Glace Bay Youth & Family Centre is a low-carbon community hub shaped by the town’s coal-mining legacy and resilience. Located on a gateway site at the edge of downtown, on the former rail terminus, it meets every visitor arriving in Glace Bay and forms a new civic focus with an adjacent park connected to the Coal Town Trail.

Within its modest 2,300 sq m (25,000 sq ft) footprint, the barrier-free building brings together childcare, recreation, an indoor skate bowl, community kitchen, café, multipurpose rooms, and social services, targeting Rick Hansen Foundation Accessibility Certification. A rising sectional sequence moves from daycare at the low end to gymnasium and youth spaces at the high end, making the architecture legible as it grows with its users from infants to teens.

Designed to meet the CaGBC Zero Carbon Building – Design Standard, the project leverages two trades rooted in Cape Breton: light-wood framing and tilt-up concrete. Prefabricated profiled trusses achieve long spans and curved forms, while locally cast panels reduce embodied carbon. Curved Eastern White Cedar siding and matching board-formed concrete recall Glace Bay’s clapboard houses and whitewashed churches, creating warm, durable interiors and transforming a site of extraction into a place of regeneration and play.