Can re-thinking parking create new architecture? Does civic symbolism matter? Can civic architecture change public opinion? How can transparency transform civic architecture? Is it architecture’s place to comment on justice, bureaucratic management, or accessibility? Can children and policing be mutually beneficial? Can bring-your-child-to-work inspire architecture? What does less land-intensive architecture look like?
Dictation
This project came from a public tender call. It’s a greenfield site at the edge of Waterdown, a semi-rural and suburban area near Hamilton, Ontario. The region is famous for having over 100 waterfalls. The site is right on the edge of the Niagara escarpment, a rocky chunk of the Canadian Shield that drops off towards Lake Ontario.
Waterdown is a bedroom community in Hamilton, but its growth has been slow. Nearby Hamilton originally had many mills. It grew to be an industrial centre. Doughnut retailer Tim Hortons originates in the area. The city is being pulled into and contributing to Toronto’s sprawl, but, for now, it is still a place where people live and work. It now needs a new and improved fire and police department complex.
Innovatively, the client wants to combine the fire and police departments under one roof, overlapping in minor ways, with some shared parking lots.
Keeping with established fire hall traditions, three or four fire trucks are kept inside. Fire departments no longer hang the hoses in a tower because they don’t use the kind of hoses that need to dry that way. As always, the police need a jail, holding cells, and space for patrol and office staff. Most police personnel are on the road in their patrol cars, while their civilian vehicles are parked out back. The fire department personnel still sleep at work. Their shifts revolve around conventional dormitory life.
Our first idea ahead was to take the schematic design included in the tender call brief and hardly do anything to it except try to find ways to make it more efficient and, hopefully, inventive.
Males and females overlap and work together as police and fire departments diversify their forces. An overlapping program and unisex building design might be the hardest to resolve in the locker rooms. We started our investigations there. We wondered if everyone from the police or fire departments could walk around the locker and shower areas wearing tubular structures on wheels –like those old comic books where people down on their luck during the Depression wore “bankruptcy barrels” as clothing. We would modernize them by introducing lightweight carbon fibre shells, and smooth casters. No single-purpose spaces would be needed since you roll your privacy with you like hospital patients who roll their IV stand outside to smoke.
With the most controversial part of the design tidily resolved, we turned our attention to the site. It is surrounded by wetlands and has an environmentally sensitive area in one corner that cannot be built on.
We wondered why the intended program called for so much parking space. It seemed inappropriate to propose pouring asphalt anywhere on a sensitive site. If one corner is super sensitive, it is fair to assume the whole site is some kind of support network. The brief called for two big parking lots, with one gated. The tender documents proposed a fuel storage and fueling area in the site’s corner nearest the sensitive wetland. We all know spills happen. As we contemplated the brief, it seemed like the whole project would work well if it stood on the site on tiptoe, hardly touched the site, and somehow used the roof area of the building for parking to leave more of the greenfield site untouched.
Security for patrol cars parked overnight is a real concern. It is conventionally resolved with heavy gates. Staff parking did not require a gate, but most staff would feel better if their civilian parking lot had some added security. I was looking around at how cars and trucks get stored one day on a major road in Vancouver. Car dealerships often drive a special offer or featured vehicle onto a faux rocky slope or onto a steel ramp to make it eye-catching for anyone driving by. This tactic literally and figuratively elevates the vehicle, making it seem faster, bigger, and more important. Honouring a vehicle also honours the person who drives it, since people’s identities are often tied to their mode of transportation in the suburbs.
Our proposal tries to revive the self-esteem and dignity of the workplace. In the wake of funding cuts, police departments must deal with staff morality and recruitment challenges. Being on the police force would have instant gravitas if staff parked their cars on the roof of the fire and police building and parked them on a personal ramp. The same ramps would store and celebrate patrol cars during work shifts. People could drive by and see their mom, dad, or friend’s car parked on a ramp. It would transform the optics of community service.
We didn’t want to leave the firefighters out of the fun. With the death of the hose tower, the design of the Canadian fire station has become a little underwhelming. As old civic fire department buildings crowned with clocks and towers, we wanted to propose a fire department building that would be a billboard for itself. Firefighters enjoy higher status since they save lives and buildings in simple and direct ways. Because police personnel must deal with crime and speeding tickets, they have never enjoyed the esteem of their civic peers.
Firefighters are a different kind of first responder. Firefighters have a lot of downtime, and the public is not really allowed in, so their buildings are often more low-key. However, the cost of maintaining fire departments is very high, especially since house fires don’t happen very often anymore now that fewer people smoke in bed, houses have fire sprinklers, and people are completely entombed with non-flammable drywall. Much of the downtime is spent washing the firetrucks, barbecuing, napping, and working out because they might go to a fire, but, in contrast, the police are always driving around on their “beat.”
Fire trucks are beautiful objects. They’re easy to maintain in great condition because they are hardly driven. It would be a lot of fun to see local dollars at work more clearly by making the fire trucks completely on display through glass walls facing the main street. The only problem with this idea is firefighters would have to parallel park the fire trucks every time they brought them back. This would make the job more challenging, which seems like a reasonable trade for good working conditions and excellent pensions.
Behind the firetruck, picture windows would be the heart and soul of the new building. The entrance is hidden at the back, under a tiered structure that feels a bit like the underside of stadium bleachers. It feels a bit taboo and behind the scenes to be under any kind of bleachers. Anyone coming and going from the fire station would feel like they are in on the joke, in the cool kid’s club, and in the know. The spatial condition would be good for morale. The diesel fueling tank hangs above the main entry like a big yellow pinata. This will give the reception area a view of the action. Lifting the diesel tank off the ground allows any small leaks to be noticed immediately before they taint the wetland soils.
You cannot be a firefighter unless you are able-bodied. Dorm rooms for firefighters could be used for another purpose: to let the building’s structure show people what is happening inside. Stacking rooms on top of rooms would be a nice way to reintroduce the tower shape back to any fire station, just without the hoses. Elevators are extremely expensive. But if stacked dorm rooms are for able-bodied employees only, stair access only would be sufficient. This would cause ripples in the building department, but expensive building components should only be required if practical and reasonable. A cross could be created if the tower dorm rooms spread out halfway up, which would be useful for a TV or recreation room. Like ambulance drivers, firefighters respond to a lot of health calls. This new building-as-cross (nodding to the esteemed Red Cross) could help with any future rebranding campaigns. On the theme of total transparency, the dorm and recreation rooms would have floor-to-ceiling glass. This would let people driving by see their tax dollars at work by revealing what fire station personnel do around the clock. In fact, as a modern nod to gracious civic clocks on towers, a new digital screen should be installed on the glass windows. The time, weather, breaking news (possibly with revenue-generating advertisements), and a running tally of the cost to operate this new police and fire station would be a great way to show the community how they benefit from taxes.
The dorm and recreation tower for fire station personnel needs a second means of egress in the event of a fire. The second way to get down would also be used when everyone must quickly get out of bed or off the sofa to move quickly to the fire trucks below in case of an emergency call.
The traditional fire pole is considered too dangerous. Fire escape chutes are now used in India and China. Like a large, rented toy at a child’s birthday party, in the event of a fire (to fight or to escape from), personnel would jump into human-diameter tubes that run from the tower right down into the fire truck hall. Fireproof fabric slows your fall in a controlled way, which would be very fun for children to try out on field trips.
Our proposed fire and police station concept tries hard to turn the whole place inside out while still being safety conscious. Controlled danger is acceptable if it is saddled with adequate safety measures. This is how life is if you are a firefighter or police officer. It makes sense to reflect a building’s users more in their architecture.
This new building has a childcare space to encourage adults with families to join the police force. The childcare is located beside the indoor shooting range. The optics of having a spot with handgun training and tactical rifle training next to young children might seem odd to outsiders, but it might make symbolic sense.
Another exciting programmatic part of this case study involves a different type of danger. Preschoolers and children up to grade 12 typically love a good field trip because kids are interested in what adults do. Instead of talking down to or coddling young people, this case study exposes them to the inner workings of a police and fire station. Their classroom looks out over the parking lot, seeing all kinds of adults coming and going. This theme is repeated elsewhere in the building.
To save and use space effectively, the childcare’s play gym is also the boiler room and mechanical space. These rooms are almost always empty. The custodian can easily put small mesh cages around hot or sharp things to keep them perfectly safe. Kids would find it so interesting to crawl around the hidden utility spaces of the building, climbing, and hanging from pipes and ladders.
The tender call requested that parking lots for staff and patrol cars should be gated for security. It is even more secure to park on the roof of a building if elevators are used to bring vehicles up and down. Vehicle elevators are very common now, often used at multi-storey car dealerships or mechanic shops. This case study uses the room-size elevator platform to lift extra special glass-walled interior space up and down every time the elevator is used for a vehicle. Inspired by dunk tanks at fundraisers, the police or fire chief would get amazing four-cornered offices with glass walls, but to keep them in good humour, their office spaces would get dunked into the moat every time the elevator went down to grade. A holding cell for criminals would use the third elevator, highlighting how those charged with a crime are innocent until proven guilty. The holding cell could create anonymity for anyone who requests it, with electronic window frosting that goes translucent at the flick of a switch. This same glass is used in high-end offices to instantly transform glass boardrooms into a private space. As each of the three elevators gets raised out of the moat, a cascading sheet of water runs over each glass façade as a reminder of the region’s waterfalls.
The interior layout of this case study was created by recombining the schematic plans provided during the tender call. We made the plans as symmetrical as possible. Civic buildings should always be symmetrical to revive a greater sense of respect, pride, and, hopefully, awe.
Civic buildings often use symmetrical plans or facades. Early libraries, courthouses, fire stations, police stations, and hospitals rarely deviated from balanced proportions and facades. The advent of larger roads, sprawl, and large parking lots eroded this symmetry.
This case study reintroduces seriousness and solemnity to an ignored building type that has suffered in our culture of expedience since the 1940s. This proposal’s delicate siting preserves a sensitive wetland as a model for greenfield suburban developments with large parking needs anywhere. This case study evolved with no regard for aesthetics. Like a cartoon Rube Goldberg machine, its awkward but undeniable logic and useful qualities are enriched by its modern symbolism and diplomatic personality.
Super Short Sentences
D’Arcy Car culture is culture. Police and fire departments cost taxpayers a lot of money, so they should expect literal transparency. Civic buildings can and should have lighter footprints than for-profit projects.
Kelsey Public service as a landmark. Two-way surveillance.
Jonny Background: A large field, surrounded by field. Formidable and most likely practical, Waterdown is a complex blending of our two most called upon public servants.
Jesse How can we meaningfully integrate two rival civic entities (police and fire) that dislike sharing a building?
Alex A paired police and fire station to optimise their overlapping program requirements on an ecological site.
Mary A new kind of signage for Ontario, the Waterdown Police + Fire Station celebrates a new residential/agricultural/industrial architectural typology, all while critiquing the irony of civil services.
Shane Waterdown Police + Fire Station is a project that seeks to provide an answer to the age-old question: do cops and firefighters actually hate each other?
Breana The inner workings of our civil forces on display in the midst of agricultural land.
This exploration is part of an ongoing speculative project that began as doctoral research. The collaborative case studies test ideas that will inform future built work. A new design methodology using unconventional techniques explores how to delay aesthetics and form in a search for utility-driven, human-focused projects. Architecture’s status quo is questioned through an optimistic but contrarian lens.
