Affinity building gives new life to City Park school
Mark Lane looked down from the fourth floor outdoor deck of the new Affinity Campus at the outdoor hockey rink and “shack.”
“That is the nicest rink shack in Saskatchewan, I think,” Lane laughed. “The neighbourhood is going to love it.”
Lane, Affinity’s CEO, was acting as tour guide of Affinity’s new head office, formerly Wilson School on Seventh Avenue, which was built in 1927.
The building is a blend of old and new that offers the 170 staff plenty of open space and natural light.
“We kept the old Wilson School plaque and the Tyndall steps were re-purposed as outside benches and incorporated in the reception area,” Lane said. “Other materials from the building were also reused during construction including metal, glass, lumber and insulation.”
The renovation and expansion project and First Nations University of Canada building took two years to complete. The 69,000 square foot building includes office space, an exercise room, parking and a recreational area.
The building accommodates all Saskatoon-based administrative employees who were formerly working in four separate buildings in the downtown core.
“The move will provide significant cost savings for our credit union,” said Lane, but added, more importantly, it brings everyone together in the same building.
After the merger of First Sask and Affinity in 2008 it was tough for everyone to be on the same page.
“Everyone was trying to do their absolute best for the Credit Union as a whole, but we didn’t know one another,” Lane said.
“If you could bring everyone under one roof, in the same room, you will make better decisions.”
The building is a joint venture between Affinity and Meridian Development Group.
Karl Miller, a partner in Meridian, said the building was a great project for his company which, among other projects, redeveloped the King George Hotel into condos.
“This would be neat to repurpose that building and really come up with a creative, adaptive use for the building,” Miller said. “We’ve done a number of these historic renovations and gutted some old buildings and put them back together so our crews were pretty comfortable doing that.
“It has just a beautiful facade on that building and it is in great condition,” he said. “It needed very little rehab on the exterior to really make it shine again.”
One of the more creative ideas was to add a fourth floor to the building.
“We were able to add more square footage onto the building without impacting the site toward the neighbourhood.”
The fourth floor, which is set back and actually hard to see from street level, is mostly a staff lounge with outdoor patios on both sides of the building. There is plenty of seating areas, fridges, stoves and microwaves, even a fireplace.
“I have to give credit to Mark,” Miller said. “He decided from Day 1 that the fourth floor was for the staff and not for the executive team,” Miller said. “That is almost unheard of in the executive world.”
In fact, the executive offices are located on the first floor. The second and third floors are similar, open workspaces.
“We tried as best we could to avoid having walls,” Lane said.
Derek Kindrachuk, cofounder of Kindrachuk Agrey Architecture and principal architect on the project, said this was a valuable building and deserved to be restored.
The challenge was, “How do you respect the original building, do an addition, have it fit in with the community and reflect Affinity?”
The entrance is a great example of melding new with old.
With the fourth floor they decided to have it inset so as not to take away from the original building.
“Rather than just plunk the new addition on the same footprint, we rotated it off 7.5 degrees just so that it was its own entity,” Kindrachuk added.
The entrance at the north end of the building has a glass outer shell with the original exterior now on the inside.
“You walk in and see the exterior of the old facade,” Miller said.
They tried to salvage what they could throughout the building.
“Our guys were able to salvage brick and were able to put areas back together,” Miller said. “You would never know today that there used to be a door or a window or an opening there because they tied it all back in and you’d think that is the original wall.”
Outside there is more than 200 parking spots on site, more than 1,000 native plants, trees and shrubs have been planted and the fruit trees which line the perimeter are freely accessible to local residents along with the rink.
“Throughout the construction process, it was important for us to maintain the look of the original building and to ensure it would be pleasing to the local community,” Lane said.
And there are always unforeseen glitches that have to be overcome.
“(For example) there is a lot more light coming from the parking lot than what the community had envisioned so we are looking at ways to cause a dimming of the lighting after such and such an hour,” Lane said. “That’s the kind of feedback we welcome, because we want to be a good neighbour.”
On Friday local residents, former Wilson School students and teachers and local business owners were able to come to an open house.
“They have watched the transformation of the building over the last few years and hopefully they will be pleased with the results,” said Lane.
Miller said these types of projects are great because you are able to save and adapt an important building in the community.
“I would put Affinity’s repurposing and adaptive reuse of that building up against any office building in Canada in terms of adaptive reuse,” Miller said. “It matches anything in Toronto or Vancouver. It’s a spectacular, one-of-a-kind building.”