Oakridge

Henriquez Partners Architects

Short description

A landmark mixed-use project, with ambitious community-building aspirations, Oakridge Park will become Vancouver’s first municipal town centre outside the downtown core.
Oakridge leverages the enormous potential of a 28-acre site in the centre of Vancouver, turning a 1950’s mall with surface parking into an inclusive, complete community built for the future. Guided by 10+ years of planning, iterative design, and extensive public consultation, Oakridge has become one of the largest mixed-use projects in Canada, encompassing 5 million ft2 of development.
The architectural expression of Oakridge combines positive attributes from planning movements that integrate city and nature, and the design narrative begins by reintroducing parkland displaced by the original mall.

A design vocabulary of ‘skin and skeleton’ builds on this, using ‘draped’ landscape as a key element and reinterpreting the residential towers as emerging from the landscape, adorned with their own ‘skins’. The tower slabs, the ‘bones’, are seen along edges where skins are pulled back revealing balconies and storefronts, reinforcing visual and physical permeability at grade. The act of wrapping or revealing defines the relationship between landscape and buildings, breaking up massing while providing programmatic identity.

As a complete community, Oakridge includes a mix of residential, retail, office, public realm, civic, and cultural elements. This includes over 3,000 new homes with 420 affordable units; workspace supporting 5,300+ full-time jobs; an array of civic amenities including a 9-acre public park, community centre, library, daycare, performance spaces and senior’s centre; new retail plus a dynamic foodhall integrated with the park to encourage engagement.

Sustainability measures include an innovative on-site district energy plant reducing carbon emissions by 70+% and supplemented by enhanced building envelopes; water management including a local aquifer supplying 72% of non-potable water; 1,400+ new trees contributing to carbon sequestration; and innovative car co-ops and bike valets to reduce vehicle use.