Radius will be a dedicated rental building with all the amenities of place you would call home. The goal is to have the people who live at Radius call it home. To do so they need to be proud of where they live and really have the amenities that people need to call it home. To achieve this, we focused on what people have in a single family home and provided most of those amenities that make a building a home. The first thing is pride in where they call home. Radius is a beautiful building built to the best sustainable standards in the world today. Anyone living at Radius will be proud to tell their friends where they live. Room for your toys and all your stuff; Radius will have private garages in the underground parking. You can safely leave your bike there and skis and your spare tires. For other things you have each unit will have a large dedicated storage room by the front entry. So if you have a $10,000 road bike that is where it will live. If you want a garden Radius has a community garden or you can have one of the ground floor units with a private yard and garden. Need more room for your children to play; the park is your extended backyard. The Library is across the Park.
Energy Efficiency & Healthy Living
Radius will produce as much energy as it consumes on an annual basis. The key to making this work is to build a very energy efficient building and then add Solar to make up for what we cannot save. Radius will be one of the most energy efficient buildings in Canada. This will be done passively with a high quality building envelope, triple pane windows and airtight construction. We will not rely on complicated mechanical systems as they are expensive and require energy and maintenance. We can achieve this with design and simple proven mechanical systems. The upside to a well built building is comfort and quiet, Radius will never be too cold or hot. It takes more than energy efficiency to lead a more sustainable lifestyle. A building needs to address health, on going use of resources, maintenance, transportation, recreation, access to food, access to amenities without having to use a car and quality of life.
Health in a building is all about indoor air quality and having lots of natural light in the living spaces. Radius will have an advanced ventilation system with heat recovery that provides fresh air to the bedrooms and living spaces of each apartment. This will operate silently and be designed for the number of people living in each unit for maximum fresh air.
Living Well
Radius is designed for people living well. We have not designed it around cars and commuting. Radius is within walking and biking distance of schools, the community hall, the library, shops, public transportation, coffee shops, restaurants and borders on the park. We will have a bike storage and workshop area in the underground parking so that you do not have to keep your bike on the deck and repair it in the driveway. The workshop will be set up for general projects, bike maintenance and ski tuning and available to all tenants in the building. It will be stocked with all the basic tools for bike and ski maintenance and will have gardening tools to work in the community gardens. We will also install two electric car charging stations.
Recreation is one of the reasons we live here. Radius is in the center of it all. With the bike storage and workshop, you will be able to ride directly from home to the trails. A bike/car/dog wash station will be at the entrance to the parkade so you can clean up before going home and put away a clean bike ready for the next ride. Or you could wash your car. A set up ski tuning bench will make it easy to always have perfect skis. Radius’ backyard is the Park, Community Center, Skate Park and Daycare. A short ride will get you to One Mile Lake and the Dike Trails start across the street. The windows will be oversized and placed higher in the wall close to the ceiling. Higher windows allow more natural light to penetrate deeper into the living spaces reducing the need for lights and use of energy. Natural light has proven health benefits and improves the quality of any living or work space. Radius will use durable materials that will not require a lot of maintenance over their lifespan. Radius will be net zero in its use of energy. Over the long term Radius will lower the cost of housing by reducing these costs. Stable housing costs are essential for long term peace of mind and housing affordability.
Access to gardening & food
If you want to grow your own food you need to live on a farm or have access to a community garden. Radius will have a community garden with 28 plots available to tenants who desire it. Each ground floor unit will have their own private yard space to use as garden or yard or they can have a plot in the community garden. We will have gardening tools available in the workshop so that each person does not need to have their own. The garden apartments will be perfect for seniors and people with young children. The units bordering the park will have direct access from their yards to the park. Those units will be the preferred ones for families and we will make every effort to make them available to families. We will encourage planters on the decks.
Sustainability
Radius is designed to make sustainable living easy. Quality of life is so much better when you have a secure comfortable home in a great neighborhood. Living in Radius will allow us to make a positive contribution to our environment and the community.
Radius is a home that is both good for you and the environment. We will source as many materials as we can locally. Made in BC and Canada will feature prominently in Radius. We have the local talent and technology to build some of the best homes in the world. Innovation Building Group has been leading Green Building in BC for decades. Radius is the culmination of all we have learned about sustainable building. To ensure we get all the details right we have partnered with the BCIT Building Science Engineering Department. They will do all the advanced energy modelling for us. The goal is to prepare a blueprint that anyone can use to duplicate our building and building techniques. We want to show that building the best is no more expensive or difficult than building a normal BC building Code building. Remember that the BC Building Code is really the worst building you are legally allowed to build. We can do so much better.
Building Science
Sustainability + Innovation
The Building Science Graduate Program has a unique, interdisciplinary approach that combines the theory and practical skills needed to deliver durable, healthy, comfortable and energy efficient buildings. If you are a student interested in sustainability and innovations in building technologies, consider one of these 3 credentials:
Our Team
Fitsum Tariku, Ph.D.
Bachelor’s Degree (Mechanical Engineering)
Master’s Degree (Mechanical Engineering)
Ph.D. (Building Engineering) Director Canada Research Chair in Whole‐Building Performance
Dr. Fitsum Tariku’s experimental and computer modeling research program spans from materials and building envelope systems right through to whole‐building performance analysis. Currently, he is working on material property measurements and characterizations; hydrothermal modeling and measurements of building envelope systems; and integrated analysis of whole‐building performances. He aims to develop a comprehensive building optimization and decision‐making tool that integrates wholebuilding simulation, risk assessment and cost‐benefit analysis, with the objective of designing a building that is energy efficient, durable, economical, environmentally friendly, and provides comfortable and healthy indoor air quality to occupants. Selected publications (2005 ‐ 2015)
Radius is about quality of life and enhancing the quality of our community.
The technical details
Insulation
The walls are double walls with an exterior 2×6 wall with an R24 batt with an interior 2×4 wall insulated with R19.5 urethane foam. This will give us a combined actual wall performance of R43.875 The roof will be insulated to R70, well above the BC Building Code requirements.
Windows
The windows will be good quality triple pane windows with a middle of glass R value of 8.33. They will be set in the middle of the wall to reduce the thermal bridging at the perimeter of the windows. This is the proven best method of installation to limit the thermal bridging around the window frames. Solar shades will be provided if needed over the windows with a potential for too much heat gain. This will be determined after we do a full scale solar analysis of the building. This work will be done by BCIT as part of our partnership.
Roof & Solar Panels
The roof will be covered in solar panels to generate all the power the building needs. They will be set back from the edge of the roof so that they are not too visible and are easier and safer to maintain. The flat roof will provide easy access for cleaning and servicing the panels. The SunPump solar panels will be part of the panels on the roof.
Heating & Cooling
The space heating, hot water and air conditioning will be provided by SunPump, a Canadian company based in Surrey. It will operate as a normal heat pump at night, but during the day when the sun is shining it will dramatically increase in efficiency. Simply put for every watt of electricity we use will get a larger number of watts of heat, hot water or cooling depending on the sunshine and outdoor temperature. The more sunshine the larger the multiplier. This is a simple system to operate and install. We will get further savings from generating the hot water
for the day during the hottest times of the day to get further savings. The by‐product of the air conditioning in the summer will be hot water for use in the building. Ventilation will be provided by a high quality, made in Canada HRV. This will run all the time providing fresh air to all occupied rooms in the building on a continuous basis.
Parkade
The underground parking will be built with Insulated Concrete Forms (ICFs) to provide a comfortable temperature without the need for any supplemental heat. Ventilation will be supplied by a high capacity HRV. This will keep the parkade smelling fresh and remove all the moisture and smells that build up in most parkades.
Green Features
The roof of the garbage building will be a green roof and an extension of the landscaping adjacent to the community garden.
Each unit will have a set of laundry machines. The units are designed for living, the decks will not be used for storage like many apartments because we have the storage. Need a workshop, Radius has a community workshop for all your ski and bike tune ups and home projects. There will be a dedicated car/bike/dog wash area.
Radius will be a community where the design has created lots of places like the park, community garden, workshop, car wash station, postal boxes, and lobby where you can casually meet your neighbors. Socially animated areas are where people meet their neighbors and form a sense of community. Radius was designed with this as core principle of the design.
Finally: Pets. Radius will be pet friendly. The units will have durable finishes that will not be easily damaged by pets. The ground floor unit backyards are ideal for pet owners. Too many people who own pets have no access to good quality accommodation. Radius will welcome them, but we will have rules in place so that all may enjoy their home including the neighbors of the pet owners.
Our goal as a landlord is to be the best landlord in Pemberton. We are committed to building sustainable buildings that fit a sustainable lifestyle and help build a more sustainable community.