UBC Vantage College Orchard Commons

Vancouver B.C. ● Academic

Orchard Commons’ thoughtful and dynamic design meets the specific mandate laid out by the Point Grey Campus Plan: To animate the main campus at a local level by providing vibrant centres in which students can live, study, socialize and access services to meet their daily needs, thus enhancing the overall student experience.

UBC Vantage College Orchard Commons is the second of five mixed-use hubs planned for the UBC Point Grey Campus. It houses first-year international students in the Vantage College Program.

The project consists of two 18 storey residential towers, a four storey academic building and a two storey dining and events / shared amenities building. Designed with the key mandate to cultivate positive social interaction with the intent to encourage and enable academic success, a range of social spaces have been provided, including a series of three-storey interconnected lounges in the residential towers. Sitting a residential tower over a large dining hall required creative solutions for transferring columns to keep space open.

Cantilevered steel stairs project from concrete bridges, contributing to a beautiful atrium design that enables student circulation. A signature of this design is the dining hall’s wood roof, seamlessly integrated with steel bridges and the building’s concrete superstructure. The project’s fast-tracked design time and tight budget left no room for error in GlotmanSimpson’s early decisions and schemes. Orchard Commons was completed on time to LEED Gold Certification standards.