The Challenge: Urban Reimagination

This is a hands-on immersive workshop that encourages architects and engineers to work together to come up with a creative solution that responds to a city challenge.

The Challenge: Urban Fabric Reimagination Across Downtown Vancouver, parts of the urban fabric have lost their sense of purpose in contemporary urban life. Dispersed throughout the city, certain buildings and spaces remain underutilized and lack a clear identity while demand for meaningful ‘third spaces’ grows.

In this context, this design hive called on creatives to propose bold, inclusive ideas that reimagine a given Vancouver site as a vibrant public destination. In addition to exploring reclaiming underused spaces, the challenge explored the boundary between indoors and outdoors, and how a ‘sense of place’ can be cultivated that nurtures community, culture and everyday urban life.

Using International Village Mall and the adjacent alleyway—an unoccupied diagonal corridor running from Pender to Hastings and left behind by historic railway lines—as a representative urban site, the challenge was to envision a design intervention that activates and optimizes this site and the urban fabric it occupies.

The concept had to fulfill the following elements:

• Contextual Integration: Respond to the layered character of Crosstown—at the intersection of Gastown and Chinatown—by drawing from its cultural, historical, and urban context.
• Adaptative Reuse: The atrium structure is to be reimagined using adaptive reuse best practices. Existing structural elements are to be reimagined and repurposed as key components to complement additional ‘light touch’ new interventions across the whole site.
• Inclusive and Safe Design: Define the program and create an environment that is welcoming, safe, and accessible to all users, supporting a diverse range of communities and everyday experiences.
• Modularity: Consider modularity with potential expansion to further local sites.

What happened on the day

With the brief dropping only 24 hours prior, teams hit the ground running on the day off, already discussing their ideas at the initial site walk-through of International Village Mall. The countdown started once they settled into Fast+Epp’s concept lab, complete with models replicating International Village Mall and various supplies to create. Each team (comprising of two architects and two engineers) were given 4 hours to brainstorm, design, build, and present their concepts to a panel of judges from Francl Architecture and Fas+Epp. Throughout the day, these judges visited each station to provide tangible feedback that each team could take away to refine their concept.

The Concepts

The Junction revives the International Village Mall as a space where Vancouverites’ varied histories and cultures come together. The axial plan reinforces the intersection between the historical rail line formerly connecting Yaletown to Gastown, and the stretch of Pender St either side of the Millennium Gate that marks the transition between Chinatown and Downtown Vancouver. Changes to the existing architecture join with sculptural and landscape elements to increase permeability of the site for pedestrians and join the mall’s atrium with the laneway park across Pender St.

The Entryway reimagines a new canopy and overhead retractable door system are introduced, allowing the entrance to open to its full height while preserving and reinforcing the site's industrial character. The design extends interior elements outward, carrying the mall's flooring pattern and palette, introducing a modular structural framework that continues along the natural pedestrian axis established by the building. This framework repeats and extends in nodes from Keefer Pl to Alexander St, creating a cohesive and recognizable urban hub.

The design concept, Ebb and Flow, draws inspiration from the layered character of Crosstown at the intersection of Gastown and Chinatown. It reimagines International Village as an open, welcoming public destination by inviting the energy of the surrounding neighbourhoods to flow through the building and reconnect the north and south sides of the site. The concept is guided by the metaphor of River – Eddy – Shore – Pond, where movement, gathering, and community interaction are expressed through a series of interconnected public spaces.

Crosstown Livingroom transforms International Village Mall into a sequence of urban experiences through a patio, interior living room, elevated outdoor living room, pavilion, and garden, creating a new public destination for the community. Modular trolley cars are integrated throughout the project as a fun element that references the railway heritage while providing opportunities for local retail. The structural intervention is carefully designed to minimize impact on the existing building, with prefabricated steel trusses and concrete columns used where new structure is required to maximize construction efficiency.

And the winner is...

The Junction revives the International Village Mall as a space where Vancouverites’ varied histories and cultures come together. The axial plan reinforces the intersection between the historical rail line formerly connecting Yaletown to Gastown, and the stretch of Pender St either side of the Millennium Gate that marks the transition between Chinatown and Downtown Vancouver. Changes to the existing architecture join with sculptural and landscape elements to increase permeability of the site for pedestrians and join the mall’s atrium with the laneway park across Pender St.