PARTISANS led the design of the first Porsche Experience Centre (PEC) in Canada. The building is designed to support driving experiences on the adjacent track, and includes a wide variety of spaces for customer experiences including exhibitions, galleries, retail uses, design studios, and new car delivery rooms, as well as support spaces such as a large auto shop and administrative offices. PARTISANS worked with advanced building delivery expert James Kotronis and Dassault Systèmes to virtually construct the EV Experience Center, a charging pavilion and turnkey event venue made from recyclable materials that advances access to renewable energy and adapts to its environment. To create the EV Experience Center, PARTISANS needed a single virtual environment that would enable them to collaborate easily with all project stakeholders and model all processes, components and their variants across different disciplines. They also needed tools capable of supporting productization and component standardization to fulfill their sustainability principles – renewable energy, recyclable materials, reusable assembly and responsive design.

We identified iconic design, innovation, and performance as key brand values that we could use to drive the design of the building. The building features two largely rectilinear buildings connected by a sweeping, aerodynamic roof that draws on the infamous lines of Porsche car bodies. The building is comprised of a mass timber structure which has excellent properties for embodied carbon and helps to convey the environmental goals of Porsche and it’s parent company Volkswagen. The roof, clad in lightweight ETFE, furthers these goals—the translucent material reduces interior lighting requirements, and the extreme light weight material has knock on effects for reducing structure from beams to columns to the foundation. Additionally, the ETFE material reflects projected light beautifully, and we worked with Moment Factory to develop a fully programmable lighting strategy for the building