Casino Hotels

Guest floors repeat above the older structure, with rooms laid out to a small set of plans and stacked so that the corridor stays in the same position on every level. Service risers, doors and window openings line up from floor to floor, which is the ordinary way a tower of rooms is built.

The pavilions do not repeat. They were made for Expo 67 as one-off national buildings on Île Notre-Dame, and their shape, their levels and their circulation are all particular to that event. The island setting in the middle of the river is single in the same way.

The complex reuses exhibition architecture that was never meant to hold bedrooms. The new accommodation was therefore arranged as a conventional stack, while the old pavilion volumes were left to be themselves and altered as little as the change of use allowed.

Room floors repeat up the tower, each holding the same arrangement of doors along a double-loaded corridor, and the window openings continue in a straight line down the face. Lifts, stairs and service rooms stay in one position on every level, so a floor plan holds good for the next.

The escarpment does not repeat. The building steps down a steep slope, so its lower levels meet the ground at different heights and the rooms facing the water look at a single landform. The theatre and the terraces along that face are each built once, to fit the drop.

The site is a cliff above a river, and that shape decided the rest. Public rooms were spread across the slope where the ground allowed it, and the bedrooms went into a tower, because a tower repeats a room on a small footprint.

Accommodation is arranged in wings where the same room plan continues along a corridor and then again on the level above. Bathrooms sit back to back, entrances alternate down the passage, and the elevation outside shows that arrangement as an even run of openings.

The waterfront is single. A marina, a quay and the channel beyond them exist in one place, and the concert hall beside the main building is a single volume made for a particular use. Richmond around it is flat delta land where the river, not the street grid, sets the edge.

The resort was placed on a working waterfront close to the airport and the city, so the plan spreads sideways along the water instead of rising. Rooms repeat within the wings because that is what makes a long low building practical.

Guest wings repeat both along their length and upward, with one room plan carried through a corridor and stacked over itself. Bathroom cores line up, corridors meet the lifts at the same point on each level, and the outside of the wing shows a steady run of identical windows.

The entertainment hall is built once, as a large single room for an audience, and nothing in the guest wings resembles it. The land is single as well: this is Chippewas of Rama First Nation territory beside Lake Couchiching, and the resort belongs to that place and that community.

The resort was developed on First Nation land as a long-term undertaking for the community, and it grew outward across open ground rather than upward. Repeating a wing is the straightforward way to add rooms when there is space to build sideways.