Passage House
Location: East Gwillimbury, Ontario, Canada
Owner/Operator: Blue Door
Developer: R-Hauz
Architects: Edge Architects
Construction Management: Jackman Construction
Passage House is a 2-storey, 18-unit transitional housing project built for the Blue Door, a social services charity and the largest emergency housing provider in York Region. Passage House is located in East Gwillimbury on The Landing campus at 18838 Highway 11. Two existing emergency housing facilities are currently situated on this site: Porter Place for men and Leeder Place for families. Passage House will help create additional capacity for transitional housing for individuals experiencing homelessness.
Blue Door operates the transitional housing facility and provides one-on-one support services to help individuals live independently and move into permanent housing, which will help people build healthy lives and create stable communities. To that end Passage House also features a health hub, with regular visits from a nurse and doctor.
The project was completed in 2002 under the CMHC’s Rapid Housing Initiative (RHI). The objective of the RHI is to create new units of permanent affordable housing for people and populations who are vulnerable and targeted under the National Housing Strategy (NHS). A core requirement of RHI funding is that a development must be built within 12-months of the contract award. Passage House was designed and built in seven months. A keystone to the successful, rapid delivery of the project was the “repeatability” of the design and construction methods. The use of use of prefabricated modular, mass timber components developed by the project team member Element5, which were factory-built and then easily assembled on-site significantly help reduce the construction schedule while also delivering cost savings over a traditional site-built project.
HGC was responsible for comprehensive design input to achieve sound transmission (ASTC) compliance of suite-demising separations with respect to OBC requirements. Suite-demising assemblies and junction details were separately assessed and, where necessary, modeled to verify the theoretical acoustical performance of both the demising assembly and adjacent constructions.
Acoustical Engineering Services Delivered Include:
- Design Review of Structural cross-laminated timber (CLT) Junctions
- Design Review of Architectural Assemblies and Junctions
- ASTC Testing
