The City of Mississauga is providing a new park and community centre as part of the overall Ninth Line Lands development between Highway 403 and 401. The project will serve this urban densification along the City?s western boundary, along a tributary of 16-mile creek, with a recreation centre and a 50-acre park. A fitness trail system around the park will connect with a series of new and existing pedestrian trails extending into the city fabric. The site will be a destination point in this system.
The community centre will be a focal point within the site with light-permeable cladding encasing a leisure and lap pool, triple gymnasium and multi-purpose rooms. For preferred solar orientation, the elemental form and the sports field face each cardinal direction. Reclaimed topsoil has been used to create a new topography on this relatively flat former agricultural field. These small rolling hills are situated at the edges of the sports fields and the central green lawn to create informal seating and destination points within the site. The building appears as a simple form within the landscape, but reveals a heavy timber structure beneath its expanded metal mesh envelope and a complex internal ceiling of forms used to control light and sound.
A change room and service bar flank the pool and gymnasium, which are fully glazed towards the amenity spaces. The change room corridors are glazed so that some of the internal workings of the community centre are visible to those arriving ...