Construction is underway on the $180 million Gateway Building at the University of British Columbia, designed by Perkins&Will and Schmidt Hammer Lassen. Intended as a “principal point of entry” to the UBC campus, the design of the six-story, 267,000-square-foot mass timber building seeks to balance sustainability, personal well-being, and Indigenous collaboration.

The scheme comprises two five-story wings connected by a central naturally-lit six-story atrium, which includes a large interconnecting staircase and lounging spaces. The building’s mass timber structure is fully expressed in the interior; a decision driven by the importance of timber for the Indigenous Musqueam people on whose territory the UBC campus sits.

“This was the first capital project where we did what we call ‘deep engagement’ with the Musqueam,” UBC’s director of planning and design Gerry McGeough told Canada’s Journal of Commerce. “We went through a whole series of exploratory discussions with them where they defined what their values are they’d like to have embraced in this project.”

When completed in 2024, the building will become a center for the university’s health departments. For McGeough, the timber interior of the Gateway Building has the potential to reinforce a sense of warmth and wellness, as does the importance of nature and landscape emphasized in the team’s discussions with the Musqueam people.

“The traditional Musqueam house is vertical wood columns with horizontal wood siding, using cedar as the fastener material,” McGeough explained. “It was all a system that you could disassemble and move if you wanted to move a house. That relationship of materials from a conceptual point of view is realized in our use of wood in the atrium and around the perimeter.”

Mass timber also plays a central role in the scheme’s environmental ambitions. The project is aiming to be the first building to meet the Canada Green Building Council’s Zero Carbon Building standard and is also targeting LEED Gold certification.

News of the initiative comes months after Perkins&Will was selected to design a new STEM facility at Howard University, and weeks after AIA President-elect Emily Grandstaff-Rice joined the firm’s Boston studio to help its EDI, decarbonization, and research efforts.