Grandview Heights Aquatic Centre

The City of Surrey’s Grandview Heights Aquatic Centre delights children and adults alike with its recreational features: a leisure pool with a lazy river, sauna, two hot pools and a fitness center overlooking the natatorium. The central lobby has clear views into the pool area, offering a sense of both openness and security, while a cafe encourages users to enjoy the facility before and after their recreational activities. Wayfinding is intuitive throughout and accommodates people of all ages and abilities in Surrey’s diverse community. Round universal changerooms are both functional and fun, enhancing the users’ first and last impressions of their swimming experience and acting as an unconventional deviation from the often-bleak change facilities in pools of the past.
But perhaps the most distinctive feature of the 95,000-sq.ft. building is the roof, a perfect union of form and function. Rather than employ conventional
steel roof trusses, glulam timber “cables” were introduced, creating the world’s longest-span timber catenary cable roof. These beams hang from post-tensioned concrete buttresses at each end of the building. Prefabricated from regionally sourced Douglas fir beams, individual beams were crane-lifted into place and clad in plywood sheathing in just eight days. The dynamic roof form rises where required to provide clearances for the Olympic dive platform on one end and a waterslide on the other.
Wood was chosen for the roof structure not only for important design considerations – such as its ability to achieve the elegant curving form that
strategically wraps the functional elements within – but also for its proven track record in high humidity environments. Wood is well suited to the pool
environment as it copes very well in the warm, moist air and does not rely on intensive maintenance for durability. The natural appearance of wood also
lends a warm atmosphere to a facility that by necessity requires large areas of hard and impervious surfaces, as well as provides a connection to the surrounding natural landscape and the province’s forestry heritage.
A significant challenge the team overcame in the detailing of the rooftop wall connection was the fact that suspended structures, lacking the rigidity of conventional truss and beam structures, are subject to deflection. The design team worked carefully to ensure the deflection of the roof under different loading conditions (most critically an eccentric snow load) would not exceed 8 in. – the maximum that could be accommodated at the roof edges by a standard curtain wall slip joint detail.
As the wood roof is the key feature of this building, it was deemed important to keep it as clean and uncluttered as possible. As a result, a lot of effort
was put into finding a way to avoid sprinklers in the natatorium. This was achieved through an alternative solution that relies on the reduction of flammable materials combined with a smoke extraction system. A side benefit: this turned out to be a significant maintenance advantage for the client,
as it removed sprinkler lines and heads from areas in the building that are difficult to access, while also allowing the client to forgo the regular maintenance that sprinkler systems in such spaces require because of the chlorinated environment.