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14.

Skyline Innovation Park

/2021
Skyline Innovation Park gallery image

Timescales

Hazardous-material remediation occupied three months, after which eight intensive night-shift crane operations stacked 40 upcycled shipping containers into place.

Raised urban-farm beds were planted immediately to leverage the spring growing season, while a temporary expo pavilion created buzz six months before completion.

The entire build—including a rooftop bar and maker-space annex—wrapped in an impressive 17-month timeframe, well under budget.

Objectives

Provide ultra-low-cost, resource-positive incubator space, reserving rent-free units for founders from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Harvest more solar electricity and stormwater than the campus consumes annually, and publish open-source retrofit manuals documenting the entire process.

Achieve near-zero construction waste by crushing 91% of railyard rubble into recycled paving sub-base material for on-site paths and plazas.

Materials

Cor-Ten shipping containers are ceramic-spray insulated for thermal comfort, and CNC-cut window openings are repurposed as brise-soleil sunshades.

Elevated walkways utilise reclaimed hardwood sleepers, and gabion benches are filled with crushed on-site concrete ballast to close the material loop.

Bifacial PV arrays feed second-life EV battery banks, and interior walls are assembled from bamboo CLT panels finished with natural beeswax.

Challenges

Legacy creosote contamination necessitated full-coverage vapour barriers, and a late fire-code interpretation mandated a bolt-on external steel stair cage.

Uneven ballast sub-grades required floating resin-bonded gravel ramps to guarantee accessible paths across the site.

Continuous freight-line noise mandated high-spec acoustic glazing, stretching the budget until a local manufacturer sponsored the panels.