Prof. Richard Kroeker
Gastprofessur Entwerfen

www.richardkroekerdesign.com [www] >>

Pictou Landing Health Centre

This building was designed as the community centre and main community health facility for the Mi‘kmaq community of Pictou Landing, Nova Scotia. It contains clinics for doctors, dentists, and community health workers, as well as a community meeting space and public health education room. The building was constructed by members of the community, using local trees. It is heated and cooled using geothermal energy from a decommissioned municipal well. It uses 43% less energy than a conventional building of comparable size.
It forms a protective south facing space around a medicine garden
and medicine wheel that forms the physical centre of the community.
The designers on the building were Richard Kroeker and Brian
Lilley in collaboration with Peter Henry architects.

Ambient Material

This pavilion is an experiment in building with ambient material: in
this case, surplus phone books, which are ubiquitous. The books
form a ready made, insulated building module held in place with
sheet metal angles normally used as drywall bead material. Once
tensioned, the phone books form a stable wall into which additional
layers can be easily screwed. The roof joists are also made
of laminated phone books. The finished structure becomes a kind
of time capsule, recording the names and numbers of community
members. The structure was built with students at the Dalhousie
University Department of Architecture.

Le Theatre du Petit Cercle

This theatre was built in the Acadian fishing village of Cheticamp
on Cape Breton Island in the summer of 2004. Each year the
community hosts a francophone children‘s theatre camp, and the
Theatre du Petit Cercle is one of the main venues for these summer performances. It is located between the Atlantic coast and the Cape Breton Highlands where conditions create hurricane force winds throughout the year. The theatre is constructed to withstand these winds. It is anchored to a playground slide which acts as a mooring post from which the form of the theatre swings downwind in a curving shape like a fishing boat. It is wind transparent, breaking the wind down, but at the same time offering as little wind resistance as possible. The walls are more porous at the top than at the bottom.

The double walls are diagonally braced and the lower part of the
wall cavity is filled with stone ballast ‒ like the ballast of local lobster traps and crab pots. The seating, made of salvaged bleachers, is also held against the wind by fishing nets filled with stones. The form of the theatre positions the audience near the action, creates shelter, and contains the sound.

Shell