Detailed plans for UBC Okanagan’s new downtown Kelowna campus show a 124 meter (406 ft) tower with eight stories of academic space and 24 floors of student housing.
The ambitious project planned for 550 Doyle Avenue will cover almost 40,000 square meters and include a medical clinic, according to designs now being reviewed by City of Kelowna planners.
It’s being touted as a “vertical campus”, with a lot of intensive development, that will be strikingly different from the low-slung buildings arrayed around UBCO’s much-larger existing site along Highway 97 North near the airport.
“The design of a vertical campus is something quite new in the history of architecture,” reads part of a summary of the project in the 98-page project description prepared by the university.
As inspiration, the document references ‘vertical campuses’ such as one owned by Columbia University in New York City and another in Toronto, owned by Ryerson University.
One notable feature of the new UBCO downtown Kelowna campus is that the parkade is proposed to be underground. Typically, builders of high-rises cite the area’s high water table and resulting construction complexities and costs as a reason to incorporate parking within the tower structure.
But UBCO says that results in a structure where the “relation of the building and the street urban life is quite poor”, and it didn’t want that to be the case at the new downtown Kelowna campus.
Campus designs show labs, classrooms, galleries, and commercial premises. The university’s School of Nursing will be a major presence, as will the School of Social Work, and the School of Health and Exercise Science. Two floors are shown as future academic expansion.
Plans indicate 352 student housing units, consisting of 230 studio units, 48 one-bedroom units, and 74 two-bedroom suites. There will also be a long ‘solar wall’ to capture energy from the sun.
For the project to proceed, city council will eventually have to rezone the site from C7 Central Business Commercial to a Comprehensive Development Zone. There is currently no date for when council will consider the matter.
It was announced in June 2020 that UBCO had bought the property at 550 Doyle Avenue, formerly the location of The Daily Courier newspaper. At the time, university officials said construction of the new downtown campus would likely start within two years.
“This is an exciting day for us all,” UBC president Santa Ono said when the purchase announcement was made. “Today we have the pleasure of revealing the next major step in the evolution of the University of British Columbia’s presence in Kelowna, and in its ability to serve the needs of BC’s Interior region and the people of the Okanagan.”
