Rajendran Neelakandan, Miles Asher, Ruba Salah, Provis Wan, Wanrong Zhu

Solar Decathlon:
Multifamily Residential Building

This project is the culmination of design decisions and extensive research developed by the Multifamily Residential Building team from Toronto Metropolitan University. The site has a total floor area of 2800 m2 and is located at the northeastern intersection of Dundas Street and Mutual Street in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It features a five-story residential and commercial mixed-use building with very high-performance metrics, reaching Passive House levels in several criteria. This was achieved by preserving the existing commercial building, which is not accounted for in project data, and instead of building over and around it using a modular construction design. This form of construction allowed the team to create unique and efficient design choices without the need to account for carbon costs from complete demolition or renovating existing structures.

The team had many goals in mind for the project, with major ones being occupant comfort (IEQ, internal environmental quality), affordability, community support, durability, and resilience, low embodied carbon, energy efficiency, and many more. The modular prefabricated units would become the hallmark of achieving everything the team needed. This design choice allowed for each modular unit to be standardized with an air-tight and highly-insulated façade, which is placed and set in a formation that allowed for green spaces and other amenities within the building itself.

Read the design narrative here.
Read the project proposal here.
See the entire final presentation here.

Toronto Metropolitan Department of  Architectural Science Toronto, CA.