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Centreline Architecture

About the Firm

Founded in 2007 out of the City of Greater Sudbury, Ontario, Centreline Architecture specializes in commercial, residential, mixed-use, institutional, and sustainable projects. The firm currently employs eight staff members that together are responsible for over 400 projects spanning across Canada, from Greater Sudbury to Toronto, British Columbia, and the Yukon.

Dan Guillemette, founder of Centreline Architecture, currently takes on the role of Partner and Senior Technologist of the firm. He has been working in the architectural field since 2000 after graduating with honours from Algonquin College in Ottawa. Kate Bowman functions as the firm’s Lead Architect and Partner, while also providing experience in the field of project management, specifically during the construction process of the McEwen School of Architecture. Rob Fleury finalizes the list of the firm’s partners, while also enabling the firm with certification in Passive House Design. Danielle Bilodeau, Heather Fleury, Renelle Therrien, Julie Vachon, and Brett Walter constitute the remainder of the employees for Centreline Architecture as of 2021.

Since 2016, the firm has been awarded with “small enterprise”, as well as a finalist for both “best customer service” and “best place to work” at the Sudbury Chamber of Commerce Bell Business Excellence Awards. They remain in a long standing relationship with several clients, including the City of Greater Sudbury, Gateway Casinos and Entertainment Limited, Cambrian Ford, Salute Coffee Company, and Science North. Being the first and only practicing Licensed Technologist with the OAA in the Greater Sudbury Area, the firm continues to use its bilingualism to best serve Northern Ontario, while also striving to branch out and expand their roots across Canada.

Notable Projects and Developments

Art Gallery of Sudbury

The Art Gallery of Sudbury (AGS) is a non-profit and charitable public art gallery that’s purpose is to serve as a key educational, cultural, and tourist destination for the Greater Sudbury region. Between 45,000-75,000 occupants are expected to visit the gallery annually to view the local history and contemporary art works housed within. As of 2021, the gallery is known to exhibit over 2200 permanent collections of noted Canadian and International artists, including the works of AY Jackson, Ivan Wheale, Norval Morrisseau, and Franklin Carmichael. Due to this growing collection and the increase of interest towards northern art, the City of Sudbury decided to partner the gallery with the Sudbury Library to form a new building located in the downtown.

Upon being hired by the City of Greater Sudbury to compose a Site Integration Plan for the proposed art gallery and library, Centreline Architecture focused on the massing of the building, the design of the exterior spaces, and the connection points between the site and the surrounding downtown. Originally, the firm studied the site of the existing Sudbury Arena to hold the gallery and library- a project eventually named The Junction­- with the assumption that the arena would be relocated. However, after discussions surrounding the idea of keeping the arena came to light, the city proposed a new piece of property for The Junction to be located just down the street from the arena. Centreline Architecture quickly studied the site to ensure the square footage of the building would fit, and not long after the site for the art gallery was relocated. “This ended up leading to the city seeing a really strong relationship with the Theatre Centre and Multicultural Centre sort of bookending the site,” Kate Bowman described. Early on, Centreline Architecture decided to shape the building by an L-configuration with a well-integrated outdoor space that continued along Elgin Street. Bowman states that through iterations the team decided on a sunken courtyard with an outdoor gallery space to connect the site to the pre-existing artist strip leading down Elgin. This decision then satisfied the firm’s goal to keep the edge of the site active with the community through the dialogue created between either these outdoor spaces or the strong visual connections with the interior. The City of Sudbury is currently developing the next step of the project with a different architecture firm, with reference to the site integration plan designed by Centreline Architecture. The new art gallery and main public branch library is set to open in 2024.

McEwen School of Architecture

Levit Goodman Architects (LGA) were hired by Centreline Architecture and the steering committee to design Canada’s first new architecture school in over forty years. Kate Bowman of Centreline Architecture lead the project management team through a design process that involved the surrounding community. “It was a project with a lot of cooks in the kitchen,” Bowman says, “We were required to meet the needs of Laurentian students, faculty, and a number of ‘subgroups’ within the community”.

As a part of Laurentian University in Sudbury, Ontario, the school was originally known as the Laurentian School of Architecture, but adopted its current name following a $10 million donation from former Goldcorp CEO, Rob McEwen, in 2016. Opening in September, 2013, the school quickly became recognized for its unique approach towards teaching architecture. Aside from the school being the only in Canada, outside of Quebec, to offer classes in both English and French, the curriculum also focuses largely on Indigenous culture, developing aspects of life in the north, wood construction, local ecologies, and design for climate change.

As for the building itself, it is located in downtown Sudbury at the crossroads of the Canadian Pacific Railway and the Trans-Canada Highway. This unique location offered the design challenge to create a school that responded to directly to its place; a northern city that feels remote due to its natural border of rock, water, and forest. Ultimately, the building was to be used as place of teaching for the advancement of sustainable design, driven by the communities of northern climates. A request for the structural and mechanical systems to be mostly exposed allowed for the building to additionally be used as a first-hand teaching mechanism into learning about architecture, climate, and culture.

The site plan sees the school to be composed of four individual buildings enclosing a central courtyard with exterior walkways that allow for pedestrian travel. Two of the city’s historic structures, being the old rail shed and the former CPR ticketing and telegraph office, were adapted into the new design along with the construction of two new buildings. The old rail shed, composed of old timber construction methods, was turned into the school’s Fabrication Lab; the CPR building represents old brick and masonry construction while serving faculty offices; a new steel and concrete wing houses the design studios; and new timber construction methods are denoted in a Cross-Laminated Timber (CLT) wing that holds the school’s auditorium and library.

“As a discipline, architecture embodies the ideologies of optimism and determinism: the belief that our physical environment both shapes and influences who we are and how we will respond to the world,” says Janna Levitt, a founding partner of LGA Architectural Partners. “For this reason, creating a new school of architecture- one that is northern in identity, demanding a dialogue between site, climate and cultural inclusion- was an exhilarating design opportunity. Our approach is very Canadian and also universal in perspective”. Overall, Centreline Architecture aided in the creation of Canada’s first new architecture school in nearly half a century.

Sustainable Architecture

As the global climate crisis continues to increase, architecture has begun to develop ways in which buildings can be better situated in its ecological place. This is known as sustainable architecture. Maximizing the energy efficiency over the life cycle of a building is the most important goal in sustainable design. In order to accomplish this, specific studies have been added to the design process of a new building in order to optimize the local environmental resources, particularly sunlight and prevailing winds for heating and ventilation of the building.

Passive House

Passive House design is a form of sustainable architecture that maximizes a building’s energy efficiency by enabling the structure to save up to 90% of the energy used for heating, while cutting total energy costs by 65-100%. Through this form of design, buildings have the potential to reduce their carbon footprint, provide high quality ventilation equipment, maintain a high resiliency to weather, and allow for easy operation of mechanical systems within the home.

Although Passive design has been slow to arrive in northern Ontario, clients are now starting to become very educated about passive design and know that this is what they want to achieve, according to Bowman. As of 2019, Rob Fleury of Centreline Architecture has provided the firm with the ability to identify as a certified Passive House design company. Since then, the firm has completed the design of three Passive Homes and have more in the making. Bowman explains that when beginning a passive design, a lot of decisions have to be made early on. It’s necessary to decide on materials, window types, door types, room locations, heating technology, and landscaping in order for the calculations to be completed. “What’s specifically challenging in the north is that we have four seasons,” Bowman states, “Passive works really well when you can design the site with trees that have leaves all year round to provide shade, but as soon as you have trees that lose their leaves come winter, the challenge only increases”. Specific strategies can be used to counteract these concerns listed by Bowman, however. Coniferous trees can be used in certain locations rather than deciduous trees to prevent the leaves from falling in the winter. Solar shading devices can also be developed and incorporated into the architecture of a building in order to provide shade in the summer months. Window technologies have been adapted to allow for the opening to experience high thermal resistance, while the positioning of these openings can create instances of cross ventilation and stack ventilation.

The design standards for Passive Homes have the potential to dictate the future of all building designs in order to ensure our structures limit their carbon footprint and fight the rising climate crisis.

Architecture and COVID-19

As the Covid-19 pandemic continues to unravel and the world adapts to a new way of living, questions regarding where architecture is to go from here remain unanswered. Many suspect a population shift away from larger cities to occur, which may leave some office towers and skyscrapers deserted and in need of a new purpose. New forms of public spaces may need to be redesigned in order to limit public gathering and allow for social distancing to occur. Building designs may also become more flexible, as the importance of adaptability has become more relevant. Adjustable walls and screens could be more common in order to transform spaces from an open-plan into several dedicated rooms. All this, however, allows architects to do what they do best- create.

Centreline Architecture, for example, has already begun to reimagine their way of working in order to fit the criteria of the pandemic. For instance, site visits are now less frequent and video calls are often organized within the firm to ensure a safe working environment. Strict protocols were outlined and methods of working with clients were reinvented in order to satisfy the safety of both parties when interaction is required. One challenge that remains significant for the firm is the collaboration that comes with architecture. “Everything got slowed down in terms of productivity, and maintaining a healthy team relationship became difficult,” Bowman explains. As all designers would agree, the design process is often very interactive and hands on, with the entire team working together to bounce ideas off one another as they work to achieve the final product.

It’s no question the Covid-19 pandemic will continue to change the world, but only time will tell how these changes will occur.

Other Works by Centreline Architecture

As Centreline Architecture continues to evolve today, so do their projects. Christ the King Church in Sudbury continues to work closely with the firm in hopes to achieve the renovation of the exterior stairs leading to the building’s main entrance. The shedding of water within the site boundaries caused a significant problem for the church, as water would collect in the summer and then freeze in the winter, causing the chance for damages or injuries to occur. Centreline Architecture has worked closely with structural engineers and the church’s maintenance crew in order to address this problem through the design of new exterior stairs. “Although the scale is smaller, the details and complexity of the project remain very high,” says Bowman, “It’s important to study how the railings are going to interact with the existing building and the new stone pillars. We need to decide what type of stone will be used, what the new structure will be, what the current structure is. It’s surprisingly complex for the project to simply be designing exterior stairs”.

The firm also continues to work with the National Bank of Canada as they look to start construction of their new branch at the New Sudbury Centre in early March, 2021. The bank is headquartered out of Montreal, Quebec so the firm has been very fortunate to consist of bilingual members, Bowman explains.

Some other noteworthy projects include Maple Hill Farms, in Sudbury, Keenan Dental Office, the 444 BarryDowne Commercial Complex in Greater Sudbury, and the Sudbury and North Bay Gateway Casino locations.