Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
Enlisted by the City of Edmonton, gh3* has transformed a former packing plant into a multi-function bus transit complex, embracing the significance of and necessity to assign a spatial role to the infrastructural image and industrial past of Edmonton.
Kathleen Andrews Transit Garage has recently been awarded a 2022 International Architecture Award by The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design and The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies.
The 50,000 square-meter Kathleen Andrews Transit Garage accommodates approximately 320 workers including bus drivers, bus maintenance staff, administration, and supervisory staff, daycare, cafeteria, and custodial employees.
It houses 300 buses (regular and articulated), 35 maintenance bays including three undercarriage wash bays, four re-fuel bays as well as exterior wash bays. Locker areas and lounge areas are provided for drivers, maintenance workers, and safety and security staff.
The building also includes 5,000 square-meter of administrative offices, meeting rooms, and training spaces of various sizes.
One level of employee parking for 900 vehicles is provided below grade.
The site is remarkable in a post-industrial sense, as the intersection of multi-modal transportation infrastructures surrounding an early 20th-century industrial site.
The project aims to celebrate the importance of municipal operations facilities located throughout the cities and suburbs and speaks directly to the idea that these are very important elements of the urban fabric to get right.
The KATG is a big building on a big site. The design argues for an architectural identity that can perform at the scale of urban infrastructure while simultaneously supporting the more intimate conditions of the workplace, whether human or mechanical.
As such, the design mediates between vastly variable scales by means of a coherent unification of building and site. The built form is conceived as a technical skin drawn across the expansive and simply articulated profile of the building.
This design strategy, a synthesis of surface, and enclosed volume weave together the human and mechanical programmatic requirements. The organization of the program places the more social aspects of workplace activity with views toward the street.
This enables strong visual connections from the interior, from the cafeteria for example, to aspects of the site, the garden, the main entrance, the intermediary landscape, and the historic smokestack.
The landscape, the detailing of materials, and the alignment of angled walls and footpaths create views that visually and physically connect across the site.
The decision to locate the primary entrance on the east side of the site, just south of the smokestack, was based on future promise, specifically, an interpretive center dedicated to the history of the Edmonton stockyards, abattoirs, and processing plants.
The new facility shares its site with heritage elements including a 50m tall smokestack that has been restored and incorporated with the larger site and landscape design.
In the spirit of inclusive design, the public is invited to view the artifact up-close and learn about their own city’s history.
Public art is incorporated into the design not as an afterthought, but in a fundamentally integrated way, taking prominence of place on the 5 lightbox gables that lend the project its landmark identity and presence.
The KATG demonstrates an approach to city building that is uncompromising in the pursuit of design excellence and that strives to ensure that all projects contribute positively to the urban realm, regardless of scale, typology, or location.
Project: Kathleen Andrews Transit Garage (KATG)
Architects: gh3*
General Contractor: Graham
Construction and Engineering LP.
Client: City of Edmonton
Photographers: Raymond Chow and Nicholas Callies
