New Waterford Hub will be a grade 6-12 school, a community wellness centre, a health centre and a long-term care home – and much more than the sum of its parts. By bringing all of these functions together under one roof, the project partners hope to break down the barriers that can prevent people from accessing the support they need. Students won’t need to leave the building to see their family doctor or go to life skills classes in the wellness centre; seniors will be able to watch community sports on the playing fields below their patio or enjoy shows by the town’s many artists and musicians in the 500-seat theatre. 

New Waterford lies on the eastern edge of Cape Breton Island, a former coal-mining, steel-making town. When these industries shut down 30 years ago, the local economy was hit hard, with many knock-on effects for the population. This ground-breaking facility is a new approach to the social determinants of health – that is the many non-medical factors that can affect health and wellbeing, such as housing, nutrition and job security.

Cape Breton Highlands National Park

Cape Breton Highlands National Park

Plans were already afoot for a new health centre and school when Nova Scotia’s government set out a vision of “wraparound schools”, offering a range of supplementary services such as mentoring, social work and after-school programming. “We began talking about what else we could do,” says Mickey Daye at Nova Scotia Health, the project’s clinical director. “How could we bring these facilities together to provide better opportunities for the students and the community?”

Community members have been closely involved with the project throughout, from deciding what facilities it should offer to how it is laid out. From the start, it was clear that everything needed to be under one roof, says Daye. “We didn’t just want collocated buildings, we wanted to really integrate services together.”

Location

  • Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Canada

Client

  • Build Nova Scotia

Project Status

  • Ongoing

Architects

  • Architecture49 and HDR Architects

Awards

  • Targeting LEED for Healthcare v4/4.1 Silver
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This means that students won’t even need to go outside to seek help with health or social issues, or collect supplies for their family from the on-site food bank. They’ll also be able to gain work experience in a healthcare environment: the school curriculum will be developed to help them find jobs in professions such as nursing, medicine or social work, creating new employment opportunities and ensuring the community has the skilled workforce it needs to thrive for the future.

“Having the health centre and long-term care attached will mean the students don’t have to worry about transportation to another facility,” explains Daye. “They can just walk across and get an understanding of those careers.”

The challenge for the design team was how to create a building that could fulfil all of these functions at the same time – in the most energy-efficient way.

There’s a huge community spirit in New Waterford, and we want to engage with that to improve those determinants of health. Hopefully when we look back in 15 or 20 years, we’ll see that we’ve made a difference to people’s lives.
Mickey Daye Clinical Director, Nova Scotia Health

 

Whose building is it anyways?

Schools and hospitals are very different facilities, and they’re designed to different codes, set by different ministries. So, when a building contains both, whose rules should it play by?

“The Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Education don’t usually have to coordinate anything or talk to each other – even the way they fund projects is different. But here, everything is attached and sitting on top of each other,” says project coordinator Sarah Prodor, architect, nurse and healthcare practice lead at Architecture49.

One of the biggest challenges was how resilient the building needed to be: the Office of the Fire Marshall considers a school to be in the “high” importance category, whereas a hospital is a “post-disaster” facility and must be designed to much tougher standards.

Resolving all of these questions has involved an unprecedented level of collaboration between WSP, Architecture49 and design partners HDR, Dillon Consulting and BMR, as well as all of the relevant governing bodies too.

“It’s very much an integrated project, not only from the architecture and engineering standpoint, but from the government and community standpoint too,” says Prodor. “Nobody’s done a building like this before, so we’re all learning. Our team is in constant communication.”

 

Everything is connected… except when it’s not

When the New Waterford Hub is complete, it will appear as a harmonious whole – but for WSP’s structural engineering team, it’s a complex four-dimensional jigsaw. The building is designed to be as open as possible, but it still had to be broken up physically, to secure approval from the Office of the Fire Marshall and so it can be constructed in phases adjacent to and on the site of the old school. 

The biggest puzzle was where to locate the four giant fire walls, so as not to break the connections between different spaces. “We wanted transparency and flow, but you can’t have windows through fire walls, or many openings at all,” says Prodor. “That means that the wellness centre is part of the health centre, even though they’re completely different occupancies, and then the long-term care home cantilevers on top of that.”

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 The first phase of the construction includes the new school – and an apparently unrelated staircase. “It’s an entirely independent structure in the first phase because it actually belongs to the structural system of the other part of the building,” explains Kathryn Edwards, senior director of structures at WSP. “It does need access to the school, but only at two points. Someone might look at that staircase tower on site and wonder ‘what on earth was this engineer thinking?’ But it’s because we’re solving the total problem, instead of just the initial phase.” 

 

Sub-acute short-stay beds
12 12
Long-term care home beds
60 60

 

Sustainability Beyond the Check Boxes

New Waterford Hub is targeting a Silver rating under the LEED for Healthcare certification. This system was selected because the majority of the facility is healthcare related, but the team has incorporated best practices from other rating systems that better address the school, or occupant health, wellbeing and performance. 

This holistic view, informed by a constant dialogue with the community, has spanned many aspects of the building. Materials have been carefully selected to create a healthy indoor environment, and water use has been reduced by 30%. The design is based on principles to encourage active occupants, with access to places of respite, such as a labyrinth, shaded patio area, greenhouse and community garden.
 

We’re trying to look 15, 20, 25 years ahead, at how we do the best that we can not just for us but those future generations that are coming after us.
Mickey Daye Clinical Director, Nova Scotia Health
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Other challenges that we have overcome