEED Platinum, are Eastern Construction, which is project managed by the BTY Group. Kasian Architecture and Interior Design are leading workplace strategy, FORREC is the landscape architect, and Matrix Solutions is the civil engineer.
For more information, please download the OSSTF Case Study
