Initially, the first location for the project was on the site of the existing Sudbury Community Arena but after following City staff’s direction, we proposed a new build on the property but worked to integrate what we could into the new proposal (using the existing lower structure of the arena for parking, for example).

Importance was emphasized not only in the indoor space but the outdoor space as well, to animate the downtown community by adding an outdoor café and extending an existing city laneway through the site to create an ‘arts alley’.

Effectively this would bring much needed store frontage and pedestrian scale presence onto Minto Street. While a challenging site, with multiple ‘fronts’ and access points from Brady, Minto, Elgin, and Grey Street, the focus of the design was to intentionally highlight these by creating ‘architecture in the round’.

The choice for our modular structural system is Cross-Laminated Timber or CLT, which is an innovative, high quality, natural, and adaptable building material.