REJUVENATE

Mission: 

With our studio project we strove to create a space of growth, healing, and resilience for the broader Calgary community. To that end our mission was to reinvigorate a site that we saw great untapped potential in. Breathing new life into existing building stock and inject new program into a stagnant area with an emergent farming technology in Aquaponics. The addition of a sustainable way of generating both food and jobs, allowed us to expand our mission further to be inclusive of both the dissemination of nutrition to the less fortunate and the mental health and healing benefits of living in conjunction with gardens, and greenery more broadly. 

Vision: 

We envisioned this project as an intersection between history and innovation, combining Calgary’s heritage buildings with modern urban farming facilities. At this intersection, all Calgarians, those dealing with mental and wellness issues and those who are not, could come together to celebrate the City’s unique personality. Here, they would engage in meaningful, cooperative, and therapeutic activity. 

Critical Approach: 

In order to accomplish these goals of resilience, wellbeing, and education, Rejuvenate nourishes change for the city of Calgary through programmatic functions and architectural expression. The project exhibits a poetic parallel to agricultural acts, rooting the architecture within the soil of the heritage buildings on site that are deep-set into the identity of the community. From this existing context extends a place of rejuvenation, healing, and growth, with the addition of new structures and programme that invites the community to participate in. The introduction of hydroponics allows for the complex to become self-sufficient as well as create food security for organizations such as the food bank, with additional produce being sold within the market. The hydroponics also allows the residents of the transitional housing to learn new skills and participate within the therapeutic acts of gardening. The residential component accommodates individuals seeking transitional housing, with ample access to natural light, fresh air, greenery, and community. The units are placed within the renovated Resilience Block, which are modularly designed to allow for the growth and fluctuations of one's life, allowing for individuals to maximize their stay within the complex. The highly public ground plane invites the community to engage with, this includes an indoor-outdoor market space, therapeutic interpretative walkway, an interpretative center allowing for education of the watershed connecting to the aquaponic farms.