Birmingham & Wood (Partners Sandra Moore & AnnaLisa Meyboom) has won a 2024 Wood Design Award for the Pyrrha project. The project is a mass timber and historic conservation project.
Award:
Wood Design & Building Awards
WoodWorks BC Category
Architect Birmingham & Wood Architects Planners LLP
Engineer Fast + Epp
Owner Pyrrha, Jewellery
Contractor Kindred Construction Ltd
The project consists of industrial space for Pyrrha, a small Vancouver based boutique jewellery manufacturer. It is located at 181 West 5th Avenue in Mount Pleasant’s industrial area. The project was designed as a Heritage Revitalization project where, in exchange for the retention and restoration of a single-family residence built in 1909, a six-storey tower was built at the rear of the site. The tower was constructed in cross-laminated timber, featuring over 9,800 square feet of industrial space for Pyrrha. Cladding was steel to be reminiscent of the industrial history of the site.
Multiple factors played into the choice of mass timber for the project – the aesthetics, sustainability of the material as well as the ease of construction on a tight site. The site was very small with no staging area and being able to get the mass timber superstructure of the tower up quickly made the logistics feasible.
In addition to the tower there was a historic house which was moved off the site and back on. The historic house was preserved and adapted for reuse as a showroom. The structure and cladding remained and interior floors and walls were removed to create one open volume with mezzanines. The existing roof rafters were exposed and the interior ceiling is the 120-year-old fir rafters with new black steel collar ties. The fir flooring in the house was also salvaged.
An outdoor space one level below the street creates a courtyard between the heritage house and the tower. The walking surface is edge grain exposed wood blocks. The landscape architects were Enns Gautier with Cornelia Oberlander.
Press release on award:
