2020 / School Road Mixed Use / 7,300sf

This 2-story commercial building will be the first new development on School Road in decades, a street that straddles both an old residential neighborhood and the financial district of George Town. In recent years, the road has become a string of lots for secondary parking. Many of these now disused sites need to be activated to fill in the dead areas of this neighborhood. This modest and tasteful building will breathe new life into a site, currently an overgrown parking lot where people dispose of broken cars and litter.

The building is designed to respect the context and fit into the surrounding built environment. The façade with ship-lap siding, a traditional material originally used by ship builders in the area, clad the structure with windows carefully placed around the exterior to allow ambient light into the flex-work spaces. The mass of the building is sheared into 3 bits such that the project reads simultaneously at two scales to address both the different sized commercial and residential neighboring buildings.