The Gleneagles Community Centre combines innovative green design with commonsense to provide a communal recreation facility for the citizens of West Vancouver, in British Columbia. Program components include a gymnasium, multipurpose room, a fitness center, and childcare area. The architect organized these elements on three levels of a building that occupies a sloping site. This provides all major indoor rooms direct access to complimentary outdoor spaces.

One of the building’s largest spaces, the gymnasium, is a unifying volume that rises through all three levels. Glazed walls allow visual connections between the major program components so that the interior of the community center is animated by the complex variety of simultaneous activities that comprise the building’s social life.

When completed in 2003, the community center was the first public building in North America to incorporate a thermo-active radiant heating and cooling system that operates on the Swiss Bâtiment Isotherme concept. Piping is embedded within the structure’s tilt-up and cast-in-place concrete walls so that heated and cooled water can pass through the concrete, allowing the walls and floors to act as radiant surfaces. Ventilation is accomplished using a low velocity displacement system, minimizing the negative impact associated with large ducts. Operable doors and windows may be used at any time without affecting the system’s performance.