GH3

BARRIE WASTE WATER INNOVATION (WWIC) Winner of the Canadian Architects Award of Excellence

WWIC is an all-electric facility powered by a 350.8 kW-DC rooftop solar photovoltaic array sized to offset the building’s projected annual electricity consumption. High-performance envelope design, passive daylighting, heat recovery, and advanced building controls support the goal of achieving operational net-zero energy and net-zero emissions. Narrow floor plates and clerestory glazing bring natural light deep into the interior, and durable, low-maintenance materials contribute to healthy, long-lasting workspaces.

Together, these strategies reinforce WWIC as a forward-looking civic building, creating a facility that is truly sustainable both technically and socially, in alignment with the City of Barrie’s corporate climate action plan.

BARRIE WASTE WATER INNOVATION CENTRE (WWIC) Winner of the Canadian Architect Award of Excellence

WWIC transforms the archetypal “big box” shed into a carefully sculpted civic form. Along Bradford Street, the corners of the volume are lifted to acknowledge the urban significance of the site. Functionally, these lifted corners bring natural light deeper into the floor plate and create a sense of openness for users and a beacon back to the public realm.

Emerging from the ground like an infrastructural landscape element, the building’s materiality and scale express the industrial sublime. Fluted Canadian-made weathering steel cladding panels are animated by shifting daylight, revealing a continuous play of light and shadow. These flutes also help to regulate daylight, reducing glare and solar heat gain to support comfortable working environments for staff.

BARRIE WASTE WATER INNOVATION CENTRE
Winner of the 2025 Canadian Architect Award of Excellence

“This addition to a public-works facility decisively rejects the notion that architectural beauty is a luxury. As a water treatment plant, it achieves remarkable architectural poise, elevating a once unseen utilitarian operation into an evocative building with a delightful civic presence. The design’s response to program is conceptually clear, rigorous, and engaging.” - Kelly Buffey, Juror

As the public face of Barrie’s treatment plant, the Wastewater Innovation Centre (WWIC) operates as both a carefully planned public-works facility and an interpretive centre, welcoming and educating visitors about the innovative processes championed by Waste Water staff. Its weathering steel panels, articulated to recall large-scale infrastructure pipes, tells the building’s story through its materiality. The WWIC stands at the threshold between civic infrastructure and civic life, serving the workers who sustain the system while fostering broader public understanding of the network the city depends on.