The Vancouver suburb of Surrey, British Columbia, is a city in high-minded transition. Newly aware of the financial, logistical, and environmental costs of its low-density, car-oriented sprawl, its municipal leaders have recently taken steps to transform the bedroom community into a better-defined and more fully equipped modern city. The harbinger was the construction of Surrey Central City: a shopping, office, and educational complex, designed by Bing Thom Architects (BTA), that created a sense of a downtown within Surrey. Now the city has two new public aquatic centers, each with a program that is the very epitome of urban vitality. Like the public library, the community swimming pool serves as a modern-day church of sorts, a gathering place empowered by North America’s dual obsessions with fitness and fun. 

Community indoor swimming pools—natatoria, in the lingo—pre­sent logistical and technical challenges that require architectural ingenuity. First and foremost is height, in order to accommodate the high-divers and water-sliders, as well as to disperse the chlorine-­saturated air. And for obvious reasons, the large interior space must have a long, clear span.

Near the city’s southern border, HCMA Architecture + Design has designed an aquatic center with an Olympic-size competition pool, diving platforms, a family-oriented leisure pool with water slide, hot tubs, a sauna, a steam room, and a weight room—all that in an area that until very recently has been sparsely populated agricultural land, but is slated to be developed into a vast residential neighborhood. HCMA has designed seven other aquatic centers in the Vancouver region. But the Grandview Heights commission posed a new kind of challenge. “We had a completely blank slate,” says Darryl Condon, HCMA principal. “We were asked to build the centerpiece of a community that doesn’t exist yet.”

HCMA’s answer to this problem was a roof that reads like a series of giant cresting waves from the outside and a billowing sheet of fabric from the inside. The undulating form, so dramatically evocative, was functionally driven. Devised with the help of structural engineers and timber specialists Fast + Epp, the roof is made of improbably long and thin ribbons of glue laminated wood. These slender elements (comprised of pairs of 4-inch-wide by 10-inch-deep beams tied together) are anchored at either end by post-tensioned concrete buttresses and a row of enormous canted V-shaped concrete columns at midspan. They perform in tension, much like the cables of a suspension bridge, notes Condon, allowing an area free of vertical supports for the 50-meter-long, 10-lane-­wide pool. They also create catenary curves that reach a maximum height of 49 feet to clear the diving platforms, falling to 29 feet at the roof’s lowest points.

At the other end of Surrey, its northeastern corner, the Guildford Aquatic Centre bookends the evolving city. Designed by BTA in partnership with Shape Architecture, the Guildford pool expands an existing recreation center on the site. Like Grandview Heights, the Guildford natatorium contains a lap pool suitable for competition, plus a leisure pool, a water slide, and a “lazy river.” It too is visually defined by a roof with an innovative wood structure engineered by Fast + Epp and in keeping with British Columbia’s “wood first” policy, which promotes (though does not require) the use of engineered timber in new buildings; the material is also better suited than steel to the potentially corrosive pool environment.

But despite the two facilities’ similarities—both serve as community magnets and have innovative wood structures—there are striking differences. The Guildford facility’s architectural introversion, with its rectilinear, mostly opaque exterior of precast concrete panels, contrasts starkly with the exuberant volumes of its counterpart at Grandview Heights, enclosed in a curtain wall of glass and translucent polycarbonate.

Where Grandview’s ceiling ribs wow the visitor with their long and slender proportions, Guildford’s roof system impresses for different reasons. BTA’s 95-foot-long ceiling trusses—22 in all—evoke the underside of a train trestle, painted white but with the barely visible grain of the laminated strand timber showing through. The structure animates what would otherwise be a straightforward, shoebox-like volume.

Ingeniously, the trusses conceal infrastructure such as mechanical equipment and sprinklers—and, at 10 feet high and 8 feet wide, they are large enough for maintenance staff to walk inside to service these systems.

Linear fluorescent lighting is also hidden within the trusses. Along with subdued daylight that seeps in through small skylights at the roof’s perimeter, the indirect electric illumination helps create an almost meditative atmosphere.

This contemplative environment is reinforced by the site strategy. To mute the cacophony from an adjacent traffic-filled artery, the design team created a large berm that serves as an aural and visual barrier, giving the illusion that the addition is partly submerged in the ground.

Leading from the main entrance, the architects devised an interior catwalk-like bridge that runs through the building, over the pool—for modern flaneurs, gazing at the swimmers—and out the building’s other side into the parking lot. The bridge-walkers don’t have to pay admission: they can be commuters taking a shortcut to a nearby bus stop. The idea, says BTA principal Venelin Kokalov, the lead designer on Guildford, is to “project the future” by making pedestrians feel as welcome as possible.

What form that future development takes will be key to the full success of both projects. Like much of Surrey, the Guildford and Grandview Heights neighborhoods still require much more density and astute urban planning to be considered truly pedestrian-oriented. Fortunately, the city now has two more important anchor buildings that can help foster a lively, more walkable community—someday.

Grandview Heights Aquatic Centre