New $465M U of A science building to open in stages
By Elise Stolte, edmontonjournal.comOctober 19, 2009 7:02 PM
A view from just off Saskatchewan Drive of the two nearly-finished lecture halls attached to the Centennial Centre for Interdisciplinary Science. The two halls hold 516 and 413 students in theatre-style seating and are scheduled to open in January 2010.
A view from just off Saskatchewan Drive of the two nearly-finished lecture halls attached to the Centennial Centre for Interdisciplinary Science. The two halls hold 516 and 413 students in theatre-style seating and are scheduled to open in January 2010.
Photograph by: Ed Kaiser, edmontonjournal.com
EDMONTON — Green and gold tarps still cover the eight-storey-high atrium in the University of Alberta’s new Centennial Centre for Interdisciplinary Science, but the first 500-seat lecture hall will open this January.
The building is six storeys tall with three towers connected by sun-lit atria, and will dominate the north side of the campus.
While the entire $465-million project won’t be open until at least January 2011, The Journal and a few faculty got a sneak peak recently.
“It’s a major logistical challenge. There’s a lot of passion in this thing,” said Greg Taylor, Dean of Science and the only one of the original planning team still involved after a seven-year odyssey.
“Keep in mind this is more complicated than a hospital,” said Taylor.
Some equipment had to be built on its own foundation, or isolation pad, and engineers had to run elevators extra slow and order braided wire to reduce electromagnetic interference. Blueprints call for 300 fume hoods, Taylor said, and ducts to pump bad air out in some parts of the building are more than two meters in diameter. “The air exchange in this building is enormous.”
When the building is finished, five departments will share the space, including 9,000 students.
The need to accommodate more students was the biggest reason for the new building, said Taylor. Student enrolment in the sciences jumped 24 per cent in the fall of 2002, and “demand has not gone down since,” he said.
As a result, the faculty had to increase admission standards. But with the new building about to open, those standards are starting to come down again. The building will make space for 1,100 new undergraduate students and 476 at the graduate level.
The building is also part of a push for more cross-disciplinary work on campus.
The design stresses collaboration between scientists, with windows onto the hallways in all the labs. Meeting tables are planned for nooks across the building, and tour guides show off almost cathedral-style seminar rooms with five-metre high banks of windows overlooking the river valley.
“Imagine those tarps are glass windows” said Dave Olsen, a field engineer marvelling in the filtered light. “It’s very open, basically wall to wall frames and very little drywall.”
The south-facing facade is a wall of glass with two layers. The half-metre of air in-between is a heat chimney in the summer and insulation for the winter. And since the rows of offices on the top levels will have frosted glass walls, the nearly horizontal winter sun “should just about go right through” the building, said Taylor.
The building looks south over the Quad, the main park on campus, and two of the eight lecture halls will be built underground, to increase the green space in the quad by 30 per cent.
The storeys underground also include a heavy lab for subatomic physics. The 10 metre high space is entirely underground and has a grate in the ceiling at ground level to lower in large objects. The feature is essential for scientists hoping to partner and build large equipment for international projects like the large hadron collider at CERN on the Swiss-French border.
Capital projects are funded out of a different budget than the one now facing a $59 million funding gap. Next year’s gap between revenue and expenses affects the operating budget, and has administrators contemplating layoffs and tuition increases.
The science centre estimates now place the building on par with the $620 million new remand centre. The new Edmonton Clinic nearby is estimated to cost $480 million, and the Mazankowski Alberta Heart Institute cost $320-million.
The new science building was originally estimated at $311 million but construction costs during the boom drove that number up. The vast majority of the funding has come from the provincial government.
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BY THE NUMBERS
Additional undergraduate science students: 1,100 (current total 6,200)
Additional graduate science students: 478 (current total 1,200)
Additional science professors: 57 (current total 287)
Departments in the same building: 5
Total seats in new lecture halls: 2,239
Average number of construction workers currently on-site: 400
Total size when completed: 52,227 square metres
Estimated cost: $465 million
© Copyright (c) The Edmonton Journal
http://www.edmontonjournal.com/technology/465M+science+building+open+stages/2121169/story.html
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