The District of West Vancouver’s 54-year-old municipal hall is set for a massive renovation project.
The district issued a request for expressions of interests from architects this summer for the design, seismic upgrades and modernization of the 1964 public building on 17th Street.
“It’s of critical importance that the municipal hall is seismically sound in order to provide services to the community in the event of an incident,” said Donna Powers, district spokeswoman.
The district is opting for major renovations over knocking the current building down and starting fresh in order to preserve its heritage value and reduce waste, and to keep the government inside working.
“Renovation is just more sustainable than knocking down and building new. It’s definitely going to allow us to recycle what we’ve got as much as possible and keep a lot of material out of the landfill,” Powers said. “If we were to build a new municipal hall, we’d have to relocate all the services that currently exist here for a lengthy construction period, which would be extremely costly and inconvenient to the public.”
The building has not had any major renovations in its lifetime and many of the building systems – plumbing, electrical and HVAC have reached the end of their useful lives.
“A lot of the materials have changed significantly and we just can’t find materials for them anymore,” said John Wong, manager of facilities and assets for the district.
The renovation should add another 30 to 40 years to the building’s life, Powers said.
If approved, work will take place over several phases, starting with installing concrete shear walls to “make sure it’s stabilized and stays in tact when the earthquake actually happens,” Wong said.
“If there was going to be substantial damage to portions of the building, it makes it almost unusable when an event like that happens,” he said.
Crews would then focus on the building’s envelope, including a new roof and windows, followed by upgrading the wiring, lighting, plumbing and duct system.
Lastly, the project would involve renovations to the office space and council chamber to modernize them. Staff will have to play a bit of musical chairs, shifting around to different parts of the building while work is done. In total, it will mean about five years of construction dust for municipal hall.
The building’s heritage value stems from its West Coast Modern design by Toby Russell Buckwell Architects as well as its location adjacent to West Vancouver’s original municipal hall.
“The upper floors appear to float over the slightly set-back ground floor, and are distinguished by the delineation of each storey and roof level with a pronounced extended slab over a sloped horizontal fascia band. The ground floor of the building is faced in distinctive white exposed aggregate prefabricated concrete panels, with glass dominating the upper storeys,” the district’s written statement of significance states about the building.
The original municipal hall was demolished to make way for a parkade after the new hall opened in 1964. Today, it is the home of the West Vancouver Police Department.
“This has really been the seat of local government here for a long time,” Powers said.
It’s still too early to know what the budget for the massive project will be, Powers said.
Determining the costs is part of the work being done now through the bidding process.
Wong said the district got six qualified bids on the design work, which will be reviewed and narrowed down to a short list in the coming weeks.
It will be up to the next mayor and council to approve the project and budget, a process likely to happen in early 2019, Wong said.
