Edmonton’s Sundance Housing Co-op was precision-scanned and outfitted with a new panellized envelope, dramatically improving its energy performance.
TEXT Max Amerongen
PHOTOS Courtesy Butterwick Projects
There?s a lane in Sundance Housing Co-op that provides a perfect ?before? and ?after? picture for housing in Canada. On one side are the original townhouses, clad in 44-year-old tan stucco and brown siding. Across from them sit their freshly updated siblings, transformed with colourful new fibre-cement siding, new windows, and air source heat pumps outside. The old gas-heated buildings use about the same amount of energy as typical Canadian townhouses. The new ones use one quarter of that, all electric, and soon to be all-renewable. And they do it at a fraction of the cost and the emissions of a new build. The retrofit of Edmonton?s Sundance Housing Co-op is a $7 million upgrade to the 59-unit, 15-building townhouse complex. The project is funded in part by Natural Resources Canada?s Green Infrastructure Phase II, Energy Efficient Buildings Program. Built in 1977, the Sundance Co-op had been well maintained; but, beyond replacing windows in 1998, it had not had major interventions until now. The Sundance membership has a history of foresight. When the development was being built, they decided to forego closet doors to pay for the upgrade to 2×6 walls?exceeding the building code. Forty years later, they knew re-cladding was imminent, and realized that if they ever...