When the joint-venture team of HOK and ZAS Architects set out to design a new head-office campus for Honda Canada Inc. in Markham, good connectivity was identified as a top priority. Honda’s existing head-office complex, in Scarborough, sprawls across a long, thin site that necessitates driving to get to the various buildings.

“We created a tight composition with easy communication and travel between the three components,’ says Gordon Stratford, principal in charge at HOK. “The office component and training centre work most closely together, so they were placed in immediate juxtaposition.”

The new campus will be located on a 53.3-acre parcel of land fronting Highway 404, just north of Elgin Mills Road. The HOK/ZAS team is responsible for the project’s architectural and interior design. The 500,000-square-foot campus will feature three separate, interconnected buildings: a four-storey, 150,000-square-foot head-office building; a 65,000-square-foot single-storey technical centre that accommodates research and development, engineering and training; and a 200,000-square-foot parts distribution centre.

The office building is designed to be LEED Gold certified.

Among the sustainable aspects of the design:

• A central plant will efficiently distribute all heating, cooling and power (there are no rooftop chillers); exhaust air will go to a heat exchanger that pre-warms intake fresh air.
• Bicycle storage, showers and changing rooms will make it easy for employees to pedal to work.
• Construction waste management through recycling or reuse will minimize the amount of waste going to landfill.
• For future expansion, the planning allows the buildings to double in size while maintaining efficient floor plates.
• Rain water on parking surfaces will drain through bio-filters before being released to public sewer systems.
• Storm water on the parts distribution centre roof will be filtered and recirculated to serve the campus’s entire irrigation needs.
• The office building is oriented to reduce solar heat gain.
• White, heat-reflective membrane roofs will reduce interior cooling requirements and minimize the buildings’ “heat island” effect.

One reason Honda selected the site is its high visibility from Highway 404, HOK said.

The office building, to be clad in silvery metallic Alucobond aluminum panels, will be perpendicular to the 404, with the narrow west end facing the highway, giving “generous long vistas” to the workers inside. The angle also works as a passive sustainable strategy in terms of solar orientation, with the long sides facing north and south. This minimizes difficult-to-control heat gain from low east and west sun angles, HOK said. Solar heat gain on the south, east and west will be controlled with shades that project one metre from the façade.

As part of the sustainability strategy, the building’s finger-like floor plan places all occupants within eight metres of the continuous, ribbon windows. This jibes with Honda’s corporate culture, which places everyone, including senior executives, in an open office to encourage communication. “All workstations will have low partitions to further enhance the flow of information and ideas”, said design architect Ken Brooks.

In keeping with its visibility along the 404, the campus will be an aesthetic “good neighbour,” with the distribution centre’s busy service yard and its attendant semi-trailers and loading docks screened from view by the other building components. The secondary loading facility, serving the office building and training centre, will be shielded from motorists’ view by a berm topped with translucent glass. Site lighting will have cutoff angles to avoid light-pollution conflicts with nearby Buttonville Airport and the University of Toronto’s David Dunlap Observatory, with the largest optical telescope in Canada.

ZAS comprises 50-plus professionals in Canada, including architects, planners, technologists, interior designers and graphic designers.

One of the world’s largest architecture and design firms, HOK employs 2,300 people in 25 offices on four continents. In Canada since 1997, HOK has offices in Toronto, Ottawa and Calgary. The Toronto office’s 250 staff members include 75 interior designers, making it the largest interiors practice in Canada.

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