60 Richmond East Housing Development By Teeple Architects
By Jeffrey Hyatt
60 Richmond East is an 11- story, mixed use building designed by Teeple Architects – one of the first new housing co-ops to be built in Toronto, Canada. The Teeple design team have said the project explores ideas for the future of urbanism in the North American city, and it seeks to understand and express the notion that urban form can simultaneously be environmental form. This program generated the idea of the architecture as urban permaculture; a housing development co-op for hospitality workers, which incorporates social spaces dedicated to food and its production.
The primary objectives of the design are to define, animate, and bring new conceptual underpinnings to the public space of the city. The building is designed with 60% solid and 40% glazed area; durable materials were combined with energy saving strategies like insulating fiber cement panel cladding, high performance windows, a sophisticated mechanical system, heat recovery, as well as drain water heat recovery from the common laundry facilities. Unlike other residential building types, the entire structure is wrapped in a highly insulated rain-screen cladding that eliminates all thermal bridging. [via architectural review]
