Tideview Terrace

The Tideview Terrace (TVT) Long-term Care Facility is a 90-bed nursing care facility with 18 beds dedicated to residential care. The client’s goal with this replacement facility was to achieve improved and expanded services in a healthy and pleasant living and working environment. To support this goal, the new facility had to be highly functional – accommodating modern technologies, clinical education space, and an expanding community role - while also providing a warm and friendly atmosphere.

To create a more intimate and home-like space, the facility was designed as smaller, residentially-scaled ‘houses’, with each 9-bedroom ‘house’ having its own kitchen, dining room, living room, and laundry room. In addition, each resident ‘house’ is served by its own front door, and the covered porches, lanterns, and ship-lap siding contribute to that maritime house-like feeling.

Residents have on-grade access to the secure outdoor gardens and walking paths, which allows them to enjoy both the living spaces and the outdoors. The designers recognise that residents will spend the majority of their time indoors – due to lifestyle, inclimate weather, etc. – so the landscape areas are also structured to provide visual interest from indoors.

To ensure that the facility provides the care and service required of a long-term care facility, the resident ‘houses’ are physically interconnected through a background building. Informal nursing stations are incorporated into open-concept common areas between ‘houses’. Tideview Terrace also includes a commercial kitchen, commercial laundry, hair salon, multi-purpose rooms, meeting rooms, and administrative office areas.

The project is pursuing LEED Silver Certification and features energy-efficient systems including a geothermal energy plant, solar-heated domestic hot water, water savings devices and low water use irrigation, as well as sustainable materials, natural day-lighting that makes use of ‘light towers’, and natural ventilation

Tideview Terrace held their grand opening event on September 29th, 2011.

WHW Sustainable Circus

A core group of WHW’s LEED Accredited Professionals regularly engage in an in-house design forum to explore and share ideas about sustainability and design. We call it the “Sustainable Circus”. Like any good circus, the “Sustainable Circus” has plenty of variety under its big tent. Topics can range from specific building design challenges to broadly interconnected social, economic and environmental trends. The presentations are made by in-house sustainability leaders or guests. Naturally, the discussion is kept on track by a designated “ringmaster”.

At a recent ‘Circus’, LEED Green Associate Miro Krawczynski presented “Full Circle” examining how the traditional relationship between cities and surrounding farmland has changed over the years with urban sprawl and our disengagement from agricultural concerns. We see signs of rebuilding that relationship with small pockets of urban gardens and interactions between local farmers and consumers at farm markets, but what is the larger picture? What is the impact on our patterns of development, of transportation, recreation, commerce and housing? What are our priorities and what actions, individually and collectively, need we take to ensure the sustainability of our communities? What balance do we need to achieve in order to create a more palatable future? What would change if we promoted a better understanding of the connection between food, consumption, waste, and environmental health? As designers of the built environment can we lead that change?

These ‘Circus’ presentations and discussions help participants expand their thinking about sustainability, and broaden our approach to building design. Increasingly we ask how architecture serves the needs beyond building occupants and how those people will integrate, invigorate and sustain their own community ecosystem over time. Its not really about getting the right answers, its really about asking the right questions.