Bill Fisch Forest Stewardship and Education Centre

Bill Fisch Forest Stewardship and Education Centre is immersed in the York Region Forest. Constructed almost entirely of wood, it exists in harmony with its site, providing forestry staff and the local community with a space to explore the importance of our natural resources.

The Centre runs on energy provided by the wind and the sun, generating no pollution or greenhouse gas; it captures rainwater, returning it to the watershed as clean as when it arrived; and most importantly, it provides delight and wonder, inspiring all who visit it. LEED® Platinum, and Petal Certified by the International Living Future Institute and targeting the Living Building Challenge, the Centre is taking on the most vigorous sustainability certifications in the world.

“We wanted to create a building that could function like a forest ecosystem, be an integral part of nature and enhance it”, says Craig Applegath, DIALOG Lead Architect. 
The building’s exterior walls were designed to minimize the sense of separation between interior and exterior. The positioning of windows allows the occupants to feel connected to the forest outside. Underfoot, living trees have offered their impressions in the leaf-patterned concrete flooring — a visual clue, that even inside the building, visitors are walking the forest floor.

The structure was built almost entirely of laminated and cross-laminated timber (CLT), all of which was FSC sustainably harvested or recycled wood, and after its projected 90-year lifetime is designed and constructed in a manner that will allow it to be easily disassembled and recycled in the future—just like the project’s exterior wood cladding, which was salvaged and repurposed from local buildings at the end of their life.

DIALOG set out to design a building that was net-zero energy, net zero-water and comprised of materials that are in no way toxic. The building helps regenerate the ecology that it’s a part of. This project is a great example of the intersection between environment and community.