April 30, 2010

TEEPLE ARCHITECTS INC.

Grande Praries’ first high school is now home to an art gallery. The modified building incorporates a steel frame inside.

FEATURE | Building Envelope

Prairie Art Gallery in Grande Prairie, Alberta a building-within-a-building

$10 million project will preserve the area’s first all-brick high school

PETER KENTER

correspondent

The new Prairie Art Gallery in Grande Prairie, Alta. has been designed as a building-within-a-building to honour the city’s heritage and the rigorous environmental requirements of a modern art gallery.

The building was designed by Teeple Architects Inc. of Toronto, the design team responsible for the Montrose Cultural Centre, which stands directly behind the gallery.

The original gallery was housed inside the community’s first high school building, constructed in 1929.

“It’s designated a provincial heritage building because it was the first high school the community had ever built,” says Martin Baron, an associate with Teeple Architects. “It was quite significant for such a small agricultural community of wood frame houses to invest so much money and effort into a large brick structure such as this. It’s quite an unusual achievement for the area and shows that the town was looking toward the future.”

The high school building was gutted in 1982 and converted into the new Prairie Art Gallery. The initial plans for the revamped gallery involved a seamless connection to the Montrose Cultural Centre. Those plans were cut short in 2007 when unusual snow loads caused the failure of a glulam beam and a collapse of the building’s roof along with significant damage to part of the brick wall.

“Nothing of the interior survived the 1982 repurposing of the building,” says Baron. “At this point we were asked to come up with a design that would preserve the remaining heritage assets and move forward with a new gallery.”

One option involved the construction of a new curtain wall envelope that would completely surround the heritage structure. “We designed it as though we were treating the original building as an artifact in a museum,” says Baron. The province ultimately decided that this approach would diminish the heritage value of the building.

Another involved repairing the existing structure and building a direct connection to the Montrose Centre.

“We couldn’t go through with that option for various reasons,” says Baron. “One of the main problems was the floor levels of the school building didn’t match that of the Montrose Centre, so it would have required a major adjustment of floor levels.

The second issue was that the Montrose Centre was designed using modern building envelope technology and a state-of-the-art HVAC system. The gallery had to operate year round at a temperature of 21 degrees Celsius and 40 to 50 per cent relative humidity whether it was plus or minus 35 degrees Celsius outside. The challenges of doing that with the existing building envelope were too great.”

In addition, local fire codes frowned on the idea of marrying a wood frame structure to the steel frame building behind it. The approach would have required the construction of a significant firewall between the two buildings, destroying the original intent of a seamless transition.

The ultimate decision was to build a brand new steel-framed building within the framework of the old building. In partnership with heritage consultant

Simpson Roberts Architecture and Interior Design of Calgary, the architect devised a plan to gut the interior of the old school building, maintain the existing masonry walls on the front and both sides and install a new steel frame to support them.

“The open back of the building connects to the Montrose centre on all three levels,” says Baron. “The bricks harvested from the back wall were used to repair the damage caused by the roof collapse.”

Additional excavation of about five feet was ordered to even up the difference in elevation between the basements in the two buildings. “We were digging about 10 feet in from the original walls to minimize the risk of damage to the original heritage structure,” says Baron. “Essentially we built a three-storey building—a basement and two storeys—that reflected the language of the Montrose Cultural Centre. The new building doubles the gallery space from about 8,000 square feet to 16,000 square feet.”

The interior of the heritage walls will be sprayed with four inches of polyurethane foam insulation.

A water-based vapour barrier will be sprayed on top of the foam before the walls are finished with a layer of plywood sandwiched between two layers of drywall.

Plywood is traditionally used in gallery wall construction to anchor hanging artwork.

“We were lucky that the 1982 renovation spared the original windows, which we used in this restoration,” says Baron.

“On the inside wall, we used a triple-glazed window system that filters out 99.6 per cent of ultraviolet light.”

The design creates an additional gallery space in the perimeter between the new and old buildings and allows light to enter the building without damaging the artwork in the central exhibition space.

While the Montrose Cultural Centre is applying for LEED Silver status, Baron says the art gallery is being built to the same standards without seeking accreditation.

The $10-million gallery is scheduled to open in 2012.

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