Tag Archives: Architecture

This Australian Tiny Home Has Two Bedrooms, a Picture Window, and Zero Compromises

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The Byron Bay by Removed Tiny Homes is not that version. Built by the Brisbane-based builder that has quietly become one of Australia’s most talked about names in the tiny home space, this model is as generous as the coastal town it’s named after. It arrives with two loft bedrooms, a full galley kitchen, and a layout that manages to feel more like a considered home than a scaled-down one.

At 8.4 metres long, 2.5 metres wide, and 4.3 metres tall, the Byron Bay sits at the larger end of what road-legal tiny homes can offer. That scale is put to work immediately. The two upstairs lofts are connected by a full standing height walkway, which sounds like a small detail until you realise how much it changes the experience of moving through the space. There is no crawling, no hunching, no reminder that you made a trade-off. The lofts feel like actual bedrooms, not storage shelves with pillows on them.

Designer: Removed Tiny Homes

Downstairs, the open-plan living area is anchored by a large kitchen fitted with a picture window. Light moves through the interior in a way that makes the 33 square metres read closer to double that. The design team at Removed has clearly thought hard about storage, building it into nearly every surface without letting it dominate the aesthetic. The result is a home that feels edited rather than cluttered.

What makes Byron Bay particularly compelling right now is its off-grid capability. Recent builds leaving the Removed factory have been fully off-grid spec, designed for families planting themselves on rural land or lifestyle blocks far from the grid. For a generation priced out of the traditional housing market, that combination of mobility and self-sufficiency is not a novelty. It is a strategy.

Removed Tiny Homes describes Byron Bay as ideal for families, and you can see why it has become one of their most requested models. Two sleeping spaces, serious kitchen infrastructure, and a layout that prioritises flow rather than function alone. Starting from US$104,000, it positions itself as a genuine alternative to a first home, not a weekend experiment.

Byron Bay does not try to convince you that less is more. It just builds the space well enough that you stop counting square metres and start thinking about where to put it.

The post This Australian Tiny Home Has Two Bedrooms, a Picture Window, and Zero Compromises first appeared on Yanko Design.

A Pour-Over Dripper Inspired One of Beijing’s Best Pop-Ups

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Pop-ups have become one of the more interesting testing grounds for design ambition. They exist long enough to make a statement but not so long that they have to compromise on boldness. And Atelier L seems to understand that assignment completely.

The studio’s latest project is a temporary coffee pavilion for Kurasu, the Kyoto-based specialty coffee brand, installed at Taikoo Li Sanlitun, one of Beijing’s most high-traffic outdoor retail districts. On the surface, it’s a pop-up kiosk. But spend a few seconds looking at it, and you realize it’s a fully considered piece of architecture that draws its entire form from a pour-over coffee dripper.

Designer: Atelier L

That’s the concept at the core of it: the geometry of a pour-over dripper, translated directly into architectural form. Atelier L scaled up the familiar conical vessel into two interconnected volumes, each clad in reflective stainless steel that mirrors the movement and light of the city around it. The inspiration nods to origami, which tracks visually. The structure reads as almost folded into place, light and precise rather than heavy or monolithic.

What makes the design smart rather than just clever is how the two volumes work separately but together. The larger one faces inward, creating a contained environment for the coffee ritual itself. A central linear bar clearly divides the space between barista and customer, and the wall inclinations, subtle as they are, actually serve a functional purpose: they create more movement space behind the counter while making the customer-facing side feel more expansive than its actual square footage. That kind of spatial sleight of hand is hard to achieve in a compact footprint, and Atelier L manages it without making you feel like you’ve noticed it.

The smaller volume does something entirely different. It cantilevers outward toward the street and functions as a display structure and micro gallery, which is an elegant answer to the challenge every pop-up faces: how do you engage passers-by without resorting to signage? Here, the architecture itself becomes the invitation.

Materials are where my personal preferences become part of the read. The stainless steel exterior is striking without trying too hard. It catches the light, reflects the surrounding winter trees, and at dusk, the entire pavilion takes on the quality of a glowing lantern. But the interior feels more considered to me. Wood-grain aluminum brings warmth into what could easily have been a cold, overly minimal space, and the curved surfaces soften light across the small interior rather than bouncing it. The contrast between the pavilion’s cool, almost industrial exterior and its warmer interior is a deliberate design choice, and it works. The outside sets an expectation; the inside quietly revises it.

A steel base anchors both volumes, with its corners slightly lifted to maintain the illusion of paper-thin lightness. Dark gravel and natural stone slabs compose the ground plane. An operable glass roof keeps the interior connected to the sky, allowing the space to shift with the light and the movement of trees above. Those details matter. They’re what separate a thoughtful installation from a kiosk.

For a brand like Kurasu, whose identity has always been rooted in the quiet rituals of specialty coffee, a pavilion that architecturally embodies the act of brewing makes complete sense. The pour-over method is slow, precise, and intentional. The pavilion mirrors all of that. Whether the alignment between concept and experience was always the plan or sharpened through the process, it reads as completely resolved.

Pop-ups tend to get treated as design’s sketchpad, too temporary to be taken seriously. The Kurasu pavilion in Beijing is a case against that assumption. When the brief is specific and the constraints are real, a temporary structure can be as fully realized as anything permanent. Sometimes more so, because there’s no room to defer decisions or soften edges. You build it, it lands, and people either feel it or they don’t. This one lands.

The post A Pour-Over Dripper Inspired One of Beijing’s Best Pop-Ups first appeared on Yanko Design.

Four Meters by Four Meters: How Tadao Ando Made Constraint Beautiful

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Perched on the coast of the Seto Inland Sea in Tarumi-ku, Kobe, the 4×4 House by Tadao Ando occupies a narrow coastal strip that Japanese authorities had not even considered constructible. That is exactly why Ando built there. Completed in 2003, the house rose in the shadow of the Great Hanshin earthquake, a catastrophe that reshaped the region and the consciousness of everyone who lived through it. Ando’s response was not to build bigger or safer in the conventional sense.

It was to build with precision — a four-story reinforced concrete tower with a footprint of just four meters by four meters. Sixteen square meters of floor area, multiplied upward toward the sky. The name is the blueprint.

Designer: Tadao Ando

At 13.4 meters tall, the structure reads less like a residence and more like a sentinel. Its silhouette evokes a watchtower — upright, deliberate, scanning the horizon. Ando sank the foundations deep into the ground to resist lateral forces, and at the base, a square concrete patio disappears beneath the waterline when the tide comes in. The boundary between architecture and ocean is intentionally blurred. Living here means accepting the sea as a roommate.

The interior climbs through a vertical sequence of rooms, each floor stacked with the discipline of a column. What makes the composition unusual is the top floor — a cube shifted slightly off-axis from the floors below, a geometric move that feels almost offhand but transforms the entire silhouette. Light enters in controlled bursts. Views are framed like paintings. Nothing is accidental.

Not long after the first house was finished, a second client commissioned Ando to build an identical tower on the neighboring plot. The result is a pair of concrete twins standing side by side on the coastline, same in form but different in material — a duality Ando had quietly envisioned from the beginning. The two buildings share no physical connection. They stand together, facing the sea, as if in silent conversation.

The 4×4 House is not a comfortable building in the traditional sense. It is a provocation — a proof that constraint, when embraced fully, becomes its own kind of freedom. Ando took a strip of coastline that the city had written off and turned it into one of the most discussed residential structures of the 21st century. Sixteen square meters at a time.

The post Four Meters by Four Meters: How Tadao Ando Made Constraint Beautiful first appeared on Yanko Design.

This Architect Built a 20m² Red Cabin on Her Family’s Greek Vineyard — and It’s the Antidote to Every Concrete Villa on the Island

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Somewhere between the olive groves and vine rows of Zakynthos, a deep-red timber cabin sits quietly in the Greek countryside, and it’s one of the most considered small structures to come out of Europe this year. The Root Cabin, designed by London-based studio Kasawoo, is a 20-square-metre prefabricated retreat that challenges the very idea of what a holiday home in Greece should look like.

The project is personal. Co-founder Katie Kasabalis owns the land in the village of Vanato, a site that has been in her family for decades and still holds the ruins of her grandmother’s old stone house. Together with co-founder Darius Woo, she set out to build something that felt of the place rather than imposed on it. The result sits at just 2.5 by 8 metres, slipping gently between rows of vines without disrupting the agricultural and historical fabric of the land.

Designer: Kasawoo

Built off-site in Romania and transported to Zakynthos fully prefabricated, the cabin is road-legal and designed to be relocatable, a detail that speaks directly to its low-intervention philosophy. “Nothing is superfluous,” the architects told Dezeen. “The project’s generosity lies in what it refuses to add.” In a part of Greece where sprawling concrete villas are accelerating across the countryside, that kind of restraint is quietly radical.

The exterior is wrapped in deep-red timber planks, a shade drawn from the historic villas of Zakynthos, and topped with a gently angled roofline that echoes the island’s mountainous horizon. It’s a structure that has absorbed its context rather than competed with it. Inside, the atmosphere shifts to something warmer and more immediate. Plywood lines the walls, ceilings, and all built-in furniture, creating a near-seamless, cocoon-like interior in which a bed, compact kitchen, sofa, and bookshelves are integrated into the structure.

The layout places the bedroom and bathroom at opposite ends, with a central living space defined by large sliding glass doors that open directly onto the landscape. Red details carry through from the exterior, while the bathroom shifts to soft blue tones, a quiet nod to the Ionian Sea nearby. Objects sourced from Greek makers, including ceramics and textiles, add another layer of local grounding to a space that already feels deeply rooted.

Passive ventilation and operable openings allow the cabin to function off-grid, reinforcing what Kasawoo describes as a “different kind of luxury,” one that measures itself not by square footage or spectacle, but by the quality of what’s been left out.

The post This Architect Built a 20m² Red Cabin on Her Family’s Greek Vineyard — and It’s the Antidote to Every Concrete Villa on the Island first appeared on Yanko Design.

This $35,000 Tiny Home Proves You Don’t Need More Than 161 Square Feet to Live Well

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At 20 feet long and 8 feet wide, the Tulsi by Simplify Further Tiny Homes doesn’t try to be anything it isn’t. It has everything you need, and nothing you don’t. That restraint is exactly what makes it work. While the tiny home market is crowded with builds that either sacrifice livability for aesthetics or pile on features that inflate the price tag, the Tulsi threads the needle — landing at a starting price of $35,000 for a fully functional, NOAH-certified home on wheels.

The Florida-based builder behind it, Simplify Further, has built a reputation around the idea that quality and simplicity aren’t mutually exclusive. Their motto — “Simple Living, High Thinking” — runs through every design decision in the Tulsi. The build carries a BBB Accredited A+ rating, and its certification as an RV through NOAH means it meets a recognized standard for workmanship and safety.

Designer: Simplify Further Tiny Homes

At 161 square feet, the Tulsi packs in a kitchenette, a full bathroom with a shower stall, a flush toilet, a mini sink, a built-in seating area, a main-level queen-sized bedroom, and a loft. The loft measures 7 by 4 feet with a 36-inch height at the low side, accessible by ladder with black metal railings — tight, but functional. The height under the loft sits at 6 feet 4 inches, which means the main living area never feels like you’re ducking through a crawl space.

What sets the Tulsi apart from its contemporaries is its genuine flexibility. The main level bedroom isn’t a compromise — it’s a feature. For guests who don’t mind the loft, you could designate the loft as the main sleeping area and convert the downstairs bedroom to a living room. That kind of adaptability is rare at this price point. In the kitchen, buyers can opt for open shelving or swap seating for additional cabinet storage — a small but meaningful decision that shapes how the space actually lives day to day.

Simplify Further positions the Tulsi primarily as a guest house or mother-in-law suite — a secondary structure that gives visitors full independence without removing them from the property entirely. But the build has proven versatile enough to serve as a short-term rental, a starter home, or a full-time residence for someone drawn to the economy of small living. The Tulsi by Simplify Further seamlessly blends convenience and comfort, making it a charming addition to any property.

For a 161 square foot box on wheels, the Tulsi has quietly earned its place as one of the more thoughtfully designed entry points into tiny living — and the numbers back it up.

The post This $35,000 Tiny Home Proves You Don’t Need More Than 161 Square Feet to Live Well first appeared on Yanko Design.

UNStudio’s Wasl Tower Is Dubai’s Most Sculptural Skyscraper Yet

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There’s a building rising on Sheikh Zayed Road that isn’t trying to be the tallest thing in the room — it’s trying to be the most alive. The Wasl Tower, designed by UNStudio in collaboration with structural engineers Werner Sobek, stands 302 metres above Dubai and carries with it one of the most thoughtful design narratives in the city’s recent skyline story. Conceived as early as 2014 and nearing completion, the 64-storey supertall is a landmark in the truest sense, not just because of its height, but because of what it means to stand there.

The tower draws its form from classical sculpture. UNStudio looked to the ‘contrapposto’, a Renaissance-era pose in which a figure shifts weight and twists slightly at the torso, suggesting movement mid-stride, and scaled it to 302 metres. The result is a building that appears to rotate as you move around it, its geometry shifting with every vantage point. Structurally, this feat is achieved through three massive 300-metre shear walls linked by four strategic outriggers, a system that allows the building to twist gracefully while still supporting a fully flexible, mixed-use floorplate.

Designer: UN Studio

Positioned directly opposite the Burj Khalifa along Dubai’s main north-south artery, the Wasl Tower occupies a site that was previously untouched by high-rise development. A new pedestrian bridge now connects it to the Burj Khalifa metro station, threading the tower into the city’s movement infrastructure and making it a genuine civic node rather than an isolated object. Its programming reflects that ambition — the building houses residential apartments, offices, a hotel, restaurants, and entertainment spaces, with public programming deliberately elevated high above street level.

What gives the tower its visual texture is its facade, one of the tallest ceramic facades in the world. UNStudio and Werner Sobek clad the building in a lace-like grid of glazed clay fins, a material choice that is as low-tech as it is clever. The ceramic tiles diffuse and reflect the desert sun, reducing heat gain and eliminating the need for more energy-intensive shading systems. At night, the facade takes on an entirely different quality, illuminated in a way that makes the building appear to breathe.

For a city that has never been shy about spectacle, the Wasl Tower earns its place on the skyline by being something rarer: a building with a rigorous idea behind it. It references art history, responds to climate, and reshapes a stretch of one of the world’s most iconic roads, all at once.

The post UNStudio’s Wasl Tower Is Dubai’s Most Sculptural Skyscraper Yet first appeared on Yanko Design.

MAD Just Opened a 46,000 sqm Silver Cloud Museum in China

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When we covered the Hainan Science Museum back in 2024, it was still a promise on renderings. The images showed a billowing silver form rising above a tropical wetland, and the honest reaction was: is this actually going to get built? It looked too cinematic, too untethered from the logic of real construction. It’s open now. And it looks almost exactly like the renders promised.

The museum sits on the edge of Wuyuan River National Wetland Park on the west coast of Haikou, in China’s Hainan Province, designed by Ma Yansong and MAD Architects. The shimmering silver exterior is made up of 843 individual pieces of fiberglass-reinforced plastic, fitted together to create a form that ripples and spirals upward like a thermal updraft. That is quite literally the design reference: the movement of warm air rising from the earth’s surface. From a distance, the structure reads as a cloud that materialized above the jungle. Up close, the seams and surface geometry become visible, but it doesn’t break the spell. It deepens it. The material choice matters too. The reflective quality of the panels shifts depending on light and weather, which means the building never quite looks the same twice.

Designer: MAD Architects

The interior is where things get genuinely impressive. The main structure is column-free, which is a structural achievement worth acknowledging on its own. The total building area is approximately 46,528 square meters. Visitors move through the museum via a spiraling ramp that ascends from the central hall across five floors, with the exhibition experience beginning at the top level on a 360-degree viewing platform with open views of both the sea and the city below. A skylight dome floods the central atrium with natural light, and the whole space feels deliberately open and unhurried. That matches MAD’s stated philosophy around what a science museum should actually feel like. As Ma Yansong put it: “A science museum is about education and imagining the future; we want nature to be part of that vision as well.”

That quote is worth sitting with. Science institutions have historically been designed to feel authoritative. Imposing facades, grand columns, marble lobbies. The architecture announces itself as serious and expects visitors to match. MAD is proposing something different: that curiosity and wonder are better triggered by a space that already inspires both. The science content doesn’t need to be communicated through the building itself; the building just needs to make you feel open to receiving it. Whether you fully buy into that idea philosophically, you can’t argue that the Hainan Science Museum fails to create a mood before you’ve even stepped inside.

The building is also elevated off the ground, which allows the wetland landscape to continue flowing underneath it. That relationship between the structure and the site feels considered rather than incidental. It prevents the building from swallowing its environment whole, which matters here given that the natural setting is precisely what the whole project is in conversation with. Standing underneath it, the ground remains soft, green, and alive. For a structure this visually assertive, it sits lightly in a way that isn’t easy to pull off.

This is MAD’s second major public project in Hainan, following the Cloudscape of Haikou, which opened back in 2021. Together, they’re beginning to form a kind of visual language along the Haikou coastline, a series of dreamlike structures that feel more like environmental installations than civic buildings. For a city actively building its identity within China’s free-trade port framework, having work like this on the waterfront is a deliberate cultural statement about where Haikou wants to stand on the global stage.

Design began in 2020. Groundbreaking was in 2021. The main structure wrapped in 2023. Five years from concept to opening doors is a reasonable arc for a project of this ambition and scale. Seeing it finally receive visitors closes a loop that many who followed its construction had been waiting for. Sometimes the renders really do deliver. This is one of those times.

The post MAD Just Opened a 46,000 sqm Silver Cloud Museum in China first appeared on Yanko Design.

Sydney Just Opened a 42-Metre Steel Lookout Over a Former Quarry

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If you told me a 42-metre platform made of weathering steel, suspended over a former rock quarry, would be one of the most compelling pieces of public architecture right now, I’d say I believe you completely. The Southern Lookout at Hornsby Park in Sydney is exactly that. And it is worth every bit of attention it’s getting.

Designed by AJC Architects in collaboration with Clouston Associates, the structure sits on the northern edge of Sydney, overlooking the dramatic topography of Hornsby Quarry. The site itself has a remarkable backstory. For over a century, the quarry was completely inaccessible to the public. A place that had been carved out and worked, left to become something between ruin and wilderness, invisible to the city that had grown up around it. The Southern Lookout is the first completed architectural piece of a much larger 60-hectare landscape masterplan. It is, in the most literal sense, an opening.

Designer: AJC Architects

The choice of weathering steel is the first thing that makes you stop and think. Cor-Ten, as it’s commonly known, is a material that rusts deliberately. It forms a stable oxidized layer on its surface that protects the steel beneath while giving it that signature warm, amber-brown tone. It is a material that ages visibly and honestly, and for a project like this one, placed on the edge of a quarry whose story is entirely about time and transformation, it feels less like a design decision and more like a point of view.

The platform runs 42 metres through the forest canopy, anchored into the embankment and balanced on four angled columns that converge on a single central footing below. That minimalism is intentional. The architects worked specifically to keep ground disturbance on the sensitive slope to a minimum. The result is a structure that feels both bold and careful, which is a hard balance to get right, and one AJC Architects manages convincingly.

Walking it is designed to be as much of an experience as looking at it. The rhythmic sound of footsteps on the metal, the glimpses of the falling topography beneath one’s feet, the steady build of height as you move further along the platform create a physical connection to the sheer scale of the man-made canyon. Every design choice is oriented toward making you feel exactly where you are. That kind of sensory engagement is something the best public infrastructure delivers and so rarely does. Most walkways just take you somewhere. This one makes you reckon with the place itself.

The entrance is framed by steel portals and gabion stone walls, the kind of raw structural language that references the quarry’s industrial character without cosplaying it. It doesn’t try to look cute or approachable. It looks like something that belongs to the site. That restraint is refreshing at a time when so many public design projects err on the side of spectacle for its own sake.

The broader context matters here too. The Southern Lookout is the inaugural phase of an ambitious plan to open Hornsby Quarry up as a 60-hectare public park. That kind of urban regeneration project usually moves at a pace that frustrates everyone involved, so the fact that this lookout is already open, already drawing visitors, already giving people a reason to show up, feels like a meaningful start rather than a placeholder.

AJC Architects, working in collaboration with Hornsby Shire Council, has delivered something that respects the complexity of the site without over-explaining it. The architecture doesn’t lecture you about the quarry’s history. It simply places you inside it. It gives you the height, the steel, the sound, the view, and leaves you to do the thinking.

Public architecture at its best creates a relationship between a person and a place they might not have noticed otherwise. The Southern Lookout does exactly that. Sydney has always had dramatic natural geography. Now, at the edge of a former quarry, it has something that finally lets you see it.

The post Sydney Just Opened a 42-Metre Steel Lookout Over a Former Quarry first appeared on Yanko Design.

Japan Just Built a Pokémon Footbath and It’s Genuinely Moving

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When you hear “Pokémon footbath,” your brain probably goes one of two places: either immediate delight or mild confusion. Both reactions are fair. But when you actually see what just opened in the small coastal town of Wakura Onsen in Nanao City, Japan, the response tends to land somewhere more unexpected than either. It lands in quiet, genuine warmth.

The Wakura Pokémon Footbath officially opened on May 12 inside Yuttari Park in Ishikawa Prefecture, and it is exactly what it sounds like: a public footbath surrounded by beloved Water-type Pokémon. Gyarados towers over the soaking pool, appearing to blast water in with its Hydro Pump. Psyduck perches nearby, looking stressed as always. Vaporeon, Pikachu, Poliwag, Poliwhirl, and Quaxly are scattered throughout the wooden structure, each one in character, each one impossibly charming. The facility is free to use and open daily from 7 AM to 7 PM, though it may close depending on weather conditions.

Designer: Wakura Onsen

From a pure design standpoint, it works. The Pokémon figures feel integrated into the space rather than slapped onto it as an afterthought. The Gyarados placement especially is clever: positioning a creature historically associated with destruction as the one filling a community wellness space with warm water is a quietly subversive design choice. It takes a familiar icon and gives it a new job, and the whole thing is better for it. Good character-led design usually does this. It finds the emotional logic of the IP and builds something genuinely functional around it, instead of just stamping a logo on a wall and calling it a day. The wooden structure keeping everything together also helps ground the Pokémon elements in something tactile and traditionally Japanese, which keeps it from reading as pure merchandise and more as a genuine place to be.

But the design story here is only part of the picture. What elevates the Wakura Pokémon Footbath beyond a cute novelty is the context surrounding it. Wakura Onsen is still recovering from the 2024 Noto Peninsula earthquake, which caused major damage to local tourism infrastructure. The footbath was renovated and developed through a collaboration between Nanao City and the Pokémon With You Foundation, an organization that has long used Pokémon’s reach to support communities facing hardship. Local officials are hoping the new attraction will draw visitors back to a region that urgently needs them. On opening day, a dedication ceremony was held, and children from a local nursery school were among the first to try it out.

That detail matters. It reframes the entire project. A giant Gyarados shooting water into a hot spring pool is fun in isolation. A giant Gyarados shooting water into a hot spring pool in a community rebuilding after a disaster, inaugurated by children experiencing something joyful, is a different kind of story. It is design as care. It is pop culture as infrastructure.

I think we underestimate how much deliberate playfulness can do for a place in recovery. A footbath is not a hospital. It is not a new road or a rebuilt building. But public spaces designed to give people a reason to show up, to sit down, to stay a while, do real work. They signal that a place is worth visiting again. That it has something to offer. That life, in some form, is continuing. And sometimes the difference between a place that comes back and one that does not comes down to whether people believe it is worth returning to.

The footbath also ties into the newly installed Pokémon manhole covers placed around Nanao City, part of Japan’s Pokéfuta initiative, which uses collectible Pokémon-themed covers to encourage visitors to explore lesser-known regions. It is a broader ecosystem of soft infrastructure pointing in the same direction: come here, look around, stay awhile.

Wakura Onsen may not be the first destination that comes to mind for a travel itinerary. But a free footbath where a reformed Gyarados keeps your feet warm while Psyduck quietly spirals next to you? That is a genuinely compelling reason to make the trip. And right now, Nanao City could use a few more of those.

The post Japan Just Built a Pokémon Footbath and It’s Genuinely Moving first appeared on Yanko Design.

Mass Timber, Passive House, & a Curving Roof: This Canadian Community Centre Is the Civic Building Other Cities Should Be Copying

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There’s a version of a public building that checks all the sustainability boxes and still feels cold, institutional, and somehow indifferent to the people it’s meant to serve. The new Marpole Community Centre is not that building. Designed by Diamond Schmitt for the City of Vancouver and the Vancouver Board of Parks and Recreation, it’s nearing completion in Oak Park. It quietly resets expectations for what a civic facility can be.

The project replaces a well-loved but outgrown facility with a two-storey structure nearly double its size, measuring 5,000 square metres. The program is generous: a gymnasium, fitness centre, field house, multi-purpose rooms for seniors and youth, and a 74-space childcare facility. Underground parking is tucked beneath the building to protect the surrounding natural vegetation, letting Oak Park remain exactly that — a park.

Design: Diamond Schmitt

What makes the architecture worth paying attention to is the mass timber. Rather than limiting wood to the roof structure, as institutional buildings often do, the Marpole Community Centre uses a comprehensive mass timber frame — glulam columns and beams, a CLT floor system, and a long-span upper roof built from steel wide flange beams and a CLT deck. The result is a structure that reads as warm and considered, not engineered into submission. Exposed throughout the interior, the timber gives the building a human scale that concrete rarely allows.

The signature move is the gently curving roof. The doubly curved cantilever form, supported by long-span steel beams, required close coordination between the design team and contractors — but the payoff is an exterior that feels unified without being monotonous, and an interior where the ceiling becomes the experience. Strategic glazing pulls the landscape in, connecting occupants to Oak Park’s natural setting without sacrificing energy performance.

On the sustainability front, the numbers are serious. The building targets Passive House and LEED Gold certifications and has achieved a 41% reduction in embodied carbon. It’s also a pilot project for the City of Vancouver’s Embodied Carbon Guidelines, meaning lessons learned here will directly shape future civic buildings across the city. The project is also pursuing the CAGBC’s Zero Carbon Building Design Standard.

Beyond the technical performance, the centre was designed with inclusion, equity, and Indigenous cultural representation as core principles — not afterthoughts bolted on at the end. For a neighbourhood as diverse as Marpole, that intentionality matters. A community centre tends to be the most democratic building a city can build. This one makes a strong case that it can also be among its most thoughtful.

The post Mass Timber, Passive House, & a Curving Roof: This Canadian Community Centre Is the Civic Building Other Cities Should Be Copying first appeared on Yanko Design.