Black and White

Design of a sculptural landmark that anchors a city gateway between Victoria’s urban and residential neighbourhoods.
Our challenge was to design an iconic building that would architecturally distinguish this prominent corner of the city, create a dense community of homes, and interact with the streetscape on both small and large scales.

2nd floor building common patio with seating, fireplace, and BBQ with visual connections to the sidewalk patio and street below.
Prominent use of wood construction and wood finishes throughout, particularly in areas such as balconies and soffits where people experience it.

The ground floor commercial spaces wrap around the corner of Fort and Cook and are articulated to accommodate urban spaces such as a bus stop, informal seating,  and a covered patio space.

The building marks the significant gateway between the busy city centre of Victoria and the quiet, leafy residential community of Rockland.

The palette of materials - brick, timber, and glass - reflect the surrounding local architecture, creating an enduring appeal that also fortifies the significant presence of the building form within its context.

The building is arranged to reinforce the street wall on its 2 main frontages, but, as it is taking up almost an entire city block, there was a risk in overtaking the site with monolith walls of stacked apartments.

Our team decided to take an unconventional approach to this massing. Using a simple rotation of the 4th and 5th floor-plates, we twisted the orientation, breaking up the scale while challenging the convention of the stacked apartment form.

The rotation also creates a sculptural form at a scale suitable to be understood when travelling at vehicle speed on the arterial frontages. This form is enhanced by a striking contrast of dark and white brick, and punctuated by warm, timber-clad patios and balconies.

These projecting balconies and cut-outs also add transparency and openness to the structure, and create a connection between the building and the public spaces.

The two-storey, townhouse scale height of each brick ‘band’ was designed to relate to a human scale of proportion.

At the ground floor pedestrian environment, the over-height, fully glazed commercial and retail spaces pull back from the sidewalk to create individual shopfronts and timber seating areas, inviting residents, visitors, and the public to rest and engage with the space more slowly, supporting the connection between the building and the public realm, and adding vibrancy to the corner.

Project Link: https://www.cascadiaarchitects.ca/case-studies/black-and-white